About us
Best known for the 🔸10% Pledge, we’re building a global community of people who care about doing what they can to help others.
What we do
Giving What We Can is working to create a world where giving effectively and significantly is a cultural norm. We carry out our mission in three main ways:
- Education & outreach about the vast differences in efficacy among charities and how to choose vetted & incredibly impactful options that do a LOT with even small donations
- A donation platform that facilitates tax-deductible donations to impactful programs in many different locations
- Public giving pledges that aim to change charitable norms — empowering average people in high-income countries to act on the incredible opportunity they have to make a concrete difference in the world.
In brief, we are a resource hub, community, and force for change. We’re best known for the 🔸10% Pledge, through which over 9,000 people have committed to giving at least 10% of their income to the most effective charities, helping inspire those who can afford it to give what we can to help others. We also leverage thousands of hours of research to help donors find the highest-impact problems and identify the best charities working to solve them, because we believe everyone can make a difference through effective philanthropy. Our community has already donated almost $400 million USD.
Above: A few members of our community at an event. We currently have over 10,000 members from around the world — 9’451 who have taken the 10% Pledge and 1’008 who have taken a Trial Pledge.
We're changing the norms around charitable giving
We believe giving should be
Effective
We empower people to make more informed decisions about where to donate — so they can have a bigger impact.
Normal
We imagine a world where it’s normal for those who can afford it to share some of their resources with others.
Public
We encourage people to talk about their giving. Giving publicly helps create a social norm by inspiring others.
We're creating a resource hub for people who want to make a difference
Whether you’re looking for the best charities to donate to, doing deeper research into how to choose charities and causes, pledging a portion of your income or wealth to highly effective charities, or learning about the key principles of effective giving (and how your donations can achieve real change), our effective giving resources and guides are here to help. In addition to our research team's recommendations, we also offer a donation platform with a variety of programs working in high-impact areas. (See how we decide what to include.)
We’re building a global community of effective givers
9’451 people around the world have taken the 🔸10% Pledge, a public commitment to give at least 10% of income to whichever organisations can most effectively use it to improve the lives of others. 1’008 have an active Trial Pledge, where you choose to give a custom percentage of your income (1% or more). We support each other in our commitments to helping others and learning about effective giving.
We make it easy to connect with people who share similar values. See if there’s a local Giving What We Can group in your city, apply to start one, and/or join our global Giving What We Can community online. Our groups are open to anyone who is interested in using their resources to help others.
We share effective giving news and updates through our newsletter – including what motivates people to take the 🔸10% Pledge, a curated list of articles about topics like animal welfare, climate change, global poverty, and preventing global catastrophic risks, and exciting developments from some of the charities we recommend.
How we do it
You can find the details of our governance structure here.
We're independently funded and don't take fees
We don’t take any fees from donors who use our platform or from organisations we choose to recommend. In short, we’re here to help you do the most good through your giving.
We have a team of dedicated staff and incredible volunteers
Everyone on our core international team (which spans three continents) has signed the 🔸10% Pledge to give 10% of their income to effective charities throughout their lifetime. This is not a requirement to join the team, but rather reflects a deep commitment to our mission.
We're anchored by our mission & vision — it's central to all that we do
At the core of our work is a deep commitment to our mission of creating a world where giving effectively and significantly is a norm. We're here because we care — deeply and passionately — about building a better world. Read more about our mission and vision below.
We understand that every decision we make can change lives
With limited resources, the stakes are always high. We opt for a strategy of crafting the simplest, yet effective solutions, and running small, cost-effective trials to gain meaningful feedback. We hold ourselves accountable to interrogating our actions, ensuring that what we do is impactful.
How we operate
Giving What We Can UK (GWWC UK) is a charity in England and Wales (with registered charity number 1207964, registered company number 15442716, and is also a Netherlands registered tax-deductible entity ANBI 827647232). Giving What We Can USA Inc. (GWWC USA) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit with EIN 93-3629215. GWWC UK and GWWC USA are separate charities that collaborate closely. These funding partners (along with our partners in Canada and Australia) allow donors to support a wide range of high-impact programs via our platform in a tax-effective way. Read more about our governance structure.
More about our mission & vision
Founded in 2009 by two Oxford philosophers, Toby Ord and Will MacAskill, Giving What We Can's mission is to make giving effectively and significantly a cultural norm.
We mean this quite literally: our goal isn't just to marginally increase the amount of money going to effective charities — we're aiming to make meaningful cultural change.
Here's a playful vision of what we imagine:
Entrepreneur Beth Bayseoff has just sold her startup for 10 billion dollars. Her friend suggests that she should keep all the money for herself and her future lineage. Beth laughs, saying that sounds like something a monkey might do if it found a large stash of bananas.
Yuvanna Noel Harare is a young historian. Like most people he knows, he and his family give at least 10% of their income to charity, and he's quite well-read about the current best donation opportunities. When he sees GiveWell cost-effectiveness estimates from the 2020s, he wonders: "How on earth could it have ever been so cheap to save a life?"
The concept of donating money no longer makes much sense, given the widespread rational compassion that means all our abundance is fairly distributed.
We're aware this is an extremely ambitious vision, but we think it's worth pursuing. As Ord, MacAskill, and Young concluded when they launched Giving What We Can after being inspired by ethicists such as Peter Singer, a tremendous amount of good can be done by carefully combining the head and the heart — using evidence and reason to figure out how to best help others.
Every step towards our goal of creating a culture where people are inspired to give both significantly and effectively has strong positive direct and indirect effects — and if we succeed, we believe the world will be a vastly different (and better) place.
Left: Our co-founder, Toby Ord, personally sending letters to people who signed the 🔸10% Pledge. Inspired by the ideas of ethicists such as Peter Singer, Ord decided in 2009 to commit a large portion of his income to effective charities. Shortly after, he launched Giving What We Can with his wife Bernadette Young and co-founder Will MacAskill to encourage others to do the same. Read more about our history, or watch the video below!
The story behind the 10% Pledge: Co-founder Toby Ord on the launch of Giving What We Can
Our community
At its heart, Giving What We Can is a global community of effective givers. We are a group of like-minded people who are committed to make a meaningful positive impact on others’ lives by donating to highly effective charities.
Our community includes 9’451 lifetime members pledging ≥10% of their income, plus 1’008 trial pledgers, together making up our 10’459 } strong giving community.
What Ollie says:
It's a rare community, a really special community of people dedicated to trying to make a difference, which is just hard to come across.
— Ollie Base, member since 2017
What Catherine says:
It's not actually the size of the problem that matters, it's how much impact I can make. If I can make life better for some animals or people in a meaningful way, that's so important to do.
- Catherine Low, member since 2011
Learn more about our members and hear their stories.
Our connections with effective altruism
Giving What We Can was one of the first organisations to embody 'effective altruism' — taking seriously the principle that thinking carefully about how to help often leads to more good than acting solely on impulse or intuition. However, while effective altruism now encompasses a wide variety of projects and priorities (see #4), Giving What We Can is focused on effective giving — the idea that it’s important to combine head and heart when donating to charity, and that philanthropy, when done with an impact-focused mindset, can have much more of an impact than we might think.
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Where do people who have taken the 🔸10% Pledge tend to donate? Here's a breakdown of the causes pledgers supported in 2020-2022.
Improve the world with us
If you want to join our global effort to make the world better for all its inhabitants, for generations to come, you can:
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