Open Philanthropy is a research and grantmaking foundation that makes grants based on the doctrine of
effective altruism. It was founded as a partnership between
GiveWell
GiveWell is an American non-profit charity assessment and effective altruism-focused organization. GiveWell focuses primarily on the cost-effectiveness of the organizations that it evaluates, rather than traditional metrics such as the percentag ...
and
Good Ventures
Good Ventures is a private foundation and philanthropic organization in San Francisco, and the fifth largest foundation in Silicon Valley. It was co-founded by Cari Tuna, a former ''Wall Street Journal'' reporter, and her husband Dustin Moskov ...
. Its current co-chief executive officers are
Holden Karnofsky
Holden Karnofsky is an American nonprofit executive. He is a co-founder and co-chief executive officer of the research and grantmaking organization Open Philanthropy. Karnofsky co-founded the charity evaluator GiveWell with Elie Hassenfeld in 200 ...
and Alexander Berger, and its main funders are
Cari Tuna and
Dustin Moskovitz
Dustin Aaron Moskovitz (; born May 22, 1984) is an American Internet entrepreneur who co-founded Facebook, Inc. (now known as Meta) with Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum and Chris Hughes. In 2008, he left Facebook to co-found ...
. Dustin says that their wealth, worth $11 billion, is "pooled up around us right now, but it belongs to the world. We intend not to have much when we die."
History
Dustin Moskovitz
Dustin Aaron Moskovitz (; born May 22, 1984) is an American Internet entrepreneur who co-founded Facebook, Inc. (now known as Meta) with Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum and Chris Hughes. In 2008, he left Facebook to co-found ...
made an $11 billion fortune through co-founding
Facebook
Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Mosk ...
, and later
Asana.
He and his wife
Cari Tuna were inspired by
Peter Singer
Peter Albert David Singer (born 6 July 1946) is an Australian moral philosopher, currently the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University. He specialises in applied ethics and approaches ethical issues from a Secularit ...
's ''
The Life You Can Save
''The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty'' is a 2009 book by Australian philosopher Peter Singer, in which the author argues that citizens of affluent nations are behaving immorally if they do not act to end the poverty they know ...
'', and became the youngest couple to sign Bill Gates and Warren Buffett’s
Giving Pledge
The Giving Pledge is a campaign to encourage extremely wealthy people to contribute a majority of their wealth to philanthropic causes. , the pledge has 236 signatories from 28 countries. Most of the signatories of the pledge are billionaires, a ...
, promising to give away most of their money.
Tuna quit her journalist job at ''
The Wall Street Journal
''The Wall Street Journal'' is an American business-focused, international daily newspaper based in New York City, with international editions also available in Chinese and Japanese. The ''Journal'', along with its Asian editions, is published ...
''
to do philanthropy full-time,
and the couple started the
Good Ventures
Good Ventures is a private foundation and philanthropic organization in San Francisco, and the fifth largest foundation in Silicon Valley. It was co-founded by Cari Tuna, a former ''Wall Street Journal'' reporter, and her husband Dustin Moskov ...
foundation in 2011. Good Ventures partnered with
GiveWell
GiveWell is an American non-profit charity assessment and effective altruism-focused organization. GiveWell focuses primarily on the cost-effectiveness of the organizations that it evaluates, rather than traditional metrics such as the percentag ...
, a charity evaluator founded by
Holden Karnofsky
Holden Karnofsky is an American nonprofit executive. He is a co-founder and co-chief executive officer of the research and grantmaking organization Open Philanthropy. Karnofsky co-founded the charity evaluator GiveWell with Elie Hassenfeld in 200 ...
and
Elie Hassenfeld
GiveWell is an American non-profit charity assessment and effective altruism-focused organization. GiveWell focuses primarily on the cost-effectiveness of the organizations that it evaluates, rather than traditional metrics such as the percentag ...
.
The partnership named itself the "Open Philanthropy Project" in 2014, and began operating independently in 2017. Good Ventures holds the funds and distributes them according to recommendations by Open Philanthropy. It is the fifth largest foundation in Silicon Valley.
Operations
Open Philanthropy's grantmaking is based on the methodology of
effective altruism.
The organization does not have a mission centered around a cause area. Rather, it does "substantial empirical research"
before funding projects that "deliver the greatest social benefits as efficiently as possible".
Open Philanthropy has a goal of giving more than $100 million a year.
The organization does research openly, publishing hundreds of interviews
and a spreadsheet ranking US policy issues by how effectively money might be able to have an impact on their website.
They calculate impact using
disability-adjusted life years
The disability-adjusted life year (DALY) is a measure of overall disease burden, expressed as the number of years lost due to ill-health, disability or early death. It was developed in the 1990s as a way of comparing the overall health and life ex ...
.
Moskovitz and Tuna hope that by being open about their work, they can "help others become better philanthropists".
