June Newsletter

Hello and welcome to our June newsletter!

Pop quiz! If you travelled to visit every person who's taken the GWWC pledge, how many different countries would you visit?

Answer: 100 countries! 🎉
With the newest addition of Uzbekistan 🇺🇿, Giving What We Can members are present in 100 countries worldwide! Turns out the idea of giving to help others effectively has universal appeal! 😉

Even though our movement is growing, we need your help - talking to your friends, family and colleagues is one of the best ways to help us change the norms around giving, which in turn means faster progress on some of the world’s biggest issues.

We’d love to know how we can help you talk to the people in your life about high-impact charities and how we can help you advocate. (We already have lots of ideas and resources here)

If you have any ideas about what you would find helpful, simply reply or send me a quick email at: grace.adams AT givingwhatwecan.org.

Below you’ll find loads of interesting updates from our partner charities and other news we think you’ll like!

With gratitude,
- Grace Adams & the Giving What We Can team

News & Updates

Community

• Our Executive Director Luke Freeman recently published a post on the EA Forum about the role of individuals in helping to fund high-impact projects and charities as well as hosting an AMA (Ask Me Anything) about his work, life and more!
• Director of Research, Sjir Hoeijmakers published a post on the EA Forum with “Four claims about the role of effective giving in the EA Community”.
• Power for Democracies is a new non-profit democracy charity evaluator based in Berlin, Germany, and operating globally. They are looking to hire 5-6 democracy enthusiasts to form their ‘Knowledge & Research Team’. The objective of the team is twofold: To build and execute a ‘knowledge-building roadmap’ that will lead to a growing set of methodologies for identifying highly effective pro-democracy interventions and potential NGOs to apply them. And to use these methodologies to generate giving recommendations for the international community of democracy-focused, effectiveness-driven donors.
• Magnify Mentoring is still accepting mentee applications from women, non-binary, and trans people of any gender who are enthusiastic about pursuing high-impact career paths for the next day or two. On average, mentees and mentors meet once a month for 60-90 minutes. Magnify Mentoring offers mentees access to a broader community with a wealth of professional and personal expertise. You can find out more here and apply here.

Evaluators, grantmakers and incubators

• Updates to ACE’s Charity Evaluation Criteria in 2023: Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE) is entering its 2023 charity evaluation season! This is the time of year when ACE works to identify charities that can do the most good for animals with two years of additional funding. To provide more transparency and insight into its evaluation process, ACE is sharing some changes it made to its four charity evaluation criteria this year.
• ACE's Updated Strategic Plan: One year ago, in 2022, ACE developed a strategic plan for the period of 2022–2024. This plan, created collectively by ACE staff under the leadership of the Acting Executive Director and approved by the board of directors, was the result of the hard work and dedication of a severely understaffed team. It represented what was needed then. Things have changed since last year. ACE added several talented individuals to their team, including new leadership and board members. ACE now has an updated strategic plan and is looking forward to testing its assumptions and delivering results.
• GiveWell CEO and co-founder Elie Hassenfeld was interviewed on the 80,000 Hours podcast about newer areas of GiveWell's research—such as malnutrition treatment, water chlorination, "kangaroo mother care", and clubfoot treatment—plus critiques of its approach from the Happier Lives Institute and others.
• GiveWell published a report on the evidence for programs that provide chlorine vouchers for home water treatment and pages on its recent grant recommendations to One Acre Fund and the Agency Fund.

Cause areas

Animal welfare

• Faunalytics has released a new study in partnership with Sentient Media: Animal Agriculture Is The Missing Piece In Climate Change Media Coverage. This report analysed recent climate articles from top U.S. media outlets to determine how often the media makes the connection between animal agriculture and climate change when reporting on climate issues, and how reporting on animal agriculture in relation to climate change misses the mark.
• Lab-grown meat has been approved for sale in the US, and two companies will be able to sell cell-cultured chicken to consumers.

Global health and wellbeing

• Very sadly, GiveDirectly discovered that some of their Democratic Republic of Congo staff conspired with others outside the organisation to steal an estimated $900,000 USD, meaning that overall, ~1.1% of money delivered by GiveDirectly last year was lost to fraud. In GiveDirectly’s response and apology to donors and recipients, they share that upon discovering the fraud, they immediately paused operations. Unfortunately, the risk of fraud in their work is not new, and while it is always disappointing news, we think GiveDirectly has done a commendable job in transparently reporting on the incident and their reaction to it. In addition to reading GiveDirectly’s response, donors could learn more about the topic by reading Vox’s article on the topic and why they believe “openness about fraud — and a plan to fix it — is key to more effective philanthropy”.
• A large study examining the effects of cash transfer programs on population-level mortality rates was published in the journal Nature recently and showed that Cash transfer programs had the following observed effects: Deaths among women fell by 20% (which was largely driven by decreases in pregnancy-related deaths) and deaths among children younger than 5 fell by 8%.
• Svetha Janumpalli, Founder and CEO of New Incentives, spoke at EAG London. She gave a behind-the-scenes look at nearly a decade of piloting, testing, learning, and pivoting and gave a glimpse into the nuts and bolts of how and why the organization maintains 121 program monitoring indicators. Watch her talk or read a quick overview here.
• Malaria Consortium's Chief Executive, James Tibenderana, joined Alicia Weng and Grace Hultquist from GiveWell's research team and Olivia Larsen from GiveWell's outreach team to discuss GiveWell's research on malaria prevention. You can access the video recording, audio recording, and written transcript here.
• Family Empowerment Media (FEM) recently completed a nine-month family planning campaign in Kano, Nigeria, reaching an audience base of 5.6 million over 2600 times; Rethink Priorities recently evaluated FEM. They estimate FEM’s cost-effectiveness in the north of Nigeria may be as high as 60x that of cash transfers.
• In 2019, the END Fund partnered with Virgin Unite and Sir Richard Branson to eliminate parasitic worm infections in four countries. Last year alone, they helped distribute more than 150 million deworming treatments to nearly 50 million people. Watch as Sir Richard explains why this form of collaborative, hands-on philanthropy is integral to disrupting these parasites' hold on families, communities, and economies, here!
• One for the World, an organisation encourages that encourages people to pledge 1% of income to GiveWell's Top Charities, is looking to open new university and corporate chapters in the next few months! Read on if you're interested in starting a chapter or know someone who might be.
• Member Akhil Bansal recently published a report on antimicrobial resistance as a potential high-impact cause worth exploring.

Long-term future

• Leading figures in AI recently signed a statement on AI risk that states: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”
• We recently published a blog post on what you can do if you’re concerned about the risks of developing AI.

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Thank you!

Thanks again for taking the time to read our newsletter! As always, here are some useful links to help you maximise your charitable impact:

• Review our giving recommendations.
• Report your donations with your pledge dashboard.
• Share our ideas to help grow our community and multiply your impact.
• Join other members in the Giving What We Can Community Facebook group.
• Find more ways to get involved with Giving What We Can and effective altruism.
• Discuss effective giving on the Effective Altruism Forum.

You can follow us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, or TikTok and subscribe to the EA Newsletter for more news and articles.

Do you have questions about the pledge, Giving What We Can, or effective altruism in general? Check out our FAQ page, or contact us directly.

Until next time, keep on doing good!