Giving What We Can is committed to transparency in all our work, including our own operations.
On this page, we outline — among other things — how we’re funded, potential conflicts of interest, and our approach to staff pay.
Giving What We Can is a nonprofit with the vision of a world free from preventable suffering or existential risk, where everyone is able to flourish. Towards that end, our mission is to make giving effectively and significantly a cultural norm.
Conceived by Toby Ord and William MacAskill (philosophers at the University of Oxford), Giving What We Can was officially launched in 2009 by Ord, Macaskill, and Bernadette Young, a physician in training at the time and wife to Ord.
Today, our team is managed by a CEO (Sjir Hoeijmakers) who is overseen by our Trustees and Boards of Directors.
As of May 2025, almost everyone in our team has signed the 🔸10% Pledge to give 10% of their income to high-impact programs throughout their lifetime. While this isn’t a requirement to join the team, it reflects our deep commitment to our mission.
Giving What We Can is funded through a combination of direct donations from members and other individuals, as well as grants from philanthropic foundations. So far, our largest funder has been Open Philanthropy. Here's a more detailed breakdown of our current funding sources:
We don't take any fees from donors who use our platform or from organisations we choose to recommend. We're here to help donors do the most good through their giving.
We also have an excess funding policy: if GWWC at any point has more reserves than needed to fund our projected operational expenses for the next two years, we regrant the excess amount to other programs in line with our mission. This is to ensure we only accept donations GWWC is best placed to spend cost-effectively, and don't build up unnecessary financial reserves.
Being largely funded by a single philanthropic foundation provides some advantages compared to relying mainly on individual donors. For example, it means we can dedicate our time to providing the best information to donors on giving elsewhere, rather than needing to spend time fundraising for ourselves. Additionally, being evaluated by an expert with deep knowledge in our area helps ensure we are being held to a high standard.
Yet, having our funding being limited to one or a few key funders carries some risk, which is why we strive to further diversify our funding sources going forward.
We have a commitment to being transparent and open to feedback. Here are some examples of this commitment.
We maintain a page outlining our mistakes. While we believe we have made significant progress towards our mission, we have sometimes fallen short of the standards we have set for ourselves and believe it is important to publicly acknowledge these mistakes so that we can do better in future.
One of the core ways we help achieve our mission is by providing charity recommendations to help donors maximise their impact. We publish all the research informing these recommendations on our website.
Here's how you can submit feedback or make a complaint.
Our last impact evaluation was published in 2023, and we are committed to publishing these periodically.
We generally acknowledge potential conflicts of interest when and where relevant (e.g. in our research reports and on our website), and additionally highlight some of the most important ones here:
We have a member removal policy for cases where members are identified as clearly fake accounts, or are nominated for removal due to actions significantly contradicting GWWC's values, mission or code of conduct.
We share how we approach pay and benefits and publish our salary calculator and policy, including our CEO's pay as an example.