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Jess Whittlestone

New Year's Resolutions and Giving

In the first few days of January each year, people around the world set resolutions - things they’d like to change, start doing, or stop doing in the new year to come. The beginning of a new year provides a nice opportunity to take a step back and reflect on our lives. It provides a feeling of a “fresh start” - a renewed sense of hope that we can make positive changes, that we can do things differently.

Whenever I stop to think about how my life is going, I also try to remember to put it in perspective. While I might not have done as much exercise as I’d like this year, I am in the richest 5% of the world’s population. The fact that I’m able to worry about whether I should be shifting to a low-carb diet, or whether I should be doing more high-intensity exercise, is a sign of just how well-off I am. Because you know what I don’t have to worry about? Getting enough food to eat, or keeping a roof above my head, or catching malaria. If these worries so much as peaked their heads into my day-to-day life, I’d certainly be worrying a lot less about how much time I was spending meditating.

This doesn’t mean, of course, that we’re wrong to think about these things, or that our problems are trivial. I think striving to improve yourself in every way is awesome, and that many people in the developed world face genuine struggles. But it’s also important to recognise that in most ways we are in an incredibly privileged position in the world. The fact that we are even able to set New Year’s resolutions is a sign of that.

an excellent video made by Cambridge University students

taking the Giving What We Can pledge as their New Year’s resolution

 - pledging to give 10% of their income over their life to the most cost-effective charities. For most of us, donating just 10% of our incomes would barely change our own lives - I’d still be in the top 6% of the world’s population, for example. And in fact, 

research suggests that giving actually makes our own lives happier

 - making giving more to charity a great resolution for improving your own life in 2015, too.

As with any New Year’s resolution, though, it’s important to make a commitment you’ll actually feel motivated by and be able to stick to. If you haven’t exercised once in the past year, resolving to go to the gym every day in 2015 might be a bit unrealistic. Similarly, donating 10% of your income might feel like too big a leap straight away. But it needn’t be all or nothing. When we’re building new habits - and donating to charity is in many ways like any other habit - initially it’s important to focus on small goals you’ll actually meet and feel good about. So if it feels more realistic to you to start by donating a smaller percentage, and to commit for a shorter period of time, 

 might be the perfect resolution - pledging to donate a percentage you choose for a certain period of time.

We needn’t face a choice between improving our own lives and improving the lives of others, because we can do both. So this January, as well as resolving to get fitter, eat better, and be more productive, I’m resolving to use my incredible position in the world to help others more - especially those who don’t have the privilege of being able to set New Year’s resolutions.

Roxanne Heston

Giving What We Can 2014 Year in Review

2014 has been the best year yet for Giving What We Can! To celebrate all of the collective progress we’ve made, here’s our year in review.

We have skyrocketed to over 800 members. That’s more than double the number we had at the end of last year, when we ended with 391! To put this in perspective, this is twice the already rapid speed of growth we experienced in 2013 when we grew over 50% in one year. Accordingly, the amount pledged has also risen from $147 million to $344 million. We have expanded from 15 chapters to 26, with additions appearing Europe, America, and worldwide. You can find the full list 

Our online presence has grown as well, with an ever-increasing number of likes on 

, and a similarly high newsletter subscribership. We published nearly 100 posts in 

a conversation with Alix Zwane of Evidence Action

, enabling members and non-members alike to give automatically to top-rated charities of their choice. Over its first year, over £300,000 was donated to it.

In April we launched our new website, complete with an updated 

 where anyone can keep track of donations. June took us to Wales for the third annual Weekend Away with the largest turnout yet, and July to All Souls College for the effective altruism-focussed 

, with a range of speakers from writer Larissa MacFarquhar from The New Yorker to researcher Jeremy Lauer of WHO-CHOICE.

