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Grace Adams

September Newsletter 2022

September Newsletter Summary | Giving What We Can

Thank you for being a part of our growing community.

Every month, our community grows and it warms our hearts. Since the 1st of September, we’ve had 186 people take a new pledge with us and over 4000 people make a donation!

When someone takes a pledge with us, they are asked to write down what motivated them to pledge, and we wanted to share a few of our favourites from September:

“... because I want to help other people and improve the quality of life on earth.”

“I consider it every able person’s duty to do what they can to leave the world a better place for all.”

“I want to dedicate my life to promoting the happiness and well-being of other beings.”

“My main motivation in life is to minimize suffering. It is the value I hold the highest.”

“I want to do more good, and I know I can.”

Knowing that there are thousands of people who are taking lifelong action to help others, especially those they will never meet, is a wonderful thing.


Get us to talk at your workplace or community group!

Many people start thinking about how to give back towards the end of the year. If you’d like us to host a talk or workshop at your workplace or with your community group about effective giving over the coming months,

! We are excited to share the ideas of effective giving with new people and have found talks and workshops to be impactful.

There’s lots of interesting news, content from Giving What We Can and events to attend in the rest of our newsletter down below!

-Grace Adams & the rest of the Giving What We Can team

Many of our Giving What We Can Pledge members have received their Pledge Pins and have been wearing them out and about. Here’s one of our early members José Oliveira wearing his pin!

This month, join us for a discussion on our co-founder Will MacAskill’s new book, 

. Bring your questions and thoughts on the book and chat with other community members.

 (New York: 6:00 pm; San Francisco: 3:00 pm, Sydney: Sun, Oct. 9, 9:00 am, Auckland: Sun, Oct. 9, 11:00 am)

 (London: 9:30 am, Munich: 10:30 am, Mumbai: 2:00 pm, Singapore: 4:30 pm)

Our open forum is an event where you can come along with questions about effective giving and/or to meet others interested in effective giving. This event alternates between Europe/Asia and Americas/Oceania each month.


 (London: 12:00 pm, Munich: 1:00 pm, Mumbai: 4:30 pm, Singapore: 7:00 pm)

 - Alana Horowitz Friedman, contributing writer

Announcement: Renaming of legal entity to Effective Ventures Foundation

Rutger Bregman on Effective Giving: Highlights from an Interview with Effektiv Spenden

What is counterfactual thinking and why should you care about it?

You can prevent animal suffering. Here’s how.

Don’t make these 10 mistakes when trying to improve the world

: Dr. Michael Noetel, High Performance Psychologist - 

Using research & strategic thinking to help animals effectively

: Interview with Neil Dullaghan, Senior Researcher at Rethink Priorities - 

Find audio-only versions of new YouTube content on the 

You can prevent animal suffering. Here’s how

Caring about the future doesn’t mean ignoring the present

: Kelsey Piper argues that perceived “trade-offs' ' between longtermism and present-day global health interventions are blown out of proportion.

Oxford’s Andreas Mogensen, an effective altruist who rejects consequentialism,  makes a deontological case for effective giving (and the GWWC pledge!) in this 

 starting the week of October 9th “that explores the core ideas of effective altruism and their relation to Jewish tradition, texts, culture, and history.” 

Easy EMDR, a company offering “all-in-one solutions” for mental health practitioners specialising in trauma, has published a blog post — 

Fighting Global Trauma with Effective Altruism

 — about its commitment to effective giving.

 (HIP) has recently shown how running a corporate fundraising campaign at your workplace can be a 

highly effective way to multiply your impact

 summarises results from and reasoning behind GWWC and EA Market Testing Team’s exploratory marketing messages trial, which aimed to compare the effectiveness of different messaging approaches during GWWC’s Giving Guide campaign.

What we’re learning about spreading EA ideas

: GWWC Head of Marketing Grace Adams speaks at EAGxOxford.

Our very own Luke Freeman (GWWC Executive Director) has written 

 about funding constraints within effective altruism.

GiveWell’s (formerly-named) “Maximum Impact Fund” will now be called the “Top Charities Fund”; GiveWell explains the name change in this 

 to solicit critiques of its cost-effectiveness analyses that could improve its allocations. Entries are due by October 31st.

welcomes Stien van der Ploeg as its new Executive Director

; she will assume the role in early October.

 process, which solicited suggestions for new cause areas to support and awarded prizes to particularly compelling entries.

Founders Pledge has published an article about its approach to comparing funding opportunities in global health and wellbeing: 

Measuring Health: How We Use (And Sometimes Don’t Use) DALY Estimates

Executive Assistant to support its Biosecurity and Pandemic Preparedness team

Programs Operation Assistant to support its Global Health and Wellbeing team

Grants Associate focused on longtermist grantmaking

 to support other operations staff and help ensure the smooth functioning of the office. It is still seeking candidates for its open 

 (focusing on barriers and supports for new vegans/vegetarians) in its longitudinal study.

 that will use thermal imaging to study the relationship of body temperature to stress signals and energy reserves in young birds.

The Humane League reports on significant corporate cage-free progress:

After a worldwide Open Wing Alliance campaign, Toridoll Holdings Corporation released a “first of its kind”

, which the Humane League reports will “directly improve the lives of 40,000 egg-laying hens by the end of 2023 in Japan alone.”

 has renewed its commitment to go cage-free.

 Former UK International Development Secretary Rory Stewart as President/CEO and is planning an ambitious program scale-up.

