Greetings :) On the 24th of August, I'm leaving my (most likely) second to last power-of-two year behind, which — as a computer scientist — makes me slightly sad. Luckily, I have a lot to be grateful for: a (by and large) healthy body & mind, the freedom to quit my job and work on whatever is interesting to me right now and, of course, a lot of wonderful friends & family around the world. But many people on this planet are not so lucky, and live with hunger, poverty, illness, or violence.

As a well-off person living in a rich country, I recognize that I have a huge opportunity to try to improve the world. This is why since 2020, I donate 10% of my income to charities that are working on some of the most pressing issues facing humanity, such as global healthcare and climate change. But there is a limit to how much difference one person can make, so I want to do an experiment: how many other people can I convince to donate a small (or large) amount to charity?

Concretely, I decided to run a fundraiser here on the website of Giving What We Can. For this fundraiser, I picked three charities: The Clean Air Task Force (advocates for clean air measures and innovation in neglected low-carbon technologies); StrongMinds (seeks to improve mental health in sub-Saharan Africa by using group talk therapy to treat depression in women) and the Good Food Institute (works to reduce animal farming by accelerating the development of plant- and cell-based meat alternatives).

I've picked these charities because (1) they work on problems that I, personally, consider important, (2) they use approaches that I believe in, such as advocating for policy change, empowering the disempowered or providing suitable alternatives to problematic solutions and (3) they are recommended as highly effective charities by respected charity evaluators like Founders Pledge.

If you want to contribute, here's how it works: you can donate by credit card or bank transfer via Giving What We Can (button in the top right), or send me your donation at paypal.me/kunzenils or https://venmo.com/u/Nils-Kunze and I will transfer it.

To encourage you, for each person donating at least 1$, I will add 5$ to the donation!

100% of the money you donate will go to the three charities I picked. No matter how much you choose to donate, know that it makes me very happy to know you care!