The Top Charities Fund supports the highest-priority funding needs among our top charities.

We find and recommend outstanding giving opportunities and publish our research to help donors give more effectively and with greater confidence.

All donations here support our Top Charities Fund. Donations to the Top Charities Fund are granted on a rolling basis to support cost-effective funding opportunities at our top charities. We use our latest research to grant the funds to the top charity (or charities) where we believe they’ll do the most good.

Learn more and view past grants at https://www.givewell.org/top-charities-fund


Photo caption: At health centers in Sierra Leone supported by Helen Keller Intl, mothers who bring their children in for twice-yearly vitamin A supplemention can also receive comprehensive counseling about birth control options that are available to them free of charge. Combining family planning and children's healthcare services benefits both mother and child. 2019.

Top Charities Fund

Delivering unconditional cash directly to the world's poorest households via secure mobile transfers. 

Since 2009, GiveDirectly has delivered more than $580 million in unconditional cash transfers to families in need. These one-time cash transfers allow recipients to invest in what they need most and have been shown to improve their earnings, children’s school attendance, health, nutrition, and mental well-being.
 
GiveDirectly uses government data to target villages where most or all residents are living in extreme poverty, defined by the World Bank as earning under $2.15/day. In-country GiveDirectly staff enroll one member of each household in the entire village to receive a one-time transfer of about $1,000 USD sent in two installments using mobile money. Recipients can then withdraw the mobile funds as cash with local agents and use the funds to invest in what they need – whether it’s on starting a business, education, making their home safer/sturdier, healthcare, or livestock.
 
GiveDirectly uses rigorous experimental research (randomized controlled trials) to measure the impact of their unconditional cash programs and answer public policy questions, generating evidence on key design and implementation questions across varied contexts. You can find over 300 studies on the positive impacts of cash transfers in GiveDirectly’s Cash Research Explorer.

GiveDirectly

LEEP advocates to prevent lead poisoning and improve the health, wellbeing, and potential of children worldwide. 

LEEP advocates for regulation on lead paint to reduce lead poisoning and improve the health, wellbeing, and potential of children worldwide. Lead poisoning is a colossal issue causing disability in 815 million children worldwide.

Currently, we are working on programs in Malawi, Zimbabwe, Madagascar and Pakistan, and are looking to expand to another 7 countries in the next year.

To learn more about our work, check out:
https://leadelimination.org/projects/
https://leadelimination.org/faqs/
https://leadelimination.org/blog/

Thank you for helping us to address the problem of lead poisoning, and improve the health of children worldwide.

Lead Exposure Elimination Project (LEEP)

We conduct and support legal research that mitigates existential risk and promotes the flourishing of future generations.

Support our mission to conduct strategic legal research that mitigates existential risk and promotes the flourishing of future generations, and to build a field that shares these priorities.

You can read our Annual Report for 2022 (including our plans for 2023) here: https://www.legalpriorities.org/blog/2023/lpp-annual-report-2022/

We currently focus on four cause areas: Law and governance of advanced artificial intelligence, biosecurity & pandemic preparedness, institutional design, and meta-research.

- Our Goals -
Strategic Research: Our primary goal is to conduct strategic research that can be used by legal actors—for example, policy makers, judges, and litigators—working on the world’s most pressing problems. Our research focuses on mitigating existential risk and promoting the flourishing of future generations.

Field Building: We aim to raise awareness about our concern for the long-term future and build a field that shares these priorities. We want to bring together researchers and policy-makers at every level of seniority and support the most effective ways to use the law to protect future generations and mitigate existential risk. 

You can find our full research agenda here: https://www.legalpriorities.org/research/research-agenda

To learn more about our previous successes, you can also browse through our newsletters here: https://us17.campaign-archive.com/home/?u=2bb7ad9a08b210b8e814dd0b5&id=798222e74e

Would you like to learn more or talk to us? You can always contact us: https://www.legalpriorities.org/contact

Thank you for your support!

Legal Priorities Project

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

We want to make life better for wild animals.

We are dedicated to finding evidence-backed ways to improve the lives of animals in the wild.

We depend on individual donors to help us make life better for wild animals. To a small nonprofit working hard on a big problem, your support is more crucial now than ever!

Wild Animal Initiative

We are a think tank dedicated to figuring out the best ways to make the world a better place.

Rethink Priorities is a research organization that conducts critical research to inform policymakers and major foundations about how to best help people and nonhuman animals in both the present and the long-term future.

Our research spans everything from animal welfare to the threat of nuclear war. We explore neglected but promising areas to improve the world and try to further build the community of researchers working on understanding how to do this most effectively.

If you'd like to support one of our fiscally sponsored projects (e.g. Epoch), you can give via Every.org, and let us know how to allocate your gift at info@rethinkpriorities.org.

Rethink Priorities

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

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Instructions to get up to $300 matched: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/oMBKeyx7ir8Jnbenz/make-a-usd50-donation-into-usd100-6x

About the Legal Priorities Project: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/PvBLDPkqKvdHQkKPn/introducing-the-legal-priorities-project

I donated to MIRI because I believe transformative AI is likely to be developed this century and MIRI is working to ensure it will have a positive impact.