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November 2021

2021 Allocation to GiveWell Top Charities: Why We’re Giving More Going Forward

by Alexander Berger Published November 22, 2021

As we wrote last week, we’re substantially growing our overall giving in Global Health and Wellbeing, with the bar in that broad portfolio continuing to be set by the cost-effective, evidence-backed charities recommended by GiveWell. (As most of our readers know, Open Philanthropy started off as a project of GiveWell.) [node:read-more:link]

Technical Updates to Our Global Health and Wellbeing Cause Prioritization Framework

by Peter Favaloro and Alexander Berger Published November 19, 2021

In 2019, we wrote a blog post about how we think about the “bar” for our giving and how we compare different kinds of interventions to each other using back-of-the-envelope calculations, all within the realm of what we now call Global Health and Wellbeing (GHW). This post updates that one and:

  • Explains how we previously compared health and income gains in comparable units. In short, we use a logarithmic model of the utility of income, so a 1% change in income is worth the same to everyone, and a dollar of income is worth 100x more to someone who has 100x less. We measure philanthropic impact in units of the welfare gained by giving a dollar to someone with an annual income of $50,000, which was roughly US GDP per capita when we adopted this framework.
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Our Criminal Justice Reform Program Is Now an Independent Organization: Just Impact

by Zachary Robinson and Alexander Berger Published November 16, 2021

Today, we’re making three announcements:

  1. After hundreds of grants totaling more than $130 million over six years, one of our first programs – criminal justice reform (CJR) – is becoming an independent organization.
  2. The team that had been leading our CJR program, Chloe Cockburn and Jesse Rothman, is transitioning to Just Impact, which describes itself as “a criminal justice reform advisory group and fund that is focused on building the power and influence of highly strategic, directly-impacted leaders and their allies to create transformative change from the ground up”.
  3. We are helping to launch Just Impact with approximately $50 million in seed funding spread over 3.5 years.
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