We held our large September internship for two weeks, producing a range of new content and organization-building thanks to the efforts and new perspectives of the interns. After lots of discussion and input, we amended the wording of the pledge new members will be taking moving forward. In light of this change, members Ravi Patel and Luke Llott spearheaded 

 to encourage more members to join the community this December, resulting in unprecedented membership growth in the last month. We’re very grateful for their efforts, and those of the amazing team of students who worked with them!

We’ve had some personnel changes. We’ve been very lucky to be joined by Jonathan Courtney as Director of Community. As well as welcoming all our new members and reaching out to interested people, he’s been 

making videos about our recommended charities

 and travelling the country to visit Chapters and present on topics from the psychological effects of giving to charities combatting climate change. We’ve been sorry to lose Steph Crampin as our Director of Communications, who’s off to Bangalore to learn programming.

With events happening all around the world, local and remote 

, and loads of online content, there is a way for everyone to become more involved. If you haven’t already, we hope you join our community by 

 or contact us if you have questions or concerns. If you don’t yet feel ready to take the Pledge, 

 provides an opportunity to challenge yourself to give an amount of your choosing and see how it feels.

Thanks to all of you for your commitment to making a difference in the lives of others. Together we have already donated more than $5 million, helping hundreds of thousands worldwide. Here’s to another year of progress towards eradicating extreme poverty!

Stephanie Crampin

The Best Charitable Campaigns of 2014

2014 has seen the rise and success of many innovative and engaging campaigns encouraging people to donate to, and raising awareness of a range of charitable interventions. With mainstream charitable advertising proving lacklustre, these campaigns show social media, blogging and youtube can be used to create a huge driving force for good.

By far the most successful (and surprising) campaign of the year was the ubiquitous Ice Bucket Challenge. Over an incredibly short space of time, over one million people took part, raising over $100 million for the ALS association. The premise is simple: you dump a bucket of icy water on your head in front of a camera, donate to the ALS association, and nominate friends to do the same.

Bill Gates taking the ice bucket challenge. Source: Youtube.

It is already the stuff of legend how this phenomenon actually started. However, consensus falls on it being initiated by a crowd of friends, who challenged each other publicly to donate, and filmed themselves dumping cold water on their heads as a penalty if they failed to do so. As it took off, nominees began to both donate (an amount of their choice) and dump the water. Only later did the ALS association begin its official involvement.

The way in which the ALS association can capitalise on this is to engage and sustain the commitment of the donors that came to it through the Ice Bucket Challenge. Over half of the donors were new to the organisation, and if their generosity is sustained, it would spell an even more monumental success for the ALS association in the long term.

One other way the challenge can be said to have made a meaningful difference is the public discussion it started about the worthiness of the cause raised for. 

 with his critique of the good done by participating in the campaign, and others followed suit, even choosing other charities than ALS to give their Ice Bucket contributions to.

Another very successful challenge, with an even simpler premise. You snap a photograph of yourself with no makeup on, post it to facebook, and nominate your friends to do the same. The campaign raised £8 million for Cancer Research, and was all in all considered a great success. Again, this campaign was started between friends before being adopted by the charity they were supporting.

The #nomakeupselfie campaign was not short of criticism however. Some of the more damning remarks labelled it as 

, as well as being inherently sexist. The Independent writes that “From superfluous ‘no filter’ reminders to boasts of being bare faced in a profile pic, the pretence these images are for anything other than an onslaught of ‘natural beauty’ acclamations, coupled with pats on the back for ‘fighting the cause’ makes the no makeup selfie mania even harder to stomach.”

Despite these misgivings, I think the biggest shortfall of the No Makeup Challenge is reflected in the fact that the campaign actually 

 during its time. This is because both Cancer Research and Unicef used the same phone number to channel donations, and many sent the message ‘DONATE’ instead of ‘BEAT’. What this shows is that, while well meaning donations were being sent, many were giving little to no thought whether the donation was even being sent to the right place. The best thing you can do in this instance is to combine your reaction to a fundraiser with some serious thought about where your donations will have the most impact, as 

The two campaigns below are great examples of encouraging people to care about some of the world’s worst problems by putting them in a relatable context. I think it is important that we care equally about people everywhere in the world, so I find these campaigns particularly impressive.

