Philanthropists tend to choose causes based on personal experience, geographic proximity, or emotional appeal. This approach is understandable — personal connection is what motivates many people to give in the first place. But some causes offer far greater opportunities for impact than others: the same donation might save ten lives in one place but a thousand in another.
One of our core values is our tolerance for philanthropic risk. We’ve seen that the biggest philanthropic wins often come from ideas that seem unlikely to succeed, so we’re open to funding a lot of work that could fail in order to find a few transformative successes.
When choosing which causes to support, we face difficult moral and empirical questions without clear "right" answers. To address this uncertainty, we divide resources across several broad approaches to doing good, each grounded in a different worldview.
In 2019, we wrote a blog post about how we think about the "bar" for our giving and how we compare different kinds of interventions to each other using back-of-the-envelope calculations, all within the realm of what we now call Global Health and Wellbeing (GHW). This post updates that one and: Explains how we previously…
Editor’s note: This article was published under our former name, Open Philanthropy. Some content may be outdated. You can see our latest writing here. How accurate do long-range (≥10yr) forecasts tend to be, and how much should we rely on them? As an initial exploration of this question, I sought...
Editor’s note: This article was published under our former name, Open Philanthropy. Some content may be outdated. You can see our latest writing here. Although we have typically emphasized the importance for effective philanthropy of long-term commitment to causes and getting the right people in place, the most obvious day-to-day...
Editor’s note: This article was published under our former name, Open Philanthropy. Some content may be outdated. You can see our latest writing here. Our thinking on prioritizing across different causes has evolved as we’ve made more grants. This post explores one aspect of that: the high bar set by...
Editor’s note: This article was published under our former name, The Open Philanthropy Project. Some content may be outdated. You can see our latest writing here. Holden Karnofsky is a co-founder and the former CEO of Open Philanthropy. He left Open Philanthropy in April 2024. One of the challenges of large-scale philanthropy...
As part of our research on the history of philanthropy, I recently investigated several case studies of early field growth, especially those in which philanthropists purposely tried to grow the size and impact of a (typically) young and small field of research or advocacy.
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