Reflecting on our Recent Effective Careers RFP

Reflections from the Effective Giving & Careers team.

Earlier this year we ran our first open call for the effective careers side of our work — a request for proposals from organizations that help people move into high-impact careers. We’re excited to share the results: We’re awarding $13,075,301 in grants to 28 organizations via the Effective Giving & Careers Fund, and several other Coefficient Giving funds expect to fund up to 16 more.

That ~$13 million is well above the ~$5 million we originally estimated, which reflects both the volume and the quality of applications. The RFP drew 474 applications. From that pool, 111 organizations advanced to a more in-depth second-stage review, either with us or with a partner team. Weighting each grant’s modeled social return on investment by its funding amount gives a mean of roughly 5,500x — though these are early, uncertain estimates.

Who’s receiving funding

These are some of the organizations that were awarded grants, grouped by their primary function (although most of them do more than one thing). Each grant works to transition more people into high-social-impact work across cause areas like global health and economic development, farm animal welfare, global catastrophic risks, and climate, and each takes a rigorous approach to using evidence, reasoning, and cost-effectiveness analysis in aiding these transitions.

Fellowships and structured placements:

• School for Moral Ambition (University Fellowship): An undergraduate fellowship that helps place students at high-impact organizations, anchored by a paid summer placement 
• World Bank Government Analytics Fellowship: A hybrid fellowship that trains government managers and analysts, primarily in low- and middle-income countries, to use data to improve real policy and reform decisions in their own institutions
• Johns Hopkins PAVE: A vaccine-training program that places graduate students into internships at global health institutions such as WHO, Gavi, UNICEF, and PAHO
• University of York (Thanzi Studentships): Funds African professionals to complete a remote, part-time M.Sc. in Health Economics at the University of York’s Centre for Health Economics
• CEGA (Center for Effective Global Action) Global Networks Fellowship: A UC Berkeley talent program for scholars from sub-Saharan Africa, now adding a policy track for people in or moving toward government, think-tank, and policy-institution roles
• Health Progress Hub: Connects qualified professionals in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia with evidence-based global health organizations that are looking to hire, through recruitment support and fellowship tracks
• ODI Fellowship: ODI places early-career economists into government institutions across low- and middle-income countries; this grant supports an effort to measure the program’s long-term career and institutional impact

Incubators and accelerators:

• The Agency Fund: Embeds senior technical talent into Global South nonprofits to build their data and technology capacity, while moving experienced technologists into impact-focused work
• LabSocial: A Latin America–based incubator that trains mid-career professionals to design and launch cost-effective new organizations; this grant supports its scale-up, including an expansion into Brazil and new social for-profit and policy entrepreneurship work
• Kickstarting for Good: An incubator, funded to run an accelerator for early-stage high-impact organizations and a podcast recruiting entrepreneurial talent

Talent-matching and career advising:

• Escape the City (Impact Matching Platform and Podcast): A long-running U.K. career-change platform for mid-to-senior professionals from consulting, finance, and tech — building tools and programs to connect them with high-impact roles
• Pivot to Good: A new initiative helping mid-to-senior corporate professionals move into high-impact careers through a podcast and a professional network that routes candidates to established programs
• Tech Safari (Building Back Home program): Channels African diaspora professionals toward high-impact work on the continent through a community, a podcast, and a curated jobs board
• Jewish Social Impact (JSI): Channels American Jews toward higher-impact careers and giving through a fellowship, one-on-one advising, and writing
• Scale Wise: Brings experienced mid-career professionals into impact-first roles and advises organizations scaling their work across Africa and Asia 
• Netherlands Effective Environmentalism Initiative: Advises aspiring climate professionals toward the most neglected, high-leverage areas of climate work, and helps other career advisors do the same
• South Asian Effective Careers: An India-based careers platform offering high-quality one-on-one advising and mapping high-impact organizations across the region

Media and advocacy: 

• Government Works: A newsletter and jobs resource for careers in government and public service, with an editorial focus on state-capacity and systems-change work
• Who Let the Docs Out: Supports impact-documentary filmmakers with production grants and mentorship; this grant funds a student track focused on animal-protection topics
• Class Action Network: Advocacy and organizing grant working to increase visibility of high-impact career paths

Competitions:

• The Giving Pitch: A university pitch competition in which students compete to recommend grants to effective charities, designed to introduce finance- and consulting-track students to high-impact philanthropy
• Hack the Fork: Runs hackathons at elite institutions that incubate alternative-protein projects and surface talent for animal welfare work

The most common grants were to EA-affiliated career advising programs and high-impact fellowship programs in Sweden, France, Israel, Norway, Estonia, and Poland. These were explicitly evaluated by how many high-impact career transitions could be facilitated per unit of budget cost, and measured against our bar.

What we funded, and what we learned

A few patterns stand out. While EA-affiliated career advising programs are the most common by count, most of the total funding went to fellowships and structured placements. Incubators and accelerators account for a meaningful share, and the rest spans media, coaching, competitions, and one advocacy grant. 

Of the 28 grants, 13 are cause-neutral, supporting high-impact transitions across our priority areas. The other 15 overlap strongly with one or two specific cause areas, with global health and development the heaviest concentration. We set out to focus on mid-career and senior professionals (much existing infrastructure skews toward students), and on LMIC talent pipelines, where many high-impact organizations operate but career infrastructure remains thin. The bigger surprise was about the ecosystem itself. We estimated a 25% chance we’d receive more than 40 applications; we got almost 500. We also came in assuming we’d fund far fewer proposals and give away considerably less money.

This indicates that we systematically underestimated both the size and the quality of the effective-careers space. We also mispredicted its shape: We expected most fundable applications to look like EA career-transition programs, and while we did receive many of those, many of the strongest opportunities came from impact-focused organizations well outside the EA network — several of which were not previously on our radar. 

Based on our cost-effectiveness estimates for about 85% of the recommended grants, weighted by funding, every dollar invested is expected to create about $5,500 of social benefit. (Read more on our framework for calculating social return on investment.) The numbers look strong, but they are early and uncertain. Relatedly, we saw a wide range of how applicants monitor their outcomes, and we’re considering an internal project to help set and share clearer standards. 

Looking ahead

We are considering another Effective Careers RFP next year. For a future call, we’d cast a wider net — promoting through development, policy, public health, and academic channels. We may consider a dedicated incubation/acceleration track and a small-grants track for nascent efforts. 

As always, the credit belongs to the organizations doing the work. We’re grateful to everyone who applied, and we’ll aim to share more as we learn how these grants play out.