Thea, the Norwegian child bride. Source: The Independent.

A simple idea became a powerful campaign against child marriage. It centred around Thea, a 12 year old Norwegian girl who was soon to be married to a 37 year old man. As she filled her blog with photos of her wedding dress, and stories of her wilting plans to one day be a vet, messages of support and horror grew in volume, and momentum grew around stopping the marriage taking place.

, run by Plan Norway in order to raise awareness for actual instances of child marriage, that happen throughout the world at an alarming rate of one every two seconds. “Through Thea's blog, Plan Norway has told a story that affected 39,000 girls every single day. The blog became the biggest in Norway in less than 12 hours, and is now read by over one million people.”

Giving What We Can’s review of child marriage

, we found that it was a hugely damaging practice, and one intimately connected with harmful and unhealthy attitudes to women. It is great to see the issue being presented in a concrete and actionable way.

Most Shocking Second a Day Video

To bring the Syrian civil war home to a UK audience, Save the Children developed this powerful and saddening advert, to show the effects of civil war on a girl living in the UK. Between birthdays she loses her home and her father, and life ends up looking bleak. The video has reached over 40 million people so far, and is another great example of how an issue that seems disconnected can be communicated effectively.

At Giving What We Can, our community of members is comprised of people who all care deeply and empathise with improving the lives of others around the world. When talking to others about giving more effectively, putting the needs of others in a relatable context such as this can be a great and persuasive way to present the issues.

Stephanie Tam

GOOD READS: 6 Books, Poems, and Essays Inspiring Thoughtful Giving

This holiday season, I would like to recommend 6 reads that inspire thoughtful giving to warm up with on a cold, wintry day. While the needs of others may seem distant from our comfortable curl by the fire, there is no season like the present for hospitality, and we can begin by welcoming the wisdom and words of others into our homes – inviting not only the potential for transforming other lives, but also opening our own to the possibility of being transformed.

Extreme poverty contributes to a host of problems around the world, including limited access to clean drinking water, poor education and literacy rates, and death by preventable diseases. [1] But while these problems may seem overwhelming, evidence suggests that your thoughtful giving – the careful selection of social interventions and programs you support – can actually have a real impact improving the lives of others in the fields of education and health. [2] From a domestic short story about giving between lovers to a novel based on the true story of a Sudanese refugee, these reads challenge us to expand our charity and comfort zones.

Naomi Shihab Nye’s ‘Kindness’: A Poem [3]

First up, we have Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem, ‘Kindness’, which invites us to begin the journey of caring for others through opening ourselves up to the possibility of loss: ‘Before you know what kindness really is / you must lose things . . . ’

Certainly, there is a sense in which the very ability to give is a profound privilege – it may be ‘better to give than to receive’ – but the reality remains that behind every gift is a loss, and such a loss can be difficult to appreciate as privilege without its lived experience. Nye’s words highlight the wisdom that our own giving is enriched by a personal knowledge of the world in all its beauty and poverty, to walk in the footsteps of strangers and discover ‘how desolate the landscape can be / between the regions of kindness.’

O’Henry’s ‘The Gift of the Magi’: A Short Story [4]

‘Charity begins at home’, goes the clichéd proverb, and so we come next to a short story about domestic love in O’Henry’s short story ‘The Gift of the Magi’. A Christmas classic, the narrative begins with Della’s dilemma of what to buy her beloved husband for Christmas with a meagre $1.87. The story is a sweet if somewhat sentimental read, following the couple’s attempt to sacrifice their own prized possessions to buy a gift for their beloved.

In a contemporary culture grown cynical about the consumerism of the winter holiday season, this little story casts consequence to the wind, focusing instead on the charitable orientation of the heart that gives – ‘charity at home’ in both the metaphorical and literal sense.

