I gave to Charity Entrepreneurship because they are doing great work to incubate new effective charities! https://www.charityentrepreneurship.com/

Supporting highly-impactful, evidence-based solutions to the triple challenge of climate change, air pollution and energy poverty.

## The Founders Pledge Perspective

Climate change is one part of a triple challenge surrounding energy production. Not only does most current energy production lead to damaging carbon emissions, the effects of which are devastating ecosystems and changing our planet beyond recognition, it also pollutes the air and leaves many of the world’s poor without sufficient energy. This adds up to an environmental and humanitarian crisis.

Thus, we face a triple challenge: we not only need to drive down carbon emissions to near zero by mid-century, and drastically reduce air pollution, but we need to do so while supporting work to reduce global poverty that will often be accompanied, or even driven, by increased energy consumption.

We aim to take a holistic approach that recognizes the global nature of this challenge, as well as the fact that, despite its urgency, we are still in the early days of climate action. This means that the solutions that we focus on will not only reduce emissions now, but will do so in a way that avoids future emissions, while also creating opportunities for the world’s poor and eventually ending energy poverty entirely.

We aim to do this in three ways:

- **Audacious advocacy**: By focusing our grantmaking on organizations leveraging large amounts of money through policy advocacy. There are highly effective organizations with budgets in the millions of dollars which have influenced government innovation budgets, orders of magnitude larger than their costs. By looking for opportunities with leverage like this, we can have an outsize impact.
- **Accelerating low-carbon innovation**: By finding and funding advocacy opportunities that strengthen the energy innovation eco-system or promote particularly neglected technologies. As the success of solar has shown for electricity, the availability of cheap, low carbon alternatives to our current energy sources can make a very significant difference. Efficient, low-cost technology can spread around the world without inter-governmental cooperation or expensive policies to spread around the world, making it a more robust strategy in a world where climate action will often not be the first priority of policy makers and the public.
- **Focusing on blindspots and bottlenecks**: By focusing on areas neglected by other stakeholders, we can ensure that fund dollars make as much difference as possible. While some technologies, such as solar, enjoy widespread popularity and significant policy support, this is not similarly true for other approaches, resulting in a huge imbalance in resource allocation. By finding and funding advocates for overlooked solutions, such as carbon capture and storage technology, we can ensure we are making the most of every tool available to us in the fight against climate change.

Managed by two members of the Founders Pledge Research team, the Climate Change Fund identifies and supports sustainable, evidence-based solutions to the “triple challenge” of carbon emissions, air pollution, and energy poverty.

## Our Approach to Grantmaking

When evaluating potential grants, we consider several key points:

- **Counterfactual impact**. Our grants are designed to create a meaningful outcome that would not otherwise have happened. In particular, we aim to make grants that otherwise wouldn’t have been made, rather than those which just take the place of other philanthropists’ donations. This means that you can rely on the Funds to create meaningful, real change, rather than just maintaining the status quo.
- **Impact-driven philanthropy**. The goal of this fund is maximal positive impact, irrespective of this impact being “sexy” or visible. This means we will focus on opportunities that others focused on clear attribution of their work or shiny outcomes might neglect. For example, we are very comfortable funding organizations to increase their general capacity and strategy when we perceive this as their bottleneck to higher impact, rather than being tied to specific outcomes or deliverables.
- **The organization’s funding gap**. Not all organizations are set up to scale up their programming and many can’t productively absorb large amounts of unsolicited funding. We evaluate all potential grantees’ capacity for growth and consider how much money they could put to good use.
- **Organizational strength**. Particularly with unrestricted funding, it’s important to have trust in the leadership and capacity of the organizations we support. We look at their track record of success and their transparency about failures as well as successes, and we only support those organizations which are exceptionally well run.
- **Time-critical opportunities and funding certainty**. While Founders Pledge members give to our top climate charities regularly, sometimes there are time-critical opportunities which require fast decisions. Or there are needs for certainty of funding streams to allow new hires and start new campaigns and programs. We will use the Fund to make grants that enable such short-term opportunities and stability for high-impact funding opportunities thereby increasing the impact compared to individual giving to specific organizations.
- **Portfolio approach**. Because most climate damage comes from particular severe outcomes – with a world of 4 degrees of warming being much worse than twice as bad as a world with 2 degrees – and because every particular strategy – such as energy innovation – might underdeliver, we pursue a portfolio approach to maximize positive impact. This means we will diversify our bets in ways that, when one approach fails (such as energy innovation), the others we promote (such as carbon removal) can be expected to be particularly important and still available. This maximizes the expected impact of your donation in a world characterized by huge uncertainty about the success of different high-impact solutions.