They consider their work "high-risk philanthropy", and expect "that most of our work will fail to have an impact".
Open Philanthropy can also "fund longer timelines than government or industry".
Notable people that Open Philanthropy has consulted with include
Avril Haines
Avril Danica Haines (born August 27, 1969) is an American lawyer and senior government official who serves as the director of national intelligence in the Biden administration. She is the first woman to serve in this role. Haines previously se ...
, the director of national intelligence under US President
Joe Biden, and political scientist Steven Teles.
Other funders who have contributed to Open Philanthropy include
Instagram co-founder
Mike Krieger
Michel Krieger (born March 4, 1986) is a Brazilian-American entrepreneur and software engineer who co-founded Instagram along with Kevin Systrom, and served as its CTO. Instagram expanded from a few million users to 1 billion monthly active users ...
, who pledged $750,000.
Focus areas
Open Philanthropy has four categories of focus areas: global health and development, US policy, global catastrophic risks, and science.
The organization also invests in animal welfare.
Global health and development
![Women and children receive anti-malarial nets in Malawi](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f6/Women_and_children_receive_anti-malarial_nets_in_Malawi.jpg)
Open Philanthropy's investments in
global health
Global health is the health of the populations in the worldwide context; it has been defined as "the area of study, research and practice that places a priority on improving health and achieving equity in health for all people worldwide". Problem ...
and
development
Development or developing may refer to:
Arts
*Development hell, when a project is stuck in development
*Filmmaking, development phase, including finance and budgeting
*Development (music), the process thematic material is reshaped
* Photograph ...
include efforts to cure iodine deficiencies, repair the environment,
and prevent malaria.
Of their global health and development giving, Tuna said, “I am still optimistic that we can do better than just giving money to poor people, but in the meantime, we’re doing a lot of just giving money to poor people.”
In 2021, GiveWell decided to defer $110 million out of its $300 million annual grant from Open Philanthropy, including money allocated to GiveDirectly, which gives money to poor people, to be spent in future years.
This was done because GiveWell expects that "they'll be able to spend all of the money in a way that's at least five times as effective as giving money directly to the world's poorest people".
Grants include:
* $17.5 million to
Target Malaria Target Malaria is a not-for-profit international research consortium that aims to co-develop and share novel genetic technologies to help control malaria in Africa. The consortium brings together research institutes and universities from Africa, Eur ...
, for gene-drive technology to control malaria-carrying mosquitoes
* Over $47 million to
GiveDirectly
GiveDirectly is a nonprofit organization operating in East Africa that helps families living in extreme poverty by making unconditional cash transfers to them via mobile phone. GiveDirectly transfers funds primarily to people in Kenya, Uganda, a ...
,
partially for research to compare the effectiveness of giving money with more traditional developmental aid,
and including at least $16 million to be given directly to extremely poor people in Kenya and Uganda
* $1 million to
Population Services International
Population Services International (PSI) is a 501(c)(3) registered nonprofit global health organization with programs targeting malaria, child survival, HIV, and reproductive health. PSI provides products, clinical services and behavior chan ...
for work on drug resistance to antimalarial medication
* Nearly $30 million to the
Against Malaria Foundation
The Against Malaria Foundation (AMF) is a United-Kingdom based charity that provides long-lasting insecticidal nets (LLINs) to populations at high risk of malaria, primarily in Africa. As of December 2021, the foundation has raised $425 million ...
US policy
Open Philanthropy ranks US policy issues based on how effectively they predict their funding might be able to move the issue forward.
The top two issues are
criminal justice reform
Criminal justice reform addresses structural issues in criminal justice systems such as racial profiling, police brutality, overcriminalization, mass incarceration, and recidivism. Criminal justice reform can take place at any point where the cr ...
and
macroeconomic stabilization policy.
For criminal justice reform, the organization calculates that "a year in prison is half as good as one on the outside"
and notes that "the United States incarcerates a larger percentage than almost any other country in the world at great fiscal cost and it has highest rate of criminal homicides in the developed world".
For macroeconomic stabilization policy, the organization expects that the value of preventing recessions will be so many times higher than the cost of effective advocacy work that it is willing to invest in it despite success being "highly uncertain".
Open Philanthropy has also made grants to help advance marriage equality.
Grants include:
* $335,000 to the Full Employment Project at the
Center for Budget and Policy Priorities
* $100,000 to the
Center for Popular Democracy’s Fed Up campaign
* $6.3 million to the Accountable Justice Action Fund
* $50 million to Just Impact Advisors, to advise philanthropists and make grants related to criminal justice
* $3 million to the
Pew Charitable Trusts' Public Safety Performance Project, to “reduce incarceration and correctional spending while maintaining or improving public safety and concentrating prison beds on high level offenders" at the state level
* $500,000 to California
YIMBY
The YIMBY movement (short for "yes, in my back yard") is a pro-housing movement in contrast and opposition to the NIMBY ("''not'' in my back yard") phenomenon. The YIMBY position supports increasing the supply of housing within cities where hous ...