Dave Eggers’s What is the What: Based on a True Story [5]

What is the What is a novel born out of an encounter between author Dave Eggers and Sudanese refugee Valentino Achak Deng, one of the 4,000 ‘Lost Boys’ who resettled in the United States after fleeing the violent devastation of their homes in southern Sudan. Eggers fictionalises Achak’s perspective, following Achak’s flight across South Sudan and his struggle for survival in a hostile landscape of wild animals, violent militia attacks, and aerial bombardments. A story of childhood tumultuously displaced civil war, it bears witness to the consequences of a horrific conflict later labelled genocide in 2002. [6]

The book demands the reader’s attention – ‘Do you have any idea? . . . Can you imagine?’ – even as it artfully commands it through masterful prose. The book is also a gift that gives: all of its proceeds go to the Valentino Achak Deng Foundation, which provides educational opportunities for those affected by the conflicts in Sudan. [7]

Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s Half the Sky: Nonfiction/Journalism [8]

Expanding to the global, Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s Half the Sky travels across ten different countries – Cambodia, Kenya, India, Sierra Leone, Somaliland, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Liberia and the United States – to tell the stories of extraordinary women and girls resisting oppression. This Pulitzer prize-winning team presents a simultaneously inspiring and heartrending case for considering gender inequality as the central moral challenge of the twenty-first century.

Investigating worldwide problems of sex trafficking, gender-based violence, and maternal mortality, Half the Sky provides compelling evidence for the urgency of the situation – interweaving statistics and stories to give a face to gender inequality. Highlighting the ways in which we can help even from a distance, it follows the work of several NGOs, charities, and other groups working to solve these problems.

Jamaica Kincaid’s My Brother: An AIDS Memoir [9]

The question of distant suffering is personalised by Jamaica Kincaid’s AIDS memoir, My Brother. Her writing grapples with the trauma of her youngest brother’s death from the disease, revisiting memories of their childhood and her attempts to care for him. Concerned with the question of how to relate to the suffering of a man who is simultaneously family and stranger – she left home as a teenager, while he was just three years old – her writing negotiates feelings of pity, superiority, and confusion in caring for her brother.

‘I shall never forget him because his life is the one I did not have, the life that, for reasons I hope shall never be too clear to me, I avoided or escaped’, Jamaica Kincaid writes, reflecting that his fate could easily have been hers had she not left her impoverished family and Antigua to become a famous writher in the States through a combination of luck and talent.

The text draws attention to how the suffering of those in ‘developing countries’ is not so distant – how the major differences between ‘us’ and ‘them’ may often be matters beyond our own achievement, gifts that we have not earned, but that can nonetheless become opportunities to give back.

David Foster Wallace’s ‘This Is Water’: An Essay [10]

Moving from heart to mind, David Foster Wallace’s essay adaptation of a commencement speech, ‘This Is Water’, encourages readers to cultivate generous modes of thinking. He calls our attention to the ways in which our default perception of the world is through a lens of egocentrism – the default and deep belief that we are the centres of our universe, a reality that we inhabit as unconsciously as fish inhabit water.

Examining a stressful, everyday experience – heavy traffic and long grocery lines – DFW proposes that we have the choice to read these situations through egocentric or altruistic mindsets. We have a choice to read such a situation with ‘the certainty that situations like this are really all about me, about my hungriness and my fatigue and my desire to just get home . . . like everybody else is just in my way’ or with the generous consideration that ‘the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick . . . in a much bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am – it is actually I who am in his way.’

Though cultivating such generosity is by no means easy, the result may be a gift to ourselves as well as others. When we choose to think charitably, such tedious situations become transformed: we experience ‘a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars – compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things.’

The fact remains that sympathy for literary characters does not necessarily translate to concern for real people, even as the practice of reading engages the imaginative exercise of empathy. But as David Foster Wallace suggests, the content of what we choose to read shapes the way we think and perceive the world, just as the way we choose to give shapes our impact on it. For at the end of the day, the thoughtful giver is one who is not only able to ‘read’ the world and recognise its problems, but who is also able to ‘read’ herself into its narrative – and recognise the subtle ways in which she may potentially contribute to it.

