Open Philanthropy Staff: Suggestions for Individual Donors (2019)

Last year, the year before, the year before that, and the year before that, we published a set of suggestions for individual donors looking for organizations to support. This year, we are repeating the practice and publishing updated suggestions from Open Philanthropy program staff who chose to provide them.

The same caveats as in previous years apply:

• These are reasonably strong options in causes of interest, and shouldn’t be taken as outright recommendations (i.e., it isn’t necessarily the case that the person making the suggestion thinks they’re the best option available across all causes).
• In many cases, we find a funding gap we’d like to fill, and then we recommend filling the entire funding gap with a single grant. That doesn’t leave much scope for making a suggestion for individuals. The cases listed below, then, are the cases where, for one reason or another, we haven’t decided to recommend filling an organization’s full funding gap, and we believe it could make use of fairly arbitrary amounts of donations from individuals.
• Our explanations for why these are strong giving opportunities are very brief and informal, and we don’t expect individuals to be persuaded by them unless they put a lot of weight on the judgment of the person making the suggestion.

In addition, we’d add that these recommendations are made by the individual program officers or teams cited, and do not necessarily represent my (Holden’s) personal or Open Phil’s institutional “all things considered” view. Also, I just want to note that per our policy we’re no longer publishing all potentially relevant relationships.

Suggestions are alphabetical by cause (with some assorted and “meta” suggestions last).

Aaron's notes:

• To save some time on formatting, I'm not copying over the full list of suggestions; read them at the original post.
• The suggestion that most surprised me was Engineers Without Borders, a large and well-known charity that doesn't seem like a "typical" Open Phil suggestion (though it could be very cost-effective as far as I know).
• The suggestion that may be most surprising to someone who hasn't seen past Open Phil grants is California YIMBY ("yes in my backyard"), which supports changing California state policy to allow more housing construction. 
  • An excerpt of Alexander Berger's case for YIMBY (emphasis mine):
    • "California is large enough that state policy reforms could make a meaningful dent in the national problem, but state policy reforms are not necessarily vastly harder here than in other places. Between reducing rents and allowing more people to be able to move to or remain in high-wage areas, we roughly estimate the social value of each new home in coastal California to be in the low hundreds of thousands of dollars, which means that even a very small improvement in the state’s housing policies could deliver a high return."