Sam Deere

Our largest trust payout yet — 77 malaria deaths prevented, food for thousands fortified, 100 people’s incomes doubled, and a quarter of a million children dewormed!

More than half a million pounds moved to top charities in Q1 2016

We’re really excited to announce our largest quarterly payout to our top charities ever. In the first quarter of 2016 Giving What We Can members, supporters, and our broader community donated more than 

77 malaria deaths prevented, food for thousands fortified, 100 people’s incomes doubled, and a quarter of a million children dewormed

 and other highly effective organisations , including:

 (≈US$220,942.00) to the Against Malaria Foundation, which is enough to distribute 41,608 

. Even though there is substantial uncertainty around these estimates, 

 that this might prevent 77 deaths of under 5 year olds in expectation.

 (≈US$142,168.15) to the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative and £82,382.68 (≈$119,430.17) to Deworm the World Initiative, which together will help to deworm around 262,100 children from parasitic worm infections.

 (≈US$113,343.36) to Project Healthy Children, which will support developing countries to incorporate micronutrient fortification into their food supply chains. Project Healthy Children is one of our ‘promising charities’ which means that it’s hard to quantify their impact with certainty, but we think it’s likely to have a very high impact, as potentially hundreds of thousands of people will consume staple foods like flour and oil that are fortified with vitamins and minerals.

 (≈$US 122,018.13) to GiveDirectly, of which 84.5%, or $103,105, will be transferred directly to the very poor, with the rest going to support their continuing monitoring and evaluation projects. This means that around 100 of the poorest people in Kenya and Uganda – people who live on less $1.90 a day now, will now be much more food secure and will have greater opportunity to invest in their futures by buying assets such as animals and iron roofs.

 to other highly effective charities, including Innovations for Poverty Action, Development Media International, and Iodine Global Network.

These figures don’t include donations by members made directly to top charities, or through partners like Transnational Giving Europe. As the chart below shows, most donations were from people coming to the Trust directly from our website, with a significant minority referred from GiveWell, payroll giving sources, or directly from a recipient charity.

It’s also very cool that about 63% of these donations are being made by non-members, which means we’re not just reaching people who have already taken the pledge, but are seeing members of the wider community taking the opportunity to donate more effectively too.

Thanks everyone who’s contributed to the efforts of some of the most effective charities in the world — here’s to Q2 being even bigger!

More info about the Giving What We Can Trust

Our Trust is a convenient way to support several highly-effective charities at once, and you don’t have to be a Giving What We Can member to use it. Because the Trust is a registered charity in the UK, donors can claim Gift Aid on donations to it — including those designated to overseas-based charities like Project Healthy Children, GiveDirectly, or Innovations for Poverty Action.

Here’s the full list of the highly effective charities you can support by donating to the Trust:

, and you can make both one-off or recurring donations. For more information, check out the 

If you don’t live in the United Kingdom you can still use the Trust, but your donation won’t be tax deductible. See our 

Together, Giving What We Can members are making a huge difference — if you’d like to join us, why not 

If you think that altruism, equality, and helping more people rather than fewer are all important values, then you're probably on board with effective altruism.

Four Ideas You Already Agree With (That Mean You're Probably on Board with Effective Altruism)

Here are four ideas that you probably already agree with. Three are about your values, and one is an observation about the world. Individually, they each might seem a bit trite or self-evident. But taken together, they have significant implications for how we think about doing good in the world.

 — when people are in need and we can help them, we think that we should. Sometimes we think it might even be morally required: most people think that millionaires should give something back. But it may surprise you to learn that those of us on or above the median wage in a rich country are 

 — maybe we can also afford to give back too.

 — everyone has an equal claim to being happy, healthy, fulfilled and 

, whatever their circumstances. All people matter, wherever they live, however rich they are, and whatever their ethnicity, age, gender, ability, religious views, etc.

 — all else being equal, we should save more lives, help people live longer, and make more people happier. Imagine twenty sick people lining a hospital ward, who’ll die if you don’t give them medicine. You have enough medicine for everyone, and no reason to hold onto it for later: would anyone really choose to arbitrarily save only 

 of the people if it was just as easy to save 

 — even millionaires have a finite amount of money they can spend. This is also true of our time — there are never enough hours in the day. Choosing to spend money or time on one option is an implicit choice 

 (whether we think about these options or not).

I think that these four ideas are all pretty uncontroversial. I think it seems pretty intuitive that we should help people in need if we can; that we shouldn’t arbitrarily preference some groups of people over others; that we would prefer to help more people if given the option; and that we don’t have infinite time and money.

In fact I’d go further — I’d say that we’d feel pretty uncomfortable trying to 

Helping others in need isn’t morally required, important, or even that good

It’s OK to value people differently based on arbitrary differences like race, gender, ability etc.

It doesn’t matter if some people die even if it doesn’t really cost us anything extra to save their lives

We don't have infinite money, so we always need to choose which worthy cause to support.

