The EA Animal Welfare Fund (AWF) invites you to Ask Us Anything. You can ask questions from now until next Tuesday morning, December 24. We will stop responding at 2:00 PM CET on Tuesday.
About AWF
The AWF’s mission is to alleviate the suffering of non-human animals globally through effective grantmaking. Since its founding in 2017, AWF has distributed $23.3M across 347 grants. This year, we’ve distributed $3.7M across 51 grants.
You can read about our 2024 year-in-review post and our request for more funding analysis to learn more about our recent work and future goals.
Why Now?
We believe now is an especially good time for an AMA because:
- AWF entered a new stage of growth, with a new full-time chair.
- We recently won the Forum’s 2024 Donation Election (alongside Rethink Priorities and Shrimp Welfare Project).
- We are seeking additional funding during Giving Season to continue funding promising new opportunities in animal welfare.
- We were recommended by Giving What We Can as one of the two best regrantors in the animal welfare space (alongside ACE’s Movement Building Grants), and by Open Philanthropy Farm Animal Welfare as the best donation opportunity for individual donors interested in animal welfare.
- We currently have an open application for AWF fund managers with a deadline of December 29 and an expression of interest form for a potential future role related to fund development.
We are open to questions from interested donors, applicants, past grantees, people interested in jobs at AWF, and others interested in animal welfare.
Our team answering questions is:
- Karolina Sarek, Chair
- Neil Dullaghan, Fund Manager
- Zoë Sigle, Fund Manager
We look forward to hearing your questions!
Thank you for this thoughtful question and for your kind words about the Animal Welfare Fund! You raise an important point. Let me break down our approach:
First, we don't operate with fixed portfolio allocations or minimum percentages per species. Instead, we aim to maximize the marginal impact of our grants based on our best current understanding. This means evaluating each opportunity on its own merits and seeing if it is above our bar. More about our bar here.
Secondly, it is worth noting that purely theoretical calculations often differ significantly from practical funding opportunities. While back-of-the-envelope calculations might suggest allocating a large percentage to certain species (like shrimps), we simply don't see enough promising, implementation-ready opportunities in those areas to make such allocations feasible. Historically, we were more limited to the applications we received, but recently we started doing more active grantmaking to generate those opportunities in areas that are cost-effective but neglected, and in 2025 we plan to further invest in it.
Even still, if those opportunities existed, I think it would be unwise to make decisions purely based on those naive utilitarian calculations. I say naive, referring to the difference between an actual cost-effectiveness and estimated cost-effectiveness. If I knew the actual cost-effectiveness of given interventions, that accounts for all uncertainties:
that gives me a true number for cost-effectiveness, a “god comes from the sky” kind of situation, then I would rely on it. However, any estimate of cost-effectiveness is going to be a naive one and merely a very uncertain estimate that may miss those important uncertainties. Additionally, I would refer here to the timeless classic “Why we can’t take expected value estimates literally (even when they’re unbiased)” by GiveWell. While AWF's approach is different in some places than the one outlined in this GW blog post, I think the main point stands. They conclude that:
“I feel that any giving approach that relies only on estimated expected-value – and does not incorporate preferences for better-grounded estimates over shakier estimates – is flawed. Thus, when aiming to maximize expected positive impact, it is not advisable to make giving decisions based fully on explicit formulas. Proper Bayesian adjustments are important and are usually overly difficult to formalize.”
In light of that all, I think that we have imperfect information and too much fundamental uncertainty to justify extremely undiversified allocation, even if explicitly utilitarian calculation would point to that.
Additionally, in practice, our fund managers bring diverse perspectives on for example how to weigh speculative versus evidence-backed approaches. This natural diversity helps ensure we maintain a balanced portfolio between proven interventions and those with high expected value but less certain ones.
Currently, we're working on refining our strategic framework, which may introduce additional allocation considerations. That said, our focus on neglected species and interventions already creates an implicit prioritization - we rarely fund work focused on cattle welfare, for instance, as other funders adequately cover this space.
For each grant we consider, we assess whether it meets our cost-effectiveness bar, which is influenced by other opportunities we see in our pipeline. This approach allows us to remain flexible and responsive to the most promising opportunities while maintaining high standards for expected impact.