The World Bank’s 2014 report on World Development Indicators

The Guardian: a lost boy who found his voice

The Guardian: David Foster Wallace's commencement speech

David Kell

The effective altruists of the Nobel Peace Prizes

The list of Nobel Peace Prize laureates is a rather extraordinary collection of famous (and infamous) figures whose impact on humanity is undeniable. But many of these people underwent extreme hardship to help others, and it's daunting to think that we could ever emulate them.

However, there are some interventions into global poverty which have, comparatively, quite a low effort to impact ratio (or at least, involve little personal sacrifice). To show this, I have selected a small group of the prize winners who show that all of us, without radically changing our lives, identify such opportunities to help and so change the world for the better.

These are, if you like, the effective altruists of the Nobel Peace Prizes.

Fridtjof Nansen might be world famous on the basis of 

, but he's included here for his work with the League of Nations after World War One. Norway maintained neutrality throughout the war, and it's interesting to see how Nansen advocated and achieved Norway's inclusion in the League in 1920, and then to follow his further tireless efforts in the repatriation of post-war refugees and prevention of famine throughout Europe. That included returning 400,000 prisoners to 30 different countries in the immediate aftermath, the successful swap and financial compensation of half a million Greeks and Turks in the aftermath of the Greco-Turk wars, and the eponymous 

 which allowed the movement of stateless persons. It was work that the League's Assembly said "would contain tales of heroic endeavour worthy of those in the accounts of the crossing of Greenland and the great Arctic voyage." (ref: Nansen, E. E. Reynolds p. 222-223)Nansen reminds us that we can make a huge difference in situations of extreme poverty that nominally have no relation to us, a idea that Giving What We Can firmly believes in.

One of the basic findings of Giving What We Can has been that the most effective interventions - at least, if we care about giving people more years to live of genuine quality life - involve guaranteeing the basic health of those in extreme poverty. And at least in the UK, no figure has had such an effect on our basic level of nutrition than Lord Boyd-Orr. His research into nutrition found that more than a third of the population of the UK were unable to afford the required amount and variety of food in order to maintain basic health. His research was used to develop the wartime food policy of 1939-45 which, despite rationing, meant that the women and children of poorer classes were 

healthier at the end of the war than they had been at the beginning

the first Director General of the Food and Agriculture Organisation

Jody Williams (2010) (+ International Campaign to Ban Landmines)

It is estimated that 15,000-20,000 people die every year from landmines, and that approximately 80% of these casualities are children (ref: Walsh & Walsh). Many of the 

countries with high unexploded landmine count

 are often also regions of extreme poverty. As chief strategist of the International Campaign to Bad Landmines, 

 led to the Ottawa Treaty, an international treaty which bans the use of landmines and which has been ratified by most of the world's countries (though notably not Russia, China or the USA). You can see her speak about this, and more broadly about her vision for world peace, 

Walsh, Nicolas E., and Wendy S. Walsh. "Rehabilitation of landmine victims: the ultimate challenge." Bulletin of the World Health Organization 81.9 (2003): 665-670.

From a reasonably affluent American background, Borlaug's major scientific achievement was the development of a strain of wheat which was high yield and disease resistant; and his primary humanitarian achievement was the introduction of the crop in Pakistan and India, which were in the mid 1960s falling into famine. Against the background of the Indo-Pakistani war, Borlaug's work counteracted the imminent starvation and brought about the self-sufficiency in wheat production of Pakistan (1968) and India (1974). This has been called 

 and Borlaug has consequently been credited as 

By some metrics - his suffering, the effort the invested, the sacrifices he made - Borlaug ranks pretty averagely with other Nobel Peace Prize winners. But what Giving What We Can seeks to emphasise is that there is no law-like relationship between these metrics and the good you can do. So its worth taking the time to work out what your aim is, and then to carefully assess possible causes to see which best fulfils what you’re interested in. And if what you’re interested in is giving people more years of decent quality life, then I don’t think there is a Nobel Peace Laureate that stands out like Norman Borlaug.

