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

Prevention, control and treatment of malaria and other communicable diseases  among vulnerable populations.

Our mission is to improve lives in Africa and Asia through sustainable, evidence-based programs  that combat targeted diseases and promote child and maternal health. 

We will accomplish this together with partners and all levels of government, by:

designing and implementing cutting edge research, surveillance and monitoring and evaluation;
selectively scaling up and delivering sustainable evidence-based health programmes;
providing technical assistance and consulting services that shape and strengthen national and international health policies, strategies and systems and build local capacity;
seeking to ensure that our experience, thought leadership, practical findings and research results are effectively communicated and contribute to the coordinated improvement of access to and quality of healthcare. 
Our areas of expertise include: 
disease prevention, diagnosis and treatment
disease control and elimination
health systems strengthening
research, monitoring and evaluation leading to best practice
behavior  change communication
national and international advocacy, and policy development


Malaria Consortium

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

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

We are a social science think tank researching long-term social and technological change, particularly moral circle expansion. We make our research results public and free, so anyone can use them to make more impactful decisions with their advocacy, careers, donations, and other resources.

We are founded on the principle of effective altruism, meaning we strive to help others as much as possible using the best evidence available. We envision a society in which the interests of all sentient beings are fully considered, regardless of their sex, race, species, substrate, location, or any other characteristic apart from their sentience. We see this expansion as an important means to prevent suffering now and in the far future.

Our mission is to conduct interdisciplinary research on moral circle expansion and to share that research with individuals and institutions making the world a better place. Two particularly important areas of expansion are farmed animals and artificial sentience.

Sentience 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

International nonprofit ending the abuse of animals raised for food.

The mission of The Humane League, why we exist, is to end the abuse of animals raised for food. This sense of purpose drives every action in our unrelenting march forward for animals.

The Humane League

Support highly-impactful, evidence-based solutions to reduce animal suffering on a global scale. 

## The Founders Pledge Perspective

At least 75 billion farmed land animals and more than a trillion fish are slaughtered each year. That is more than 2000 land animals and 25,000 fish are killed every second. This is possible due to the mechanization and intensification of factory farming, driven by global increase in demand for meat.

Although this situation seems bleak - and the numbers almost too large to comprehend - there are reasons to be hopeful. Recent years have seen rapid progress in the animal welfare movement. Many large companies have pledged to phase out or drastically reduce some of their industry’s most harmful practices. Governments have banned some of these practices outright. And companies working to commercialize alternative proteins, such as plant-based meats, have raised billions of dollars from investors. 

Yet farm animal welfare remains highly neglected, with just 0.03% of US philanthropic funding going to this cause in 2017. By giving to the Founders Pledge Animal Welfare Index, you can spread your donation across several highly-impactful and neglected global initiatives to alleviate suffering and improve the conditions of factory-farmed animals. By pooling your donations, this Index fund allows you to make larger grants and thereby maximize your impact.

## 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.
- **The grant’s potential outcomes**. We focus on outcomes (e.g. how many lives were saved), rather than outputs (e.g. how many products were delivered). We review all the available evidence and take into account cost-effectiveness to assess whether the grant money could produce more good if donated elsewhere.
- **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. We also look for organizations that demonstrate a strong commitment to measuring outcomes and evaluating the impact of their programs.

Animal Welfare Index

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. 

Founders Pledge

We search for the charities that save or improve lives the most per dollar.

Our goal is to produce the world's top research on where to give. Free, for everyone.

We recommend a small number of charities that do an incredible amount of good. 

If you would like to donate to our giving funds or individual top charities, please see our projects below. You can donate here or on the Unrestricted Fund page below to make an unrestricted gift to GiveWell to support the full spectrum of our grantmaking and underwrite our ability to continue doing what we do.