: Dylan Matthews discusses the growth of GiveDirectly, how its cash transfer model has helped change the charitable giving landscape, and what’s coming next under Stewart’s leadership.

 on the R21 malaria vaccine’s impressive 

: In an article for Jacobin magazine, Garrison Lovely explains why he sees longtermism as “perfectly compatible with a socialist worldview.”

 a newly updated report showing that 14 million people are at increased risk of cancer due to toxic oil and gas emissions in the U.S. CATF also discusses 

 on a new global steel standard which it believes will help decarbonise the industry.

 a collaboration with Microsoft that will aim to “decarbonise coal facilities with nuclear power,” “repurposing over 2,400 coal-fired power plants worldwide to run on carbon-free energy.”

The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security is 

 for its Health Security track PhD program (2023-2024 academic year). Full funding is available.

Don't make these 10 mistakes when try to improve the world

 by setting up a recurring donation to a highly-effective charity today! 

 to help grow our community and multiply your impact.

Alana Horowitz Friedman

Should charity begin at home?

Examining the impulse to give locally helps us better understand 

A principle tenet of effective giving is that your money can often do more good when you donate it to the world’s poorest places. For example, Will MacAskill, a co-founder of effective altruism and Giving What We Can, estimates that your money will 

to “benefit the extreme poor” than to “benefit typical citizens of the United States” (MacAskill 22) due to 

the stark income differences between lower and higher income countries.

 And the charity evaluator GiveWell agrees that 

each dollar has more power when donated internationally

Yet this analysis is sometimes met with resistance, with questions like: 

Shouldn’t you help out members of your own community first? 

Don’t you have a special obligation to the people near you?

It’s understandable that some of us may feel a strong pull to give locally. After all, while higher-income countries don’t face poverty on the same scale as lower-income countries (in which it’s far more extreme, and far deadlier)

 there is no shortage of suffering, inequality, and illness in high-income countries. And these are the problems that are right in front of our eyes; we may even know people affected by them.

But I think it’s worth more closely examining the idea that our obligations to people in need change based on our proximity to them. Where does this pull towards giving locally come from? How do we weigh it against the desire to maximise our impact and do the most good we can? Is there room for both types of giving within the effective altruism framework? These are some of the questions I’d like to explore.

The pull to prioritize giving locally: evolutionary explanations

For much of history, our world was limited to those who were in the same location as us. Humans have been living in permanent settlements since the Agricultural Revolution, which happened a little more than 12,000 years ago. While the jury is out as to 

, many place it around the time of Columbus’s voyage to America (only about 530 years ago), and others date it much later, starting in the 1800s or even after World War II! (Of course, some also date it earlier, but National Geographic 

 “the most well-known early example” of globalization to be the Silk Road, which still dates to less than 3,000 years ago.)

So it seems likely that for the vast majority of our time living in communities, we certainly didn’t know much about what was going on outside our local bubbles. 

And even when we started to, we couldn’t do much about it. 

Only very recently have we developed the infrastructure to effect change in other parts of the world

. Thus, our acts of “doing good” were limited to helping out those in our immediate surroundings. Since this limitation was lifted only fairly recently, it’s unsurprising that our moral impulses (

which likely have at least some basis in evolution

) may still be lagging behind.

Now that we 

 help those in other countries, however, there’s a very good case for doing so. In fact, according to an 

 from The Lancet, it would cost about $9 billion to provide “full coverage of basic WASH and waste services [clean water, sanitation, hygiene, and waste management] in existing public health facilities in the 46 UN designated least developed countries.” That’s under 2% of the 

 Americans donated to charity in 2021. Directing money to high-impact causes abroad can do a tremendous amount of good.  

The pull to prioritize giving locally: psychological explanations

If we are evolutionarily primed to prefer giving locally, though, then why do international disasters strike our moral chords so intensely? In other words, why are many so motivated to give internationally after disasters, but not motivated to fund organizations increasing stability in lower-income countries in non-disaster times? Perhaps we need to examine this disconnect further.

It seems likely that we are more emotionally affected by the unexpected, especially when the unexpected shakes our personal sense of safety.

 This “surprise factor,” along with the sense of urgency and magnitude created by extensive media coverage, perhaps explains why events like the war in Ukraine, Hurricane Maria’s devastation of Puerto Rico, the massive earthquakes in Haiti and Japan about a decade ago, and similarly brutal international disasters often motivate substantial influxes of donations from around the world.

In contrast, extreme poverty in low-income countries is a 

 problem. It falls within our paradigm of “normal,” and as such, does not trigger the same type of emotional response (though it should, if we really think about the fact that 

thousands needlessly die every day from preventable causes

, just because of where they happened to be born.)

I would argue that our response to international disasters underscores that we 

feel a sense of compassion and responsibility

for those outside of our local communities; it’s just that for some, it can take a shock to the system (and/or the sense of extreme urgency/magnitude facilitated by media coverage) to access that compassion.

When we understand how our psychology works (and that it isn’t always rational), perhaps we’ll be more equipped to extend our compassion to people who aren’t experiencing suffering and risks to their health and safety because of an 

 disaster, but rather on an everyday basis — simply due to a lack of funding for global health and development where they happen to live. 

It is, in a sense, a disaster of the largest scale that the suffering in certain areas of the world is often thought of as “par for the course” when 

many of us are actually in a pretty good position to prevent it

Cosmopolitanism: What does “local” mean, anyway?

Another way to challenge this preference for helping out your “own” community first is to expand the definition of what your “own” community is.

Blog

September Newsletter 2022

Should charity begin at home?

Member Profile: Fernando Martin-Gullans

Announcement: Renaming of legal entity to Effective Ventures Foundation

Rutger Bregman on Effective Giving: Interview with Effektiv Spenden

What is counterfactual thinking and why should you care about it?

August Newsletter 2022

Update to our recommended Global Health and Development charities

Joey Savoie: Making it easier for great charities to exist

Using expected value when donating to charity — and day-to-day