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!
Thanks Emre,
In practical terms, each grant manager gives a score +5 to -5, with +5 being the strongest possible endorsement of positive impact, and -5 being a grant with an anti-endorsement that’s actively harmful to a significant degree. We then average across scores, approving those at the very top, and dismissing those at the bottom, largely discussing only those grants that are around the threshold of 2.5 unless anyone wanted to actively make the case for or against something outside of these bounds (the size and scope of other grants, particularly the large grants we approve, is also discussed). So the “bar for funding” is when the average of fund manager’s votes is ~2.5 (though we now also have an additional mechanism for comparing applications just above or below the bar). And the votes take into account not just the welfare improvement from an intervention, but other factors like where it fits into broader theories of change, scalability, the value of funding (analyzing counterfactuals and long-term sustainability). For a list of our criteria, refer to a question in our FAQ: “How Does the EA Animal Welfare Fund Make Grant Decisions?”.
However, if you mean what’s the bar in terms of impact per $, we’re currently trialing a few different approaches for how we estimate that (see our answers about use of welfare capacity, SADS, and benchmarks), and would like to arrive at a common unit and threshold (or range) that would be constant across species & interventions. But again, this would just be one input and arguably the estimates shouldn’t be taken literally, but more as providing intuition pumps.
Regarding how many animals or animal-years should be affected per dollar for the listed welfare improvements, this will very much depend on how those reforms were achieved (corporate campaigns, producer outreach, policy advocacy, strategic litigation, etc.). Unfortunately, at this time we can’t share a cost-effectiveness estimate for these common interventions from averaging the estimates across all relevant grant applications. There are some publicly shared estimates that we refer to as potential benchmarks (see below).
On cage-free and broiler welfare: Corporate welfare campaigns over 13 years (2005-2018) to commit corporations to sell only cage-free eggs and higher welfare chicken meat were estimated to impact 10 to 280 animals per dollar spent (9.5 to 120 animal years) (Šimčikas 2019). The author of the report, Saulius Šimčikas, made a comment on the Forum in 2021 about unpublished estimates of chicken welfare reforms, suggesting cost-effectiveness was two to three times lower in 2019-2020 than in 2016-2018 (“According to this new estimate, in 2019-2020 chicken welfare reforms affected 65 years of chicken life per dollar spent.)”. Similar sentiments about the lower cost-effectiveness of such campaigns today are discussed here and here. There’s also the separate cost-effectiveness for various ballot initiatives, including cage-free ones (Duffy 2023) and speculative broiler ballot initiatives (Khimasia 2023), and the various cost-effectiveness analyses from Vasco Grilo. Furthermore, in a comment in 2023, Emily Oehlsen, Managing Director of Open Philanthropy, a major funder of these chicken corporate campaigns, reported that since 2016, “we’ve covered many of the strongest opportunities in this space, and we think that current marginal opportunities are considerably weaker,” and that “We think that the marginal FAW funding opportunity is ~1/5th as cost-effective as the average from Saulius’ analysis” referencing Šimčikas (2019).
So it seems fair to believe many cage-free and broiler welfare corporate campaigns being funded today are less cost-effective than the 2019-2020 estimate Saulius provided. Sagar Shah also created some prospective fish pre-slaughter stunning corporate campaign estimates suggesting such campaigns in Europe might only affect a few hours of life per dollar spent- though there are many caveats and assumptions in that estimate, including the very important consideration of how one weights excruciating pains.