CharitiesFounders Pledge: Patient Philanthropy Fund
Founders Pledge: Patient Philanthropy Fund
Fund

Founders Pledge

Patient Philanthropy Fund

The Patient Philanthropy Fund seeks to grow the available resources to reduce existential risk by acting as an "emergency fund" for safeguarding the long-term future of humanity -- investing contributions and waiting to deploy them until exceptional opportunities appear and funds are needed most.

Reducing global catastrophic risks
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What problem is the Patient Philanthropy Fund working on?

The Patient Philanthropy Fund takes a patient approach to philanthropy: it invests contributions until the time is optimal for it to make large grants aimed at improving the long-term future.

In addition to identifying the highest-impact giving opportunities at any particular point in time, it aims to identify the point in time when the highest-impact opportunities are available — which may be years, decades, or even centuries ahead.

What projects does the Patient Philanthropy Fund support?

The Fund is currently incubated as a special trust within Founders Pledge Ltd (their UK entity). It is managed by a committee consisting of purpose-aligned experts on timing of giving. Its aim is to further develop and grow the Fund over the coming 10 years and eventually spin it out as a separate charitable entity.

Small grants are made each year (less than 1% of the Fund’s size) to build up its grant-making infrastructure and track record.

Recent past recipients of grants from the Patient Philanthropy Fund include:

  • Centre for Long-Term Resilience - to develop effective UK policy to mitigate extreme risks from AI and Biotechnology
  • Emerging Challenges Fund - to help strengthen the knowledge and opportunities around reducing existential risks and protecting the future.
  • Peace and Security Funders Group Executive Director Alex Toma - funding expert analysis to help better understand the changing nuclear funding landscape following MacArthur’s exit.

See the Fund webpage for more information about the giving strategy, the latest annual Fund report, and plans for the future.

Unsure how a fund is different from a charity? See our page about why we recommend donors give to funds.

What information does Giving What We Can have about the cost-effectiveness of the Patient Philanthropy Fund?1.

We previously included the Patient Philanthropy Fund on our list of recommendations because it is managed by the impact-focused evaluator Founders Pledge. We’ve since updated our recommendations to reflect only organisations recommended by evaluators we’ve looked into as part of our evaluator investigations and chosen to rely on; as such, we don't currently include the Patient Philanthropy Fund as one of our recommended programs but you can still donate to it via our donation platform.

Please note that GWWC does not evaluate individual charities. Our recommendations are based on the research of third-party, impact-focused charity evaluators our research team has found to be particularly well-suited to help donors do the most good per dollar, according to their recent evaluator investigations. Our other supported programs are those that align with our charitable purpose — they are working on a high-impact problem and take a reasonably promising approach (based on publicly-available information).

At Giving What We Can, we focus on the effectiveness of an organisation's work -- what the organisation is actually doing and whether their programs are making a big difference. Some others in the charity recommendation space focus instead on the ratio of admin costs to program spending, part of what we’ve termed the “overhead myth.” See why overhead isn’t the full story and learn more about our approach to charity evaluation.