Comments
It's impressive that this post was published before the end of January for the quarter prior. Would love to see that kept up for this and other funds!
It's impressive that this post was published before the end of January for the quarter prior. Would love to see that kept up for this and other funds!
This payout report covers the Animal Welfare Fund's grantmaking from October 1, 2024 to December 31, 2024 (3 months). It follows the previous April–October 2024 payout report.
As mentioned in the recently published 2024 review and the previous payout report, the Animal Welfare Fund made a conscious decision to increase transparency and prioritize more frequent communications about our work. As part of those efforts, we've resumed regular publication of detailed payout reports after previously reducing our public reporting to focus fund manager capacity on grant evaluations. With additional support now in place, we've streamlined our reporting process to provide comprehensive information about our grants and their intended impact. Given that these are recent grants, outcome data will not be included in the initial payout reports. We plan to share these reports quarterly to keep the community informed of our grantmaking activities.
One of our grantees, who received $291,000, requested that we do not include public reports for their grants (you can read our policy on public reporting here). One grant has been approved but not yet paid out.
Highlighted grants correspond to grants that the AWF team rated highly, usually because they thought the grant was very likely to be very cost-effective or the potential upside was likely very high.
Anonymous ($108,000): Creation of local bad-cop “groups” in Asia to drive corporate compliance of 2025 cage-free commitments
In October 2024, the Animal Welfare Fund provided a $108,000 grant to support the creation of local groups in five key countries in Asia to pressure companies to fulfill their 2025 cage-free commitments. Localized, targeted pressure significantly increases compliance with corporate cage-free commitments, but Asia currently lacks an existing mechanism to apply this pressure. Leaders across Asia will initiate these bad-cop groups to conduct consistent outreach and pressure at local and regional offices. These leaders will also collaborate with other regional and international animal welfare groups to initiate campaigns against companies who do not fulfill their commitments. The model used for this system of localized pressure has been historically successful in increasing compliance with cage-free commitments. While the organization establishing these local groups is new, the team involved have strong track records of animal welfare advocacy and a strong plan for implementation. The leadership is well-connected, which will allow them to strategically collaborate and identify supporters to initiate advocacy efforts.
Through these efforts, these groups aim to get 10 companies to announce that they will meet their cage-free commitments and 15 companies to report their progress. The countries involved slaughter nearly 800 million hens per year, so ensuring the fulfillment of these cage-free commitments will improve the wellbeing of vast numbers of hens and will set a strong precedent for other companies to comply with cage-free commitments. Therefore, given the importance of ensuring fulfillment of cage-free commitments, we believe this project has high expected value.
Open Wing Alliance ($200,000): Funding for strategic regranting to drive fulfillment of the 2025 cage-free corporate commitments in key regions
In December 2024, the Animal Welfare Fund provided a grant of $200,000 to Open Wing Alliance (OWA) to support cage-free advocacy efforts through accountability work on existing commitments as well as strategically securing new commitments. This grant is meant to support OWA’s regranting to organizations around the world, especially in the Global South. With many deadlines for cage-free commitments approaching in 2025, this is a particularly critical time to push for implementation, which was one important motivation for this grant. These efforts will directly decrease hen suffering significantly.
This project addresses one of the largest global sources of animal suffering. OWA has a strong track record and an in-depth understanding of the need for additional cage-free work. We assessed that OWA have a room for more funding, so we recommended this grant to support their efforts. This project has a high likelihood of increasing the wellbeing of millions of hens and is especially cost-effective.
The following articles or posts published since the last payout report can provide a good overview of the Animal Welfare Fund, or otherwise be very helpful to donors and community members.
