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

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

NTI designs innovative threat-reduction projects that show governments the way and build momentum and support for action.

We work with presidents and prime ministers, scientists and technicians, educators and students, and people from around the world. We collaborate with partners worldwide. And we use our voice to raise awareness and advocate for creative solutions.

Nuclear Threat Initiative

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

Supports highly-impactful, evidence-based solutions to the challenges of global poverty and inequality.

## The Founders Pledge Perspective 

Despite substantial progress in recent decades on development goals, nearly half the world lives on less than $2.50 per day. This poverty leads to a huge amount of hardship and unnecessary loss of life. In 2019, more than five million children under five years old died, mostly from preventable causes like diarrhea, malaria, and respiratory infections. 

 
Poverty is also associated with hunger, exposure to conflict, and limited access to education and other opportunities. We believe that all individuals, regardless of where they were born, deserve the chance to live happy, healthy, and prosperous lives.

 
Global inequality in mortality, health, poverty and more is a tragic, but not unsolvable, problem. Researchers, advocates, and organizations around the world are working to scale up solutions to these problems. By taking a thoughtful, evidence-based approach to philanthropy that accelerates the best of these solutions, we can do immense good.

Managed by two members of the Founders Pledge Research team, the Global Health and Development Fund identifies and supports highly-impactful and neglected development initiatives. By pooling donations and collaborating with other funding and research organizations, the Fund allows individuals to make contributions when and where they will have the largest 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.
*   **Time-sensitive opportunities**. In many cases, highly competent organizations identify time-critical opportunities for impact that require funding on a shorter timeline than traditional funders can support. In addition to considering these quick-turnaround opportunities in a timely manner, we plan to provide unrestricted funding streams to enable organizations to make new hires, start new campaigns and programs, and act on opportunities that come their way. 

## 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 Global Health and Development Fund, please visit [founderspledge.com](https://founderspledge.com/funds/global-health-and-development-fund) or email the Fund Managers at [funds@founderspledge.com](mailto:funds@founderspledge.com).

Founders Pledge: Global Health & Development Fund

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

Communicating the best research and data to understand big global problems and make progress against them.

Poverty, disease, hunger, climate change, war, existential risks, and inequality: The world faces many great and terrifying problems. Our World in Data focuses on communicating the best research and data that helps us understand and find solutions to the world’s largest problems.

Our World in Data publishes an open-access publication where users can understand the state of the world today, where we are making progress and where we are falling behind. Through interactive data visualizations we can see how the world has changed; by summarizing the scientific literature we can understand why. We cover everything from global poverty to natural disasters, education and health, democracy; we have over 3500 charts across 300 topics.

Our World in Data is free, open-source and provided as a public good. It has millions of users every month, and is cited in research and media across the world every day. This allows millions of people to understand the large problems the world is facing, and how we can solve them. 

Our World in Data

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

A new breed of climate-focused NGO working to build a world that removes more carbon than it emits.

Reducing emissions is not enough.

We envision a world where climate change has been halted and economic prosperity is driven by innovative farmers, foresters, and businesses pulling carbon from the sky.

By partnering with experts and change-makers across industries, we elevate three essential pillars of economic transformation: accelerated research, smart business practices, and effective policies.

With so many solutions at our fingertips and so little time, we’re committed to motivating change widely — and fast. We work alongside people of diverse perspectives and backgrounds to build broad momentum for carbon removal.

Carbon180

TerraPraxis designs and implements strategies that leverage science, technology and energy innovation for a prosperous planet

We co-founded TerraPraxis to design and implement strategies that leverage science, technology and energy innovation for a prosperous planet. 

Our special focus is on enabling high-impact rapid transitions for neglected parts of the decarbonization challenge. 

We work with an extensive global network to define, incubate and initiate scalable strategies that fulfil the twin missions of prosperity and decarbonization. 