Lead Exposure Elimination Project (LEEP) is an outstanding Charity Entrepreneurship-incubated charity recognized externally for its impactful work by RP, Founders Pledge, Schmidt Futures, and Open Philanthropy. It's one of the clearest cases of new charities having a profound impact on the world. However, everything is clear in hindsight; it now seems obvious that this was a great idea and team to fund, but who funded LEEP at the earliest stage? Before any of the aforementioned bodies would have considered or looked at them, who provided funding when $60k made the difference between launching and not existing?
 

The CE Seed Network, so far, has been a rather well-kept secret. They are the first people to see each new batch of CE-incubated charities and make a decision on whether and how much to support them. A handful of donors supported LEEP in its earliest days, culminating in the excellent charity we see today. Some of them donated anonymously, never seeking credit or the limelight, just quietly making a significant impact. Others engaged deeply and regularly with the team, eventually becoming trusted board members. Historically, the Seed Network has been a small group (~30) of primarily E2G-focused EAs, invited by the CE team or alumni from the CE program to join. However, now we are opening it up for expressions of interest for those who might want to join in future rounds. Our charity production has doubled (from 5 to 10 charities a year) and although our Seed Network has grown, there is still room for more members to join to support our next batches of charities.
 

We have now created a website to describe how it works. On that website, there's an application form for those who might be a good fit to be a member in the future. It’s not a great fit for everyone as it focuses on the CE (near-termist) cause areas and donors who could donate over $10k a year to new charities and can make a decision on whether and whom to fund with how much in a short period of time when we send out the newest project proposals (~9 days). But for those who fit, we think it's one of the most impactful ways to donate.

Comments3


Sorted by Click to highlight new comments since:

Do you think it's worth organisations like this offering to sell their impact? I find it hard to think about. But it seems like if people are retroactively funding (as they are) then they might be willing to purchase LEEP impact from Seed Network?


So far have not seen this work well for many projects but open to the idea in theory.

I guess in theory by RP, Founders Pledge, Schmidt Futures, Open Philanthropy and the CE Seed Network and current donors would have to agree on how they split their impact. 

If that were possible can you think of any bottlenecks to CE selling impact on, say Manifund?

Curated and popular this week
 ·  · 5m read
 · 
This work has come out of my Undergraduate dissertation. I haven't shared or discussed these results much before putting this up.  Message me if you'd like the code :) Edit: 16th April. After helpful comments, especially from Geoffrey, I now believe this method only identifies shifts in the happiness scale (not stretches). Have edited to make this clearer. TLDR * Life satisfaction (LS) appears flat over time, despite massive economic growth — the “Easterlin Paradox.” * Some argue that happiness is rising, but we’re reporting it more conservatively — a phenomenon called rescaling. * I test rescaling using long-run German panel data, looking at whether the association between reported happiness and three “get-me-out-of-here” actions (divorce, job resignation, and hospitalisation) changes over time. * If people are getting happier (and rescaling is occuring) the probability of these actions should become less linked to reported LS — but they don’t. * I find little evidence of rescaling. We should probably take self-reported happiness scores at face value. 1. Background: The Happiness Paradox Humans today live longer, richer, and healthier lives in history — yet we seem no seem for it. Self-reported life satisfaction (LS), usually measured on a 0–10 scale, has remained remarkably flatover the last few decades, even in countries like Germany, the UK, China, and India that have experienced huge GDP growth. As Michael Plant has written, the empirical evidence for this is fairly strong. This is the Easterlin Paradox. It is a paradox, because at a point in time, income is strongly linked to happiness, as I've written on the forum before. This should feel uncomfortable for anyone who believes that economic progress should make lives better — including (me) and others in the EA/Progress Studies worlds. Assuming agree on the empirical facts (i.e., self-reported happiness isn't increasing), there are a few potential explanations: * Hedonic adaptation: as life gets
 ·  · 38m read
 · 
In recent months, the CEOs of leading AI companies have grown increasingly confident about rapid progress: * OpenAI's Sam Altman: Shifted from saying in November "the rate of progress continues" to declaring in January "we are now confident we know how to build AGI" * Anthropic's Dario Amodei: Stated in January "I'm more confident than I've ever been that we're close to powerful capabilities... in the next 2-3 years" * Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis: Changed from "as soon as 10 years" in autumn to "probably three to five years away" by January. What explains the shift? Is it just hype? Or could we really have Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)[1] by 2028? In this article, I look at what's driven recent progress, estimate how far those drivers can continue, and explain why they're likely to continue for at least four more years. In particular, while in 2024 progress in LLM chatbots seemed to slow, a new approach started to work: teaching the models to reason using reinforcement learning. In just a year, this let them surpass human PhDs at answering difficult scientific reasoning questions, and achieve expert-level performance on one-hour coding tasks. We don't know how capable AGI will become, but extrapolating the recent rate of progress suggests that, by 2028, we could reach AI models with beyond-human reasoning abilities, expert-level knowledge in every domain, and that can autonomously complete multi-week projects, and progress would likely continue from there.  On this set of software engineering & computer use tasks, in 2020 AI was only able to do tasks that would typically take a human expert a couple of seconds. By 2024, that had risen to almost an hour. If the trend continues, by 2028 it'll reach several weeks.  No longer mere chatbots, these 'agent' models might soon satisfy many people's definitions of AGI — roughly, AI systems that match human performance at most knowledge work (see definition in footnote). This means that, while the compa
 ·  · 4m read
 · 
SUMMARY:  ALLFED is launching an emergency appeal on the EA Forum due to a serious funding shortfall. Without new support, ALLFED will be forced to cut half our budget in the coming months, drastically reducing our capacity to help build global food system resilience for catastrophic scenarios like nuclear winter, a severe pandemic, or infrastructure breakdown. ALLFED is seeking $800,000 over the course of 2025 to sustain its team, continue policy-relevant research, and move forward with pilot projects that could save lives in a catastrophe. As funding priorities shift toward AI safety, we believe resilient food solutions remain a highly cost-effective way to protect the future. If you’re able to support or share this appeal, please visit allfed.info/donate. Donate to ALLFED FULL ARTICLE: I (David Denkenberger) am writing alongside two of my team-mates, as ALLFED’s co-founder, to ask for your support. This is the first time in Alliance to Feed the Earth in Disaster’s (ALLFED’s) 8 year existence that we have reached out on the EA Forum with a direct funding appeal outside of Marginal Funding Week/our annual updates. I am doing so because ALLFED’s funding situation is serious, and because so much of ALLFED’s progress to date has been made possible through the support, feedback, and collaboration of the EA community.  Read our funding appeal At ALLFED, we are deeply grateful to all our supporters, including the Survival and Flourishing Fund, which has provided the majority of our funding for years. At the end of 2024, we learned we would be receiving far less support than expected due to a shift in SFF’s strategic priorities toward AI safety. Without additional funding, ALLFED will need to shrink. I believe the marginal cost effectiveness for improving the future and saving lives of resilience is competitive with AI Safety, even if timelines are short, because of potential AI-induced catastrophes. That is why we are asking people to donate to this emergency appeal
Recent opportunities in Effective giving
81
· · 3m read