After a few quiet years, Giving What We Can (GWWC) has been significantly ramping up its activities and has a lot planned moving forward, starting with a partial merger with EA Funds and a significant marketing push.

We wrote this post to contextualise our new strategy and plans. In summary:

A lot has changed since we launched in 2009, but we still wholeheartedly believe in creating a culture where giving effectively and significantly is the norm.
We have ambitious plans to achieve this, and you can help.

Things have changed… a lot

Cast your mind back to 2009. Barack Obama is sworn in as US president amid a global financial crisis, mRNA vaccines haven't yet had a clinical trial, and Jeopardy! and Go world champions are still human. Though the term 'effective altruism' would not be invented until 2011, the movement had just begun.

That was the year Giving What We Can was founded as the first international community of effective givers, and it would soon go on to found the Centre for Effective Altruism alongside 80,000 Hours. At that time, Giving What We Can was almost exclusively focused on global poverty, and funding was scarce for both the movement and the organisations it supported. The idea that a single billionaire (or even a few multimillionaires) would join seemed like a far-off ambition.

Pictured: Our cofounder, Toby Ord, personally sending letters to people who signed The Pledge.

Fast forward to 2022: over 7,000 people from 94 countries have signed The Pledge, over 1,000 people have reported 80,000 Hours significantly influenced their careers, and the community has much better funding (primarily due to a small number of wealthy donors).

Another significant change is cause prioritisation. In 2009, Giving What We Can and the nascent effective altruism (EA) movement were almost exclusively focused on global health and development. Today, we now also emphasise causes that safeguard the long-term future and improve animal welfare.

These changes bring challenges. In a movement that values impartiality and a commitment to doing the most good, it can be difficult to coordinate among people with different worldviews, and potentially wildly different ideas of what "doing the most good" means in practice. As the movement has grown, so have problems with donor coordination (for example, of fungibility, timing of philanthropy, etc.), and the increase in funding from large ...

Jasper Hartong

Posts 1

Posts
1