Payout Date: August 15, 2018
Total grants: USD 526,000
Number of grantees: 5
Please note that this writeup is identical to that for the grants made at the same time from the Long-Term Future Fund; Nick Beckstead made decisions for both sets of grants together and therefore they should be considered as a single grant recommendation across the two funds.
I have recommended grants to the following organizations in the following amounts, from the following funds (LTF = Long-term Future Fund, EAM = EA Meta Fund):
| Organization | Amount | Funding Source |
|---|---|---|
| 80,000 Hours | $91,450 | LTF |
| 80,000 Hours | $75,818 | EAM |
| CEA | $162,537 | LTF |
| CEA | $56,061 | EAM |
| CFAR | $174,021 | LTF |
| Founders Pledge | $393,939 | EAM |
| MIRI | $488,994 | LTF |
This will disburse all the EA Funds under my management. (My opinions on these individual organizations are available in the linked Open Phil write-ups.)
I recommended these grants with the suggestion that these grantees look for ways to use funding to trade money for saving the time or increasing the productivity of their employees (e.g. subsidizing electronics upgrades or childcare), due to a sense that (i) their work is otherwise much less funding constrained than it used to be, and (ii) spending like this would better reflect the value of staff time and increase staff satisfaction. However, I also told them that I was open to them using these funds to accomplish this objective indirectly (e.g. through salary increases) or using the funds for another purpose if that seemed better to them.
Some comments on amounts and grantees:
- University-based grantees were not considered for these grants because I believe they are not well-positioned to use funds for time-saving and productivity-enhancement due to university regulations.
- The amounts I’m granting out to different organizations are roughly proportional to the number of staff they have, with some skew towards MIRI that reflects greater EA Funds donor interest in the Long-Term Future Fund.
- I think a number of these organizations could qualify for the criteria of either the Long-Term Future Fund or the EA Community Fund because of their dual focus on EA and longtermism, which is part of the reason that 80,000 Hours is receiving a grant from each fund.
- CEA will use the LTF funding to support a new project whose objective is to expand global priorities research in academia, especially related to issues around longtermism.
Note: At the time this report was published, the Effective Altruism Meta Fund was known as the "Effective Altruism Community Fund". To reduce confusion, we've changed this report to use the newer name."