Disclosure: I made a $1000 unrestricted donation to Givewell in June 2014.
Givewell’s donation portal allows you to donate to any of their three currently top recommended charities, or to donate to Givewell directly. If donating to Givewell directly one of two things can happen.
i) You make a donation which restricts Givewell to allotting that money to one of it’s top recommended charities as it sees fit to have the financial needs of those organizations met.
ii) You make an unrestricted donation, which allows Givewell to use your donation to support its own operating cost. Since Givewell apparently receives sufficient funding to do their typical work, your donation, i.e., the marginal dollar, effectively funds the Open Philanthropy Project, formerly Givewell Labs. This is Givewell’s joint investigative research venture with Good Ventures, a foundation worth hundreds of millions of dollars; their research right now is into global catastrophic risks, policy reform, and improving scientific research. This is the ambitious research the rationality community looks forward toward, and was profiled as such by Holden Karnofsky at the 2014 Effective Altruism Summit.
Disclosure: I made a $1000 unrestricted donation to Givewell in June 2014.
Givewell’s donation portal allows you to donate to any of their three currently top recommended charities, or to donate to Givewell directly. If donating to Givewell directly one of two things can happen.
i) You make a donation which restricts Givewell to allotting that money to one of it’s top recommended charities as it sees fit to have the financial needs of those organizations met.
ii) You make an unrestricted donation, which allows Givewell to use your donation to support its own operating cost. Since Givewell apparently receives sufficient funding to do their typical work, your donation, i.e., the marginal dollar, effectively funds the Open Philanthropy Project, formerly Givewell Labs. This is Givewell’s joint investigative research venture with Good Ventures, a foundation worth hundreds of millions of dollars; their research right now is into global catastrophic risks, policy reform, and improving scientific research. This is the ambitious research the rationality community looks forward toward, and was profiled as such by Holden Karnofsky at the 2014 Effective Altruism Summit.