Both the Long Term Future and the EA Meta fund have now opened their applications again. You can apply here:
Both of these funds will from now on have rolling applications, with a window of about 3-4 months between responses. The application window for the coming round will end on the 28th of June 2019. Any application received after that will receive a response around four months later during the next evaluation period (unless it indicates that it is urgent, though we are less likely to fund out-of-cycle applications).
The Long Term Future Fund
We continue to be particularly interested in small teams and individuals that are trying to get projects off the ground, or that need less money than existing grant-making institutions are likely to give out (i.e. less than ~$100k, but more than $10k, since we can’t give grants below $10k). Here are some concrete examples:
- To spend a few months (perhaps during the summer) to research an open problem in AI alignment or AI strategy and produce a few blog posts or videos on their ideas
- To spend a few months building a web app with the potential to solve an operations bottleneck at x-risk organisations
- To spend a few months up-skilling in a field to prepare for future work (e.g. microeconomics, functional programming, etc)
- To spend a year testing an idea that has the potential to be built into an org
You are also likely to find reading the writeups of our past grant decisions valuable to help you decide whether your project is a good fit:
Apply Here
The EA Meta Fund
The EA Meta Fund aims to write grants to groups that drive more high-quality talent, information and capital towards tackling the world’s biggest problems. We are interested in applications from organisations and individuals working on long-established as well as completely new projects. While the smallest possible grant we can make is $10 000, we are very much interested in small projects requiring only small grants.
To get a better idea of what kind of projects we might be interested in funding, you can review our grant writeups for March 2019 and November 2018. Note that the projects we have funded so far do not present an exhaustive list of types of projects we might be interested in funding. Some other examples of projects we might be interested in funding:
- A project building and supporting profession-specific networks in EA
- Initiatives to target specific community problems
- Research projects related to cause prioritisation
- A project experimenting with novel fundraising strategies or target groups
Our application process consists of two stages. The first stage consists of submitting the application form, where you only need to answer two questions about your project, in less than 300 words each. We will get back to applicants by the 1st of July.
For the second stage of the application, we will either ask questions via email/request further material or arrange a phone call, potentially both. This will be decided on a case by case basis for each potential grantee. We will finish the second stage of the application by the 6th of July, which is when we will need responses by.
We will inform you of our final decisions by late July.
Apply here
What kind of applications can we fund?
After last round, CEA clarified what kinds of grants we are likely able to make, which includes the vast majority of applications we have received in past rounds. In general you should err on the side of applying, since I think it is very likely we will be able to make something work. However, because of organizational overhead we are more likely to fund applications to registered charities and less likely to fund projects that require complicated arrangements to be compliant with charity law.
For grants to individuals, we can definitely fund the following types of grants:
- Events/workshops
- Scholarships
- Self-study
- Research project
- Content creation
- Product creation (eg: tool/resource that can be used by community)
We will likely not be able to make the following types of grants:
- Grantees requesting funding for a list of possible projects
- In this case, we would fund only a single project of the proposed ones. Feel free to apply with multiple projects, but we will have to reach out to confirm a specific project.
- Self-development that is not directly related to community benefit
- In order to make grants the public benefit needs to be greater than the private benefit to any individual. So we cannot make grants that focus on helping a single individual in a way that isn’t directly connected to public benefit.
- Note this is different to self-study, where person intends to do own research or gain skills that are directly connected to community benefit
If you have any questions about the application process or other questions related to the funds, feel free to submit them in the comments. You can also contact Oliver Habryka directly under ([email protected]) if you have questions about the Long Term Future Fund, as well as Denise Melchin at [email protected] if you have questions about the EA Meta Fund.
I'm not involved with either of these funds, but here are three projects I really want to see happen:
Regarding EA Oxford: I can understand the general goal of "having professionals work on community things", but are there particular issues you've seen with Oxford community activities? Specific things you think EA org employees could improve on?
I think there should be an Oxford group that has as its audience the people in EA orgs, with activities to improve happiness, productivity, and the attractiveness of these workplaces, which is quite different from the goal of trying to grow a community of students. On this front, I've been spending time finding group housing near the new office. It would also be good to have short-term housing for visitors. It would be good to have dinners, and fun activities on a Friday night. In-principle, the range of activities that could be helped by proximity to the Oxford orgs is extremely large, but things that interact more closely with the orgs, like grant recommendations, or recruitment, just to pick a couple of arbitrary examples, would have to be worked out beforehand.