Effective Altruism (Global Health and Wellbeing)

Many people want to help others, and seek out ways to do so effectively.

We empower people to use their careers and donations to help others as much as possible.

We believe that individuals can have a huge positive impact on the world by being thoughtful about how they can best use their resources to help others.

We support organizations and projects that enable people to use their careers and donations to improve the lives of humans and animals around the world.

Our work is guided primarily by two observations:

First, there is large variation in the impact that different charitable organizations can achieve. By focusing on important, neglected problems and relying on evidence-based solutions, top charities, such as those recommended by GiveWell, can achieve much more than others with the same donation. GiveWell estimates that the funding it has directed since inception will save at least 200,000 lives.

 

“How rich am I?” calculator from Giving What We Can (2023) with associated estimate of what effective giving could achieve. Results shown are for a single person earning $40,000 after tax in the United States. You can enter your own salary and household size on the Giving What We Can website.

 

Second, the career a person chooses is one of the most important decisions they can make — and a career focused on important and neglected problems is likely to achieve much more impact. Today, however, there is a lack of quality resources and guidance that can help people find and pursue these kinds of careers.

Fortify Health is an Indian nonprofit which fortifies flour to reduce anemia; it was incubated by Charity Entrepreneurship (Fortify Health 2019).

The theory of change for this program spans five potential sub-strategies that our grantees might work on. Our funding so far has focused on (1), (2), and (3): 

  1. Raise funds for highly effective charities
  2. Enable people to have a greater impact with their careers
  3. Found and incubate new charities working on important and neglected interventions
  4. Conduct research to find especially cost-effective interventions
  5. Provide infrastructure to support people implementing the principles of effective altruism in ways that further items (1) through (4).

We launched this program in July 2022. In its first 12 months, the program had a budget of $10 million. This focus area uses the lens of our global health and wellbeing portfolio, just as our global catastrophic risks capacity building area uses the lens of our GCR portfolio.

The following Open Philanthropy staff oversee the Effective Altruism (Global Health and Wellbeing) program.

  • James Snowden
    Senior Program Officer, Global Health & Wellbeing
  • Melanie Basnak
    Senior Program Associate, Effective Altruism (Global Health and Wellbeing)

Prospective Funders

If you are a funder interested in donating significantly to support work across any of our five sub-strategies, let us know! We are eager to work in partnership with other funders and share information to help allocate resources toward exceptional work. If interested, please email melanie.basnak@openphilanthropy.org.

Prospective Grantees

We source the vast majority of our grants through active outreach and are not currently reviewing unsolicited proposals. For more information, see our grantmaking process.

Sample Grants

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