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What are the fund's current focus areas? And Kieran, congratulations on being the new fund chair. Projecting yourself into the future, what would you say future areas of focus might be a year from now? 5 years from now?

kierangreig

I would say the current focus areas are: 1. Large-scale and neglected animal populations (for instance, farmed fish and wild animals) 2. Large-scale and neglected geographies (for instance, China and India) 3. Exploratory work regarding the scaling of alternative proteins (for instance, a novel and potentially scalable intervention on plant-based alternatives) In terms of projections, I think it is hard to say. There are going to be a lot of inputs into that output. Inputs that will only become known over the next couple of years Here are some plausible priority areas that come to my mind for the fund on a 2-5 year timeline: * Seeding some groups in the Middle-East and further seeding groups in Africa. * Alt-proteins * Fish welfare * Field building on wild animal welfare

Animal Welfare Fund: Ask us anything!

william3y3

Could you please list some of the past grantees? Which past grants are you the most proud of? And conversely have there been some lessons learned or updates to the methodology?

kierangreig

Sure. :) Somewhat random sample of past grantees includes: * FIAPO * Essere Animali * Environment & Animal Society of Taiwan * Compassion in World Farming USA The full list with description regarding the grants are available in our payout reports! Some specific grants that I have been particularly proud of include early stage grants to: * Crustacean Compassion * Equalia * Rethink Priorities * Wild Animal Initiative * Fish Welfare Initiative * Sinergia Animal In terms of lessons learned, I would quickly say: * Active grantmaking is important * Take the growth approach to evaluating startup non-profits, not the marginal approach * Double-check grantees understand any restrictions * References are useful in evaluations, although remember to ask for reasons behind references * Don’t spend some minimum amount of time on each grant out of a fairness intuition – instead, just focus on the grants that really matter. * It can be surprisingly difficult to get applications for funding out of some international groups

Animal Welfare Fund: Ask us anything!

william3y2

How has the EA fund grown over the years? Do you have a sense of what percentage of overall EA Animal Welfare giving is being done through the fund as opposed to direct donations from EAs to orgs? How it is being advertised both within the EA community and outside of it?

KarolinaSarek

You can check the donations made through all the funds on our website. Below I pasted a graph illustrating AWF’s growth over the last three years: I’m not aware of any comparison data of that sort, but a couple of sources (mainly EA Survey) may give us some approximate answers. EA Survey 2019 Series: Donation Data quotes the following amount of donations made by EA community members who filled out the EA Survey. Note however, that $87,385.50 of that amount was donated to EA Animal Welfare Fund. Out of that following organizations received funding: * ACE 132,222.80 * THL 128,012.00 * EA Animal Welfare Fund: 87,385.50 * GFI 85,778.53 * Mercy For Animals: 29,705.96 Those numbers add up to 463,104.79, so something is not right with the data. But it gives us a ballpark number. Lewis Bollard provided another interesting piece of data in one of his newsletters, where he estimated a Farmed Animal Advocacy Groups and Team’s Revenue by Year. Note however, that those estimates are from 2014 and 2016, so before AWF launched. Lastly, for comparison data from Lewis Bollard’s newsletter released in 2018 claiming that “Since the start of 2016, the Open Philanthropy Project has approved 82 farm animal welfare grants totaling $47M to 50 grantees in 24 countries.”

Animal Welfare Fund: Ask us anything!

william3y5

Hi Kieran, thanks for organizing the AMA! What is the EA fund? How does it work and how does it make decisions? Is the fund trying to find grantees that will have the highest expected impact, or is it also using other criteria? And finally, how does its focus differ from ACE's Movement Grants? Thank you!

kierangreig

Hi William, > What is the EA fund? Briefly, the EA AWF is a regranting mechanism for donors interested in maximizing their impact on non-human animal welfare. Contributions to it are allocated out to grantees by fund managers three times per year. > How does it work and how does it make decisions? As outlined in another question by Karolina. We solicit applications via an open process advertised on relevant sites, Facebook groups, and by individually reaching out to promising candidates. Additionally, we create an RFP and distribute it accordingly. AWF applications are initially triaged, rejecting applications that are out of scope or clearly below the bar for funding, we reject <5. The remaining applications are assigned to a primary and secondary fund manager with relevant, compatible expertise. The assigned fund manager will read the application in detail, and often reaches out to interview the applicant or ask clarifying questions. In addition, they may read prior work produced by the applicant, reach out to the applicant's references, or consult external experts in the area. They produce a brief write-up summarizing their thinking. What follows is voting by all fund managers. As outlined in another question by Marcus, we grade all applications with the same scoring system. For the prior round, after the review of the primary and secondary investigator and we've all read their conclusions, each grant manager gave a score (excluding cases of conflict of interests) of +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 averaged 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 t

Ask Rethink Priorities Anything (AMA)

william3y9

Thanks Saulius, it actually so happens that the organization running the baitfish petition in France, Paris Animaux Zoopolis, was founded by Amandine Sanvisens... who is also the director of ALI in France! But, and that goes to your next point, we were not aware of the relative scale of baitfish farming; so if we do end up prioritizing it over another intervention, the credit for the additional impact of doing that campaign over the one we would have done otherwise would go to you and RP! Would love to chat more and we'll keep you updated.

saulius

Good to know. I've talked to Gautier who wrote the French article I linked to, and he said he had already tried to figure out the scale of the industry in France, but didn't manage to find stats on it. However, he said that there are indications that it is a small industry compared to the U.S. He said there was work on it mostly due to legal precedent reasons rather than direct impact.

Ask Rethink Priorities Anything (AMA)

william3y10

Hi Saulius, thank you for your comment! To add some more context, ALI is based in New York, but we indeed have a global team. I'm very glad you're bringing up baitfish. Our focus for 2020 was the creation of the Aquatic Animal Alliance, the drafting of our coalition welfare standards and the launch of our certifier campaign. We've done great progress on all of them, and actually already had our first victory with GlobalGAP (which certifies more than 1% of the global aquaculture market). For next year, we plan on continuing our certifier campaign but also w... (read more)

saulius

Thank you very much William for your comment! I will follow up with you in private but there are few things that I thought would be suitable to say/ask here as well. It was very recently brought to my attention that baitfish seems to also be farmed in France and that there is an animal advocacy organization that has a petition on it (see here and here). I don’t know what is the scale of baitfish farming in France or in any country other than the U.S., so I don’t yet know if it is an issue I would recommend tackling in France. I just thought I should mention that in case you or someone else could be interested in doing some lobbying on this issue there. Also, at Rethink Priorities we try to track any possible impact we had on the projects of animal welfare organizations. So I wanted to ask, do you think you would have worked on fish restocking if this article was never written? And please don’t hesitate to say that you knew about the industry and its size independently of that article and it had nothing to do with it, if that is the case :)

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