Bring Your Laptops and Come Research Local Charities

Meet inside The Shops at Waterloo Town Square—we will congregate in the indoor seating area next to the Your Independent Grocer with the trees sticking out in the middle of the benches (pic) at 7:00 pm for 15 minutes, and then head over to my nearby apartment’s amenity room. If you’ve been around a few times, feel free to meet up at the front door of the apartment at 7:30 instead.

Topic

This week, come with your laptops! I will be giving a very fast crash course on basic charity evaluation as someone whos worked at a few nonprofits and am currently working at one. Then we’ll be evaluating some local nonprofits in (at least some of) the following categories:

Poverty Reduction
Climate Change
Animal Welfare
Health and Medicine
Housing and Homelessness
Women and Minority Group Advocacy
Longtermist Causes

Why are we doing this?

I remember a lot of DIY spirit in the early EA days—the idea that people in the community are smart and capable of thinking about charities and evaluating them, by themselves or with their friends or social groups. Nowadays the community has more professional and specialized programs and organizations for that, which is very much a positive, but I feel like has consequently led to some learned helplessness for those not in those organizations.^[1] I would like to rectify this.
In my view, the fact that EAs have cause areas at all is downstream of lack of capacity; if it was free to do it would be ideal for every single charity in the world to have undergone some amount of EA analysis.
Giving season is coming up and:
- I think there is a large contingent of people who only give to local causes, and their donations should be considered non-fungible with EA cause areas.
- At the same time, they also deserve good information on which charities are better to donate to than others.
We get to practice doing something cool and useful and hard and collaborative.

Readings

Useful Vices for Wicked Problems—Holden Karnofsky, 2022.
(In case you are unaware, Holden is the guy that co-founded Givewell in 2007, and OpenPhilanthropy in 2017.)

Optional Further Readings

The Wicked Problem Experience—Holden Karnofsky, 2022

Truthseeking is the ground in which other principles grow—Elizabeth, 2024

^
if this sounds familiar it’s because it’s from my 2023 post on my annual charitable donations.