So if we agree that these four ideas embody important values — and I think that they do — then there are big implications for how we should think about doing good. In fact, it means that the way we typically think about doing good is wrong.

In order to be true to these values, we need to think about how we can help the most people with our limited resources.

 where we can make a big impact for a small amount of money. In fact the best options are 

 — sometimes hundreds of times better. That might mean the difference between helping one person, and helping hundreds of people 

for exactly the same amount of time or money

is almost certainly not making as big an impact as the 

 (and let’s face it, many causes we choose to support tend to be the result of either random chance, or systemic factors that mean we’re only exposed to certain causes).

And this matters, because if we don’t choose well, then we’re either not giving people equal consideration (that is, implicitly discriminating against some groups of people), or we’re not helping as many people as we can (that is, allowing extra people to suffer or die, even though we could potentially help them).

So, at first, every worthy cause — from cancer research, to climate justice, to animal sanctuaries, to preventing 

 diseases in places that we'll probably never visit — should be on the table... 

 that we also think it's better to help more people and we understand that we don’t have the resources to help everyone. So we should first focus on the causes where we can help the most people for our limited time and money, 

not just on those that we happen to have already heard about

Women in Uganda holding bales of insecticide-treated bednets provided by the 

Trying to be cause-neutral can be a really hard thing to do. Most people have first-hand experience of loss: I’ve lost two relatives to leukaemia; watched as the disease consumed their bodies and the pain meds fogged their minds; lived through the shared grief of their passing. It’s entirely reasonable that this makes us want to donate to organisations trying to solve the specific problem or cure the particular disease that has robbed us of our loved ones. We’re empathetic creatures, and we don’t want other people to experience the same suffering, or for their loved ones to experience the same grief.

 equally, we should also care about treating their experiences equally. There’s not a really good reason that I should prefer averting the death, disability, and suffering caused by a particular disease (like leukaemia) any more than I should care about suffering caused by malaria, tuberculosis, traffic accidents, or anything else. What matters is that lives are cut short, parents are deprived of their children, people are living in pain. Caring about equality means treating 

 death and suffering as a tragedy, not just that caused by specific diseases that we — by cruel twists of fate that thrust them into our field of view — happen to notice.

Making these decisions is really, really hard. But there is a set of thinking tools we can use to help us. This way of thinking is called 

. It's basically the same as regular altruism (in that it emphasises the importance of helping other people) — the word 'effective' just means trying to think clearly about how your actions can help the 

I see effective altruism as a way of being able to better live up to 

This way of thinking is applicable to any way that we might want to do good — whether that be agitating for political change, choosing where we donate our money, or how to have a big impact with our careers.

In a world where there are so many worthy causes we could work on, it gives us a way out of decision paralysis, by systematically looking for ways to do the most good with our limited time and money.

It asks us to face up to some hard choices. But remember, we’re making these choices anyway, whether we think about them or not. So even though it might be hard to not donate to something that seems really important — whether for personal reasons, or because you’re convinced by a charity’s marketing pitch — remember that you’re always trading off against other worthy causes.

Here’s an example of this in action. The typical person in the UK donates around £6,700 ($9,600USD)

 over the course of their working lifetimes. For this money we could fund the distribution of 

 (likely preventing around 200children from becoming really, really sick from malaria

). However, most voluntary donations go to domestic medical charities

. The UK’s National Health Service considers it good value to save one 

. It’s highly unlikely that a domestic charity will beat this figure, so the typical donor’s impact is going to be many, many times less than it could otherwise be. Remember, 

just because we don’t think about these choices, doesn’t mean that they’re not there.

So please, think carefully about these ideas — the importance of altruism, equality, and doing as much as we can with our scarce resources — and see if they make sense to you.

If they do, then the next time you think about how to make the world a better place, give voice to these values by thinking 

Some resources for learning more about effective altruism:

Some actions you can take that we think are really effective

 to a charity recommended on the basis of its impact and cost-effectiveness — check out our 

. If you’d like to support charities that increase the welfare of non-human animals effectively, check out 

 to keep donating over the course of your lifetime — 

 people (and counting) have pledged to donate 10% of their lifetime income to the most effective charities, and 

 have made pledges of 1% or more of their income for a custom period.

Choose a career that’s really high-impact by reading career advice from 

 in your local area or at your university, and get other people interested in making a bigger difference

Sam is the Head of Technology for EA Funds and the former Technical Director of Giving What We Can. He has previously worked in policy and communications roles for several high-profile Australian politicians and was part of the team that won the ‘unwinnable’ 2014 South Australian state election. He studied Politics and History at the University of Adelaide, and has nearly a decade of experience as a web developer. While no longer working in politics, Sam takes a strong interest in global politics and policymaking, and is also a keen photographer.

Sam Deere

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More than half a million pounds moved to top charities in Q1 2016

Four Ideas You Already Agree With (That Mean You're Probably on Board with Effective Altruism)