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!
We are excited about efforts to increase the amount of funding that goes to high-impact animal interventions. That being said, we believe there are as many, if not more, promising opportunities to increase funds from these other sources, such as:
a) less effective animal sources, supporting work of animal-focused effective giving and fundraising initiatives such as FarmKind, or Farmed Animal Funders, and cross-cause ones, e.g., Effektiv Spenden and others. I believe AIM had a report offering an impact evaluation of those, but I cannot find it now.
b) less effective human sources, such as leveraging government R&D funding to be redirected to alt protein. This had significant successes, as described by Lewis in his new newsletter “6. Putting Green into Going Green. Governments invested over $200 million into research and infrastructure advancing alternative proteins, including in the US ($71M via DOC, DOD, and Massachusetts), Denmark (DKK 420M / $59M), Japan (¥7.87B / $51M), the UK (£27M / $34M via two grants), the EU (€12M / $13M) and Beijing (80M Yuan / $11M). New alternative protein research centers, funded by the Bezos Earth Fund, opened in London, North Carolina, and Singapore.” We also think that influencing climate philanthropy has a lot of potential.
We haven’t evaluated the two methods you described, and I’m not aware of any such estimates, so I cannot comment on their effectiveness. But I think that in any scenario, those interventions I mentioned would be better on the global net, species-agnostic welfare than, e.g., moving from the best interventions helping humans to the best ones helping animals.