CNBC reported on 30/11/22 that the Centre for Effective Altruism had filed a '“serious incident report” tied to “the collapse of FTX”' with the Charity Commission for England and Wales. It says reasons for this could include 'the “loss of your charity’s money or assets” or “harm to your charity’s work or reputation”'. Here is more information about serious incident reporting.
I have not seen any comment about this from CEA or anywhere else. Whilst the FTX fallout is serious, I wasn't aware of clear direct implications for CEA, so this seems like new information. Readers of the Forum may be donors to CEA and CEA is still soliciting donations through its website, so I think it's important to get a clear public picture of any problems. Clarifying that there is no problem relevant for the public would also be helpful if that's the case. Does anybody have knowledge about this that they could share?
Given that CEA writ large includes Giving What We Can, EA Funds and the Donor Lottery, this would be a pretty big deal in terms of people's giving this month. If I need to avoid donating through CEA, my life as a donor gets a lot harder.
Given this, and given how many members of the community will be making big charitable donations around this time of year, some clarification from CEA on this front seems pretty valuable.
Right -- and I totally get why organizations are hesitant to share certain information right now.
If CEA is in a precarious situation and/or cannot disclose enough information to reassure donors, it may at least be in a position to demonstrate that EA Funds and the Donor Lottery are either already safe from the claims of CEA's general creditors or will be made safe, at least on a going forward basis by Dec 31.
This is because, in many jurisdictions, certain donations can be restricted by the donor in ways neither the charity nor general creditors can breach. But it's possible for the charity to intend to provide this protection yet screw it up . . . and has happened in at least one non-EA case I can think of.
(all this is summarized from cell phone while out of town...I have some broader thoughts about risk containment in draft form on my home computer)
Hi Jason,
It has been a few days since this answer of yours (and other comments) have appeared. This has caused a little anxiety. This has appeared in several private discussions.
Below is an external, non-sympathetic take. Can you check this content over and give your perspective or reaction?
Here is some public information:
I believe the above is good evidence that CEA serves important, irreplaceable ro... (read more)
I have no inside knowledge on what Unnamed Big-Money Organization (UBMO: I'll follow your lead and not name it) would do if CEA were actually insolvent.
While I'm not familiar with UK insolvency law, I assume the basic principles are similar to US bankruptcy law. Basically, you are correct that a white knight can come in and save the distressed organization -- at a high level, options include buying all its assets (name, etc.) out of bankruptcy or (perhaps more efficiently) by persuading the creditor that they are better off with a settlement funded by the third party that gives the creditor as much as they would get in bankruptcy/insolvency. It would probably be a bad idea to disclose any such plan publicly, so the absence of any public discussion of the plan should not influence your assessment of its likelihood.
None of that changes the bottom lines of my comment: being restructured in bankruptcy, or having a massive public bailout, is "very, very bad" for an organization. The idea that UBMO would bail out CEA/EVF supports the conclusion that "I generally would not donate to an organization with potentially catastrophic FTX risk" too. In a bailout situation, either the money... (read more)
My guess is that the main reason you are not seeing a lot of communication is that there is not a major problem.
However, if there was a problem, I think the EA institution cannot simply quickly backfill 8 figures of funding by making a formal legal promise, or by delivering a cash transfer in a week's time.
If there was a plan to implement this backfilling, I think there are a lot of steps upstream to seeing messaging:
There are other possibilities or side actions: CEA probably has other sources of funding, and it might prefer to use those to show diversity.
All of the above should take weeks of time under normal conditions: there’s a legal dependency, an executive/leadership dependency, and then a media/communications dependency. All of these processes are slow, must be done in “serial’, and this is occurring one of the busiest times possible.
CEA has continued its operations, including proactively distributing new funding guidelines in a way that suggests a disciplined, thoughtful rollout.
Please see our update regarding this. The important section is: