Joel Tan🔸
Bio
I run CEARCH, a research and grantmaking organization; we try to find and fund cost-effective philanthropic ideas.
Posts 32
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Topic contributions1
Every charity that uses Players Philanthropy Fund as a 501c3 fiscal sponsor in the US (so CEARCH, most Charity Entrepreneurship incubatees, plus some other EA organizations) is capable of accepting crypto donations through Engiven.
However, the charity will need to get set up an Engiven page first, which can be done fairly quickly (e.g. see CEARCH's Engiven page for illustration).
There's very strong empirical evidence that taxes reduce alcohol consumption (price elasticity is about -0.5, so a 10% increase in price reduces consumption by 5%), and the evidence that alcohol harms health is well-established enough that I won't belabour the point
It's probably also cost-effective. Rough rule of thumb is that policy interventions are highly cost-effective due to large scale of impact (policy has national level reach, while is hard to beat), and low cost per capita (particularly due to leveraging less impactful government spending). GiveWell estimates that alcohol policy may be more cost-effective than its top charities, and Charity Entrepreneurship estimates that it's potentially competitive with GiveWell top charities. Uncertainty is very high, of course.
The other posters have also rightly pointed out the conflict-of-interest reasons you should distrust this Snowdon fellow, but also the fact of the matter is that the scientific consensus is what it is for a reason, and even without conflict-of-interest reasons you shouldn't put too much stock in what some rando says over what experts as a whole say.
Yep, and that's about 5x existing GiveWell top charities. Also, GiveWell has made a 700k grant to Resolve to Save Lives (RTSL) for their salt reduction work in China; CEARCH previously recommended and evaluated RTSL for their salt policy work in Southeast & South Asia, and I'm very excited to see GiveWell make this exploratory grant.
One minor suggestion I have is to do annual donations (i.e. sit down at the end of the year / whenever you do your taxes, and decide how much disposable income you have and how much you want to give). It feels more special this way, you get more invested (if you spend time looking at potential charities recommended by GiveWell and charity evaluators), and of course it's less of a hassle than deciding monthly.
Hi Sanjay!
Impactful Giving was incubated by CE, and its founders Chetan & Jesse are currently working on effective giving promotion in India. I understand that it's been challenging, and getting the general public to give has been particularly difficult, though the HNWI side of things has shown more promise.
We introduced them to Upadhyaya Foundation earlier in 2025, and they've worked together (with India Animal Fund) to start a new India Animal Welfare Funding Circle, which brings donors together to promote both evidence-based giving in AW and also more coordination/information sharing between grantmakers. I'm fairly excited to see how things develop from here.
I will say that the difficulty of promoting effective giving to the (relatively poorer) public in India informed our decision to focus on high-income East Asia, where it's plausible that the man on the street (if sold on the ideas of effective giving) is able and willing to give a few thousand a year.
Cheers,
Joel