## Frequently-Asked Questions

**Can charities apply for money from the Fund?**

The Funds do not generally accept applications from charities. If the Fund Managers choose to open up an application round, this will be publicized. Charities are requested not to send unsolicited applications for funding.

**How frequently will you make grants from the Fund?**

Fund Managers will review grant-making decisions on a quarterly basis. Decisions will be made based on the value of Funds and the available options for high-impact grant-making. We may sometimes delay grant-making if we believe that waiting for more promising opportunities will be more impactful. Conversely, we may disburse funds outside of our quarterly review dates if we become aware of a particularly promising and time-sensitive funding opportunity.

**How will my contribution be used?**

All funds are granted out. The Fund is not an investment vehicle. The Fund does not use any percentage of contributions to cover staff time or other overhead costs. Every dollar contributed to the Fund will be used to make grants directly to end-user organizations creating a real difference.

## More Questions?

To learn more about the Founders Pledge Climate Change Fund, please visit [founderspledge.com](https://founderspledge.com/funds/climate-change-fund) or email the Fund Managers at [funds@founderspledge.com](mailto:funds@founderspledge.com).

Founders Pledge: Climate Change Fund

We connect donors with cost-effective, evidence-based ways to increase global happiness and wellbeing.

​There are many ways to improve people's lives. If we want to find the best ways, we need to be able to measure and compare the impact of these different approaches. Of fundamental importance is the choice of metric: what can we measure that reflects the values that we, as individuals and societies, care about? 

A common approach is to measure the impacts on people’s health or wealth and use these as proxies for life improvement. However, health and wealth aren't the only things that matter. At HLI, we believe that they are valuable to the extent that they increase wellbeing. Although closely linked, it is people’s wellbeing, and not their health and wealth, which is intrinsically valuable.

We think the best available approach is to use subjective wellbeing (SWB): individuals' own reports of their happiness and life satisfaction. Social scientists - mostly economists and psychologists - have been collecting data on subjective wellbeing for the last few decades. The field has recently grown dramatically, with 175,000 books or articles published within the previous decade. 

Subjective wellbeing data is a powerful tool to incorporate into our assessments of how to help others. We aim to conduct research that looks into this in greater depth: building on the theoretical foundations of the SWB literature and applying this to the question of how resources can most effectively be used to improve worldwide well-being. 

Happier Lives Institute

We do foundational mathematical research to ensure smarter-than-human artificial intelligence has a positive impact.

The Machine Intelligence Research Institute is a research nonprofit studying the mathematical underpinnings of intelligent behavior. Our mission is to develop formal tools for the clean design and analysis of general-purpose AI systems, with the intent of making such systems safer and more reliable when they are developed.

The field of AI has a reputation for overselling its progress. In the “AI winters” of the late 1970s and 1980s, researchers’ failures to make good on ambitious promises led to a collapse of funding and interest in AI. Although the field is now undergoing a renaissance, overconfidence is still a major fear; discussion of the possibility of human-equivalent general intelligence is still largely relegated to the science fiction shelf.

At the same time, researchers largely agree that AI is likely to begin outperforming humans on most cognitive tasks in this century. Given how disruptive domain-general AI could be, we think it is prudent to begin a conversation about this now, and to investigate whether there are limited areas in which we can predict and shape this technology’s societal impact.

Researchers at MIRI tend to be relatively agnostic about how the state of the art in AI will change over the coming decades, and how many years off smarter-than human AI systems are. 

Machine Intelligence Research Institute

Dedicated to educating and inspiring philanthropy in the sports community and beyond.

Created by NFL Legend Matt Stover, PPF is the nation's leading facilitator and administrator of athlete, celebrity and philanthropist charitable funds.

Players Philanthropy Fund - PPF

Catalyzing resilient solutions, scaled to meet the climate challenge.

CATF is a nonprofit organization dedicated to reducing atmospheric pollution through research, advocacy, and private sector collaboration.

Clean Air Task Force

StrongMinds provides life-changing mental health services to women in Africa using innovative community-based group therapy.

