Today, Open Philanthropy is becoming Coefficient Giving. Our mission remains the same, but our new name marks our next chapter as we double down on our longstanding goal of helping more funders increase their impact. We believe philanthropy can be a far more vital force for progress than it is today; too often, great opportunities to help others go unfunded. As Coefficient Giving, our aim is to make it as easy as possible for donors to find and fund them. (For more on how we chose our new name, what’s changing, and what’s staying the same in this next chapter, see here.)
The world has seen enormous improvement in living conditions over the last two centuries, but continues to face devastating problems philanthropy is well-placed to address. Nearly half of children in poor countries have elevated blood lead levels even though there are proven methods to dramatically reduce lead exposure. Billions of animals live in horrendous conditions on factory farms, though corporate campaigns can meaningfully reduce their suffering. Strict zoning and other barriers slow growth and progress, but YIMBY and the broader abundance movement are beginning to turn the tide. Advances in synthetic biology will increase the risk of novel bioweapons, but ambitious biosecurity efforts to improve detection and response are there for the taking. And while advances in AI hold enormous promise, they could also pose unprecedented risks, leaving a narrow window to implement technical and policy safeguards.
Over the last decade, we’ve developed a model for finding and funding the most cost-effective opportunities to solve these problems. We’re proud of what we’ve achieved:
These achievements are the result of our founding partnership with Good Ventures, the foundation of Cari Tuna and Dustin Moskovitz. Cari and Dustin have committed to spending down the vast majority of their wealth within their lifetimes. We have helped them give over $4 billion so far, and expect our partnership to grow even more in the coming years.
Based on Forbes data, Cari and Dustin have already given away a greater portion of their wealth than any other major living philanthropists their age. But even with their generosity and continued scaling in the coming years, Good Ventures represents a tiny fraction of what’s possible in philanthropy today.
Many more philanthropists are interested in giving at scale. But three-quarters of American billionaires have given away less than 5% of their wealth, and many who have expressed philanthropic intentions aren’t yet on track to meet them. In our conversations with donors, one of the most common reasons cited for not giving more is a lack of confidence in their ability to find outstanding philanthropic opportunities.
This is the problem we’re trying to solve in our next chapter, and we’re off to a strong start. In 2024, we directed over $100 million to high-impact causes from donors besides Good Ventures. In 2025 so far, that has more than doubled, putting our non-Good Ventures work on par with that of some other major philanthropic organizations. We’re aiming to grow that substantially in the coming years.
The rest of this essay covers our theory of why philanthropy is needed at all, why it isn’t an efficient “market” right now, and how we’re trying to fix that in our next chapter.
We believe that markets and governments often leave crucial gaps that philanthropy is structurally well suited to fill:
Historically, some of philanthropy’s greatest wins have come from addressing these market and government failures, like the Rockefeller Foundation’s investment in agricultural R&D leading up to the Green Revolution, which dramatically increased food production in the mid-20th century. This work was a great fit for philanthropy, since the benefits were highly diffuse and primarily accrued to people in low- and middle-income countries.
Despite philanthropy’s comparative advantages, funding rarely flows to the areas with the highest social return. We see several reasons for that:
The big picture result is that philanthropy has enormous potential to make a difference, but philanthropic capital is not systematically allocated to maximize that potential.
We think the most important decision that a philanthropist makes is choosing which causes to fund. Just as different charities within the same field can have vastly different levels of cost-effectiveness, different fields present vastly different opportunities for cost-effective giving.
That’s why we invest substantial effort in comparing causes before committing resources. We evaluate them based on three criteria, which are proxies for our ultimate goal of cost-effectiveness:
We’ve used this framework to identify and fund work across more than a dozen cause areas, ranging from Biosecurity and Pandemic Preparedness to Air Quality to Global Growth.
Once we’ve chosen a cause, we look for the most cost-effective opportunities within it, in terms of expected impact per dollar.
For some causes, there is a natural metric that can be directly observed and used to guide grantmaking decisions. In our work on lead poisoning, for instance, our goal is to reduce population lead levels, which are relatively measurable. But it can take time for policy wins to show up in population statistics, so we often make grant decisions in terms of intermediate metrics (like reducing the prevalence of lead in spices or paint). Across our global health and wellbeing work more broadly, we try to translate between different outcomes so we can assess the expected cost-effectiveness of grants aimed at different goals (e.g. accelerating economic growth, developing a new vaccine, or reducing lead exposure) in apples-to-apples terms and allocate resources accordingly.
For some other causes, the ultimate goals can be sufficiently hard to measure (e.g. a reduction in the probability of global catastrophic risk from bioterrorism) that formal cost-effectiveness analysis at the grant level is less illuminating. In those cases we rely more on strategic prioritization of intermediate goals, qualitative comparisons, and stack ranking to find the most cost-effective opportunities.