.
Open Philanthropy was the first institutional funder of the YIMBY movement;
however, the movement has garnered individual financial support from many tech executives.
* $2.4 million to the
Center for Election Science
Moskovitz and Tuna have also given tens of millions of dollars to political campaigns and parties as individuals.
Of this giving, Dustin states, "This decision was not easy, particularly because we have reservations about anyone using large amounts of money to influence elections. That said, we believe in trying to do as much good as we can, which in this case means using the tools available to us (as they are also available to the opposition)."
Global catastrophic risks
Under their
longtermism
Longtermism is an ethical stance which gives priority to improving the long-term future. It is an important concept in effective altruism and serves as a primary motivation for efforts that claim to reduce existential risks to humanity.
Sigal S ...
portfolio, Open Philanthropy supports organizations aimed at tackling
global catastrophic risks
A global catastrophic risk or a doomsday scenario is a hypothetical future event that could damage human well-being on a global scale, even endangering or destroying modern civilization. An event that could cause human extinction or permanen ...
. This category includes nearly $40 million given for
biosecurity and pandemic preparedness,
and over $100 million for
potential risks from advanced artificial intelligence.
Open Philanthropy has also invested in mitigating asteroid collision risk.
The organization has been criticized for its narrow focus on risks that might "kill enough people to threaten civilization as we know it".
By "flooding" money into biosecurity, Open Philanthropy is "absorbing much of the field’s experienced research capacity, focusing the attention of experts on this narrow, extremely unlikely, aspect of biosecurity risk".
Grants include:
* $17.5 million to
Sherlock Biosciences, for viral diagnostic tools.
* About $38 million to the
Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security
The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security (abbreviated CHS) is an independent, nonprofit organization of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. The center works to protect people's health from epidemics and pandemics and ensures ...
* $11.3 million to the University of Washington’s Institute for Protein Design to develop a universal flu vaccine
Science
Open Philanthropy named eleven areas in science "that it considers neglected by other funders", "including
tuberculosis
Tuberculosis (TB) is an infectious disease usually caused by '' Mycobacterium tuberculosis'' (MTB) bacteria. Tuberculosis generally affects the lungs, but it can also affect other parts of the body. Most infections show no symptoms, i ...
,
chronic pain
Chronic pain is classified as pain that lasts longer than three to six months. In medicine, the distinction between acute and chronic pain is sometimes determined by the amount of time since onset. Two commonly used markers are pain that continue ...
and
obesity
Obesity is a medical condition, sometimes considered a disease, in which excess body fat has accumulated to such an extent that it may negatively affect health. People are classified as obese when their body mass index (BMI)—a person's ...
".
Grants within the science bucket include the areas of human
health
Health, according to the World Health Organization, is "a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease and infirmity".World Health Organization. (2006)''Constitution of the World Health Organiza ...
and
wellbeing
Well-being, or wellbeing, also known as wellness, prudential value or quality of life, refers to what is intrinsically valuable relative ''to'' someone. So the well-being of a person is what is ultimately good ''for'' this person, what is in th ...
,
scientific innovation, science supporting biosecurity and pandemic preparedness,
transformative basic science, and other scientific research areas. Funding for science was $40 million in 2017, with the intention of increasing "several times over the coming years".
The money was given to four teams of scientists whose proposals had been rejected by the
National Institutes of Health
The National Institutes of Health, commonly referred to as NIH (with each letter pronounced individually), is the primary agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical and public health research. It was founded in the late ...
.
Grants include $6.4 million to Stephen Johnston and his team at Arizona State University to test a cancer vaccine for middle-aged pet dogs.
Animal welfare
Holden Karnofsky claims that Open Philanthropy "is the largest funder in the world of farm animal welfare", including investing in alternative proteins and animal welfare advocacy.
Open Philanthropy made an investment in
Impossible Foods
Impossible Foods Inc. is a company that develops plant-based substitutes for meat products. The company's signature product, the Impossible Burger, was launched in July 2016. In partnership with Burger King, Impossible Whoppers were released ...
in 2016, to support the growth of non-animal meats.
It is also a patron of
The Good Food Institute
The Good Food Institute (GFI) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that promotes plant- and cell-based alternatives to animal products, particularly meat, dairy, and eggs. It was created in 2016 by the nonprofit organization Mercy For Anima ...
.
Research done by Open Philanthropy includes an investigation on the pros and cons of industrializing insect meat production
as well as an investigation of the economic viability of
cultivated meat.
References
External links
*
{{Effective altruism, state=uncollapsed
Non-profit organizations based in San Francisco
Organizations established in 2017
Philanthropic organizations based in the United States
Organizations associated with effective altruism
2017 establishments in California
Research organizations in the United States