According to the WHO, depression is the leading cause of disability worldwide, and is a major contributor to the global burden of disease. In Africa, an estimated 66M women have depression and 85% have no access to treatment. Since 2014, StrongMinds has treated over 200,000 individuals for depression symptoms, with 80% measuring as depression-free after therapy. When a woman recovers from depression, she is more engaged in the community and her economic activity increases. Her family eats more meals and her children go to school more often. When you invest in mental health, you invest in the future of an individual, their family, and their community.

StrongMinds Inc

We connect and support a network of women, trans people of any gender, and non-binary people interested in Effective Altruism.

Effective Altruism is about answering the question, "How can we use our resources to help others the most?" We believe that to solve this question, we need incredible people with a diversity of skills and perspectives.

We started WANBAM because we identified an opportunity for a high-leverage, positive impact. In 2019, 71% of respondents to the EA Survey reported their gender as male. Additionally, the survey found women twice as likely to cite a lack of diversity or welcomingness as a barrier to greater involvement in EA. Personal contact was overwhelmingly the most important factor for retention, especially for women. This pointed toward the value of mentorship to complement and support EA community-building efforts in attracting and retaining dedicated, talented people.

WANBAM was founded with the aim of inspiring and supporting women, trans people of any gender, and non-binary people pursuing high-impact career paths. Since late 2019, we have matched and facilitated the mentoring of over 230 people. Our mentor base has quickly grown to over 90 people from a diversity of organizations. You can find out more about our successes, challenges, and opportunities for impact in Kathryn, our CEO’s talk at EAGX Asia Pacific, below.

WANBAM

Reducing the suffering of billions of fish through researching and executing targeted, highly-scalable welfare interventions.

We work to reduce the suffering of fish.

We collaborate with corporations, governments, and producers to improve fish welfare standards and practices. Our work is simple: we research the most promising ways of improving fish welfare, and then we enable stakeholders to do so.

Following our initial research, our team partners with NGOs to help farmers introduce higher welfare farming methods in the one of the highest fish producing countries in the world: India.

Fish Welfare Initiative

Developing the roadmap for a sustainable, secure, and just global protein supply 🧫🌱


Check out what your support makes possible at gfi.org/your-impact. 

The Good Food Institute (GFI) is a global network of nonprofit organizations developing the roadmap for a sustainable, secure, and just protein supply. Industry alone will not meet this challenge at the scale or speed we need. GFI is accelerating the transformation of the food system by identifying solutions and mobilizing resources to make alternative proteins the default way meat is made.

GFI is a network of nonprofits around the world strategically based in the most critical economies for alternative protein advancement. In Asia, Europe, Brazil, India, Israel, and the U.S., GFI’s teams are mobilizing the international community to use markets and technology to replace harmful practices with ones that are better for the climate and biodiversity, for food security, and for global health.

GFI’s Focus
As a nonprofit, GFI is uniquely positioned to accelerate the transition to alternative proteins by focusing on three programmatic priorities:

-Cultivating a strong scientific ecosystem | GFI’s science and technology teams map out the most neglected areas that will allow alternative proteins to compete on taste and price. GFI meets these challenges by developing open-access research and resources, educating and connecting the next generation of scientists and entrepreneurs, and funding research that benefits alternative protein development across the sector. 

-Influencing policy and securing government funding | GFI’s policy teams ensure that alternative proteins are a part of the policy discussion around climate change mitigation and global health. In every region where GFI has a presence, teams advocate for government funding and incentives to transition to alternative proteins and are paving the way for the approval of novel proteins such as cultivated meat.

-Ensuring industry prioritizes alternative proteins | GFI’s corporate teams are creating a transformation of our global meat supply. GFI works to replicate past market transformations by showing companies of all sizes, from startups to multinational corporations, how alternatives to animal products can be profitable while meeting environmental, social, and governance goals.

Reimagining meat
The very real threats of climate change, global food insecurity, antibiotic resistance, and pandemics require us to imagine a different future of food. Alternative proteins are the solution that will securely and sustainably feed the world.

GFI’s global community of scientists, policy experts, and corporate specialists are creating a world where alternative proteins are no longer alternative.



The Good Food Institute

Founders Pledge is a global nonprofit empowering entrepreneurs to do the most good possible with their charitable giving. 

We equip members with everything needed to maximize their impact, from evidence-led research and advice on the world’s most pressing problems, to comprehensive infrastructure for global grant-making, alongside opportunities to learn and connect. We’re grateful to be funded by our members and other generous donors. 