Even in areas that are relatively more amenable to quantification, we still rely on the qualitative judgment and experience of our program officers. But trying to estimate expected impact, even roughly, helps us sharpen our understanding of trade-offs and improve our grantmaking over time.
Our original vision was always to make it easier for many donors to give as effectively as possible. That’s why we remained a separate organization from Good Ventures even as we deepened our partnership with them; we knew that once we had enough capacity to support their grantmaking at scale, we wanted to advise others as well.
Our dedicated work with other partners began in earnest with the $125 million Lead Exposure Action Fund in 2024, and continued with the Abundance & Growth Fund, which launched this year with $120 million to accelerate economic growth and boost scientific and technological progress.
Over the last year, we’ve created a formal Partnerships team, now 10 people strong, and begun working more directly with individual philanthropists. That work takes a variety of forms:
Expanding these partnerships is a priority, and a key reason behind our decision to become Coefficient Giving. If you are a funder interested in our approach and looking to give over $250,000 a year, we’d love to talk. Reach us at partnerwithus@coefficientgiving.org.
Case study: reducing lead poisoning globally
Our recently launched Lead Exposure Action Fund is a good example of building partnerships based on strategic cause selection. Lead exposure scored well on all three of our criteria:
- Importance: Around 1 million deaths each year are attributable to lead poisoning, which is similar to the impact of tuberculosis or malaria. And even when it doesn’t lead to death, lead exposure can cause cognitive impairment and other serious health issues.
- Neglectedness: Before LEAF, only $10-15 million in philanthropic funding went toward lead exposure each year — less than 1% of the funding for tuberculosis or malaria (which themselves are globally neglected).
- Tractability: We’ve seen several cases where lead exposure has been addressed very cost-effectively, across multiple sources (especially paint and spices). For example, after a 2019 study found high levels of lead in turmeric in Bangladesh and the Food Safety Authority took action, a follow-up study found that blood lead levels fell by roughly 30%.
With our partners at GiveWell, we had been among the biggest philanthropic funders of efforts to reduce lead exposure in low- and middle-income countries. We saw impressive early signs of traction, which encouraged us to try and expand that work. In parallel, a donor we’d collaborated with before had been exploring giving in the environmental toxins space, independently decided to prioritize lead, and suggested we start a pooled fund. We ultimately brought together twelve philanthropic partners who collectively committed over $125 million to reduce lead poisoning.
As well as advising a growing set of donors directly, we are also continuing to invest in the overall philanthropic ecosystem that is aimed at ensuring that the most impactful opportunities get funded.
Part of this work focuses on supporting the high-impact advisory ecosystem. Our Effective Giving & Careers Fund invests in a global network of groups that promote high-impact giving. We’ve also provided early general operating support to donor advisories like Longview Philanthropy and the P150 community of philanthropic advisors.
We also directly support giving that looks above our cost-effectiveness bar by other funders and regrantors. We’ve funded regranting by organizations like Blueprint Biosecurity and the Humane America Animal Foundation, and contributed to pooled funds like Renaissance Philanthropy’s Talent Mobility Fund and the EPIC Air Quality Fund. We also continue to be major backers of GiveWell, which we believe sets the standard for recommendations on cost-effective and evidence-backed global health giving. Another example of supporting work at other funders was our 2022 Regranting Challenge, which awarded $150 million to organizations like the Gates Foundation, Eleanor Crook Foundation, and Tara Climate Foundation to make grants in promising areas where they had greater expertise. Part of our intention there was to pilot a mechanism to improve philanthropic feedback loops and ensure that the most effective funders would end up with more resources to allocate.
By working with a wider range of funders ourselves and bolstering the broader ecosystem of cost-effective giving, we’re aiming to help make the whole philanthropic “market” more efficient and ensure that resources flow where they can help others the most.
Over our first decade as Open Philanthropy, we learned a lot about how to give effectively, refined our approach, and built a strong team.
In our next decade as Coefficient Giving, we are focused on scaling our impact to make the philanthropic market more efficient. We’re incredibly excited about what more effective philanthropic capital could unlock: new vaccines for some of the world’s deadliest diseases, intelligent navigation of rapid AI progress, faster economic growth around the world, and meaningful reductions in animal suffering.
I’m extremely grateful to my colleagues and to the donors and grantees who have made this new chapter possible. They’ve set us up to deliver far more impact in our second decade than in our first. I can’t wait to see what we accomplish together.
A coefficient multiplies the value of whatever it’s paired with, just as we aim to amplify impact through our research, grantmaking, and partnerships. We knew that any name would take some getting used to, but this one captured something essential about our work.
