CharitiesAnimal Charity Evaluators: Recommended Charity Fund
Animal Charity Evaluators: Recommended Charity Fund
Fund

Animal Charity Evaluators

Recommended Charity Fund

The Recommended Charity Fund aims to improve the wellbeing of animals globally by supporting organisations ACE has rigorously evaluated and believes to be highly-impactful.

Animal welfare

What problem is ACE's Recommended Charity Fund working on?

ACE’s Recommended Charity Fund supports a group of impactful organizations that work in ways that ACE believes are most likely to produce the greatest gains for animals, actively evaluate and improve their programs, and have a demonstrated need for more funding. The Fund is for anyone who wishes to support all of ACE’s current recommended charities through a single donation, simplifying the process so that people can easily give to multiple effective animal charities at once. Each organization supported by the Recommended Charity Fund has been rigorously evaluated based on ACE’s charity evaluation criteria, which is updated annually.

What projects does the ACE Recommended Charity Fund support?

The Fund supports ACE’s current recommended charities. Recent grant recipients include:

  • Faunalytics
  • The Good Food Institute
  • The Humane League
  • Wild Animal Initiative
  • Fish Welfare Initiative
  • Sinergia Animal
  • Çiftlik Hayvanlarını Koruma Derneği
  • Dansk Vegetarisk Forening
  • Legal Impact for Chickens
  • New Roots Institute
  • Shrimp Welfare Project

Its biannual disbursements are determined by ACE’s researchers. For more information about how donations are allocated, see the list of past recipients on the ACE website.

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 ACE’s Recommended Charity fund?1.

The Giving What We Can research team looked into ACE's Charity Evaluation program as part of our 2023 and 2024 evaluator investigations, and decided to not currently rely on their charity recommendations or Recommended Charity Fund. However, we still expect choosing ACE recommended programs to be significantly more impactful than choosing animal welfare programs without an impact-focused evaluation behind them, and we remain open to (some of) ACE's recommendations being among the most cost-effective donation opportunities in animal welfare.

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.