In making the above short list, I set myself two fairly restrictive criteria, so as to keep with the concerns of Giving What We Can: one, that the intervention be clearly beneficial in alleviating the suffering of those in extreme poverty; and two, that the intervention did not require great personal sacrifice (my constraint that it was something we could reasonably aspire to).

Relax the first, and there are a host of distinguished politicians and activists who have campaigned throughout history to resolve specific conflicts, to de-arm nuclear weapons and promote the unity of the world through organisations such as the UN. It's very difficult to assess the effectiveness of these sorts of endeaviours (though the failure of the League of Nations to prevent World War 2 makes it difficult to view Nobel Prizes awarded in relation to the Kellog-Briand Pact as good candidates, say), and researching the effectiveness of charities that advocate political change remains 

an active area of research at Giving What We Can

Relax the other, and one thinks of Médecins Sans Frontières, who today fight to guarantee the basic health of Ebola sufferers in Guinea, Sierra-Leone and Liberia, or Malala Yousafzai's campaign for female education in Northwest Pakistan; or the work that the International Committee of the Red Cross or Amnesty International have done to guarantee human rights worldwide.

What I hope to have shown, is that it is possible, often at surprisingly little expense to your own happiness, to make a pretty clear difference in the world. And I hope the insights above - a cost effective nutritious diet, a passport for stateless people, a ban on land-mines, and a high-yield, disease-resistant wheat - offer some fleeting inspiration as to how we might do that.

Allan Saldanha

Quadruple your donation to AMF- in praise of donation matching

 that allows you to have your donation to AMF quadrupled this Christmas. This is a great opportunity to increase the impact of your donation! Read on to learn more about Allan's motivation for matching donations.

I have also always been keen on match fundraising. Not only does it increase the amount of money raised, it also involves collaborating with other people and psychologically makes people feel better about the money they donate. I always look for donation matching appeals at christmas time (when they tend to occur) to increase the impact of my donation.

There are critics of donation matching who argue that it can distract donors and lead to a misallocation of donations, and that donors should focus on donating to the most effective charities. Research by Givewell and other charity evaluators clearly shows that some charities are many times more effective than others, and clearly this can dwarf the impact of matching.

However I think it's possible to have the best of both worlds, and since I joined Giving What We Can, I'm keen to maximise the impact of my donations by looking for matching opportunities for the most effective charities.

 has kindly offered to match all donations to the 

 up to 31st December 2014, so I've set up the below fundraising page offering to match all donations up to a total of £5,000. After Charity Science's matching, this then means that donations to the page will be quadrupled (to raise a total of up to £20,000).

Many thanks for your generosity- please donate before the 31st December 2014 deadline.

Alison Woodman

Making the most of seasonal giving

It’s that time of the year again where we’re frantically buying presents for loved ones, decorating our homes and planning Christmas dinner. Despite the hectic nature of it all this is a great time to think more about giving, and to encourage others to do so too.

 took place on 2nd December and promoted just this; it asked people to donate to charities and to make their donations public, motivating more people to join in. The idea was launched in the US in 2012, and this is the first year it has been promoted in the UK as well. It was a cleverly timed antidote to the shopping frenzies of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and the event’s promoters, 

, reported a 43% increase in donations compared with any other Tuesday this year.

It’s fantastic that campaigns like this have an immediate high impact by increasing interest in charitable giving. However, such seasonal awareness-raising also bring new opportunities to encourage one another to think more deeply about charity. In fact, in the past few weeks students in Cambridge have been doing just this. A campaign, initiated by medical student Ravi Patel, is inviting people this Christmas and New Year to take Giving What We Can’s 