Vision & Values

Open Philanthropy identifies outstanding giving opportunities, makes grants, follows the results, and publishes our findings. Our main funders are Cari Tuna and Dustin Moskovitz, a co-founder of Facebook and Asana. Meet our staff here and read more about our governance and history, including our relationships with GiveWell and Good Ventures, here.

We aim to reflect the following values in our research and grantmaking:

We believe that people have intrinsic value regardless of the circumstances of their birth, and that animals’ lives have value, too. We believe economic development and technological innovation have greatly increased human well-being. We’re optimistic that this trend will continue, and we hope to play a part in accelerating it. We’re motivated by our vision of a day when every person’s needs are met and each of us is empowered to shape our own life.

We’re open to supporting high-risk, high-reward work, as well as work that could take a long time to pay off. But, all else equal, we prefer to do good quickly, because helping people empowers them to help themselves and others, meaning the good we accomplish compounds over time. We’re open to shorter-term, evidence-backed giving opportunities (such as GiveWell’s top charities) as well as high-risk, potentially very long-term opportunities (such as efforts to reduce global catastrophic risks or change public policy). For more on the latter, see our post about hits-based giving.

We’ve attempted to outline the values that guide our philanthropy, though we remain uncertain on some fundamental questions. But we don’t believe we need to resolve such questions fully to take action.

The advice we heard most often when we started giving was “focus on something you’re passionate about.” In our case, we’re passionate about using the resources we have to improve others’ lives as much as we can. Our level of excitement about an issue depends on how much good we believe we’ll accomplish by working on it. So, instead of starting with a predefined set of focus areas, we’re considering a wide variety of causes where our philanthropy could help to improve others’ lives. We’ve investigated many potential focus areas, and we’re prioritizing based on three criteria: importance, neglectedness, and tractability.

Prior to beginning to operate independently in June 2017, Open Philanthropy was originally incubated as a partnership between the foundation Good Ventures and GiveWell. Both groups have their own statements of values that continue to inform our work:

• Read Good Ventures’ vision and values.
• Read GiveWell’s values.