For some applications submitted to the fund, the AWF evaluates the proposal and recommends them to partner organizations to fund the proposal. In these cases, the partner organization completes due diligence, issues a grant agreement, and pays out the grant, but the AWF still receives progress reports from the organization to track the grant’s success. These grants are included in the “total funding recommended” but not the “total funding paid out.” During this period, the AWF recommended two grants to be funded by partner organizations:
Below is a list of 8 other grants, totaling nearly $414,000, that the Animal Welfare Fund made during this period to support work on animal welfare in many countries.
| Grantee | Amount | Grant Purpose | Award Date |
|---|---|---|---|
| Indonesian Cage-free Association (Asosiasi Bebas Sangkar Indonesia) | $50,000 | Creating a new org that exclusively focuses on campaigning for highly impactful and tractable animal welfare issues | November 2024 |
| AETP - Animal Enterprise Transparency Project | $28,500 | Funding to increase capacity and successfully run campaign aimed at banning cages in Slovenia with potential effects on the rest of the European Union | November 2024 |
| Eurogroup for Animals | $97,000 | Pilot project for a research and advocacy connector to strengthen political animal advocacy in Europe | November 2024 |
| Sam Yan Press | $13,000 | Top-Up: Sam Yan Press promotes ethical living in Thailand through translated texts, seminars, documentaries, and collab | November 2024 |
| Bob Fischer | $43,974 | Academic research on tools for incorporating animal welfare into benefit-cost analysis | November 2024 |
| Animal Law Italia | $81,000 | A 1-year project for advancing aquatic animal welfare in Italy and Europe through advocacy and corporate outreach | December 2024 |
| Anonymous | $15,348 | 4 month salary to conduct research, create resources, and build skills relating to the aquatic animal stunning systems | December 2024 |
| Tälist | $85,000 | 8-month stipend to validate platform impact by prioritizing employer engagement over candidate support | December 2024 |
I was initially impressed and considered donating to the fund in the future, but then noticed the ~$300K grant without a public report. I can't see myself donating to a fund that doesn't say what it's doing with almost 30% of its disbursed funds.
I don't have any insight into why this grantee wanted to remain anonymous.
I do know of some situations in the animal advocacy space, and advocacy space in general, where it is strategic to not have on the public record (or as little as possible) where one is receiving funding from. Reasons for this might include:
I hear the concern you raise and also see there are cases where the tradeoff with transparency on distributed funds and setting the grantees up for success may be in conflict. Might some insight into why the grant is anonymous help bridge that gap?
For example:
One of our grantees, who received $291,000, requested that we do not include public reports for their grants as doing so is likely to negatively impact their ability to carry out their work by exposing publicly how they are connected to other organisations.
One idea I've had to try and resolve this issue for donors is to have all private grants audited by a trusted animal welfare person who doesn't work on the fund (e.g. Lewis Bollard) and commit to publishing their comments in payout reports. I think they'd be able to say things like "I agree that the private grants should be kept private and on average they were about as cost-effective as the public grants".
I'll take <agree> <disagree> votes to indicate how compelling this would be to readers.
I would find this compelling but I think there are pretty strong social incentives to not disagree publicly with the fund managers so you either need a mechanism to get around that or need someone who is very happy to disagree publicly and incur social/reputational costs
Personally I don't believe in a "trusted person", as a concept. I think EA has had its fun trying to be a high trust environment where some large things are kept private, and it backfired horribly.
That was the aim of my comment as well, so I do hope more people actually vote on it.
I think a reasonably independent reviewer who is not perfectly trustworthy would still be better than no reviewer at all.
Thanks, Guy. I am very much for transparency in general[1], but I do not think it matters that much whether I know what happens with 70 % or 100 % of AWF's funds. Even in a worst case scenario where there was no information about 30 % of the money granted by AWF, and the enspecified grants had a cost-effectiveness of 0, AWF's cost-effectiveness would only decrease by 30 %. This would be significant, but still small in comparison with other considerations. In particular, I estimate the Shrimp Welfare Project (SWP) has been 173 times as cost-effective as cage-free campaigns. AWF has funded both SWP and cage-free campaigns, so they implicitly estimate the marginal cost-effectiveness of SWP and cage-free campaigns has not been that different[2]. I suspect our disagreement is mostly explained by me believing excruciating pain is more intense, and lack of scope-sensitivity in AWF's grantmaking decisions, which is based on grantmakers' ratings of grants (from -5 to 5) instead of explicit cost-effectiveness analyses.
Not necessarily in this case. I would have to know the details.
If they thought SWP was way more cost-effective at the margin, they would just fund SWP and not cage-free campaigns.
Zero effect is not the worst case.
I agree, but unspecified grants being neutral in expectation would still be very pessimistic for someone enthusiastic about the specified grants.