CharitiesGiving Green Fund
Giving Green Fund
Fund

Giving Green

Giving Green Grantmaking Fund

The Giving Green Grantmaking Fund addresses climate change by supporting a research-backed selection of high-impact climate giving opportunities.

Addressing climate change

What problem is Giving Green working on?

Giving Green is a team of climate scientists, economists, and impact evaluation experts with decades of experience working at the intersection of evidence-based policy and the environment.

Giving Green's primary activity is conducting research to identify cost-effective giving opportunities in climate. It assesses the landscape of climate philanthropy to identify important, tractable, and neglected interventions, and assesses organisations working on those interventions for their theory of change, cost-effectiveness, and room for more funding.

What projects does the Giving Green Fund support?

The Giving Green Fund primarily supports Giving Green’s Top Nonprofits, which will be updated dynamically as new evidence emerges. The Giving Green team will recommend strategic grants from the fund based on the supported organisations’ funding needs and opportunities. The Giving Green Fund may also support other high-impact climate work in areas identified as important, tractable, and neglected. For example, past grantmaking priorities have included industrial decarbonization, reducing livestock emissions, and supporting the energy transition in low- and middle-income countries. This may include making strategic grants to projects outside of Giving Green’s Top Nonprofits.

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 Giving Green Fund?1.

We don't currently have further information about the cost-effectiveness of the Giving Green Fund beyond it doing work in a high-impact cause area and taking a reasonably promising approach.

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.

We have varying degrees of information about the cost-effectiveness of our supported programs. We have more information about programs that impact-focused evaluators (some of which our research team expects to investigate soon as part of their evaluator investigations) have looked into, as well as programs that we’ve previously included on our list of recommended charities. We think it’s important to share the information we have with donors as we expect it will be useful in their donation decisions, but don’t want donors to mistakenly overweight the extent to which we share information about some charities and not others. Therefore, we want to clarify two things:

  • When we include information about an organisation’s cost-effectiveness, this may not be the only evidence that exists. It is simply the evidence the GWWC research team has at this time.
  • When we don’t include information about an organisation’s cost-effectiveness, this does not necessarily mean there is no such information. However, it does mean the GWWC research team isn’t privy to any more information at this time.