I want to help people in need of serious medical attention but don't have the same access as some developed places across the world.

GiveWell, more than any organization I know, works tirelessly to find the most cost effective ways to save and improve lives. This simple idea is deeply powerful!

Growing up I had a genuine curiosity for tech and sciences, but felt it could never be a career for me. I think back and wonder if it was because I never saw someone like me in those careers or were exposed to such opportunities when I was younger. Girls Who Code is opening the door for so many girls and I am so excited for what our future holds. #womenshistorymonth

Love Founders Pledge's approach to finding nonprofits who are doing impactful work in fighting climate change. From their site: "Charities should compete on how much impact they have, not how good they are at fundraising. When we donate thoughtfully, based on evidence of strategic thinking and outcomes, we incentivise those practices within the sector as a whole."

Medical aid where it's needed most — independent, neutral, impartial.

Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF) is a private international association founded in 1971. The association is made up mainly of doctors and health sector workers and is also open to other professions which might help in achieving its aims. Our mission is to provide lifesaving medical care to those most in need.

All MSF members agree to honor the following principles:

MSF provides assistance to populations in distress, to victims of natural or man-made disasters, and to victims of armed conflict. They do so irrespective of gender, race, religion, creed, or political convictions.

MSF observes neutrality and impartiality in the name of universal medical ethics and the right to humanitarian assistance. MSF claims full and unhindered freedom in the exercise of its functions.

Members undertake to respect their professional code of ethics and to maintain complete independence from all political, economic, or religious powers.

As volunteers, members understand the risks and dangers of the assignments they carry out and make no claim for themselves or their assigns for any form of compensation other than that which the association might be able to afford them.

Doctors Without Borders (MSF)

The GiveWell Top Charities Fund supports evidence-backed giving opportunities that save or improve lives most per dollar donated.

[GiveWell](https://www.givewell.org/) - 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. Learn more and view past grants at [givewell.org/top-charities-fund](https://www.givewell.org/top-charities-fund).

GiveWell

Our mission is to:
Provide service to others, promote integrity, and advance world understanding, goodwill, and peace through fellowship of business, professional, and community leaders;
Advance community understanding and support to those in need throughout our District's communities, schools, colleges and other citizen-devoted facilities.

Lake Arrowhead Rotary Foundation

Works to educate, inspire, and equip young women with the skills and resources to pursue academic and career opportunities in computing fields.

Girls Who Code is a national nonprofit working to close the gender gap in the technology sector. Its programs work to educate, inspire, and equip high school girls with the skills and resources to pursue opportunities in computing fields.

Girls Who Code

Our research-based matching system motivates people to donate to highly effective charities at givingmultiplier.org.

Giving Multiplier is a Harvard University research project that matches donations to any charity of your choice and promotes the world's most effective charities.

To make a donation that gets matched, go to http://givingmultiplier.org. To become a matching funder, go to http://givingmultiplier.org/matching. (If you donate on this page here, your donation will also go into our matching system.)

Giving Multiplier

Accessible giving infrastructure for a more generous world.

Follow our realtime impact at https://www.every.org/metrics - people have donated over $18M!

We provide nonprofits with free tools to fundraise more effectively, including our all-in-one donate button and peer-to-peer fundraising solution. Our website encourages individuals to take action and spread generosity by giving monthly and giving out loud to help nonprofits get steady funding and grow awareness. Our open API for fundraising powers a collective research effort to transform fundraising with nonprofit, academic, corporate, and grassroots partners.

We envision a world where every person and organization has the best technology to help them do more good, increasing the global giving rate from 2% to 3% of GDP.

Every.org

We defend your civil liberties in a digital world.

The first line of defense when your rights in the digital world come under attack. EFF champions user privacy, free expression, and innovation through impact litigation, policy analysis, grassroots activism, and technology development. We work to ensure that rights and freedoms are enhanced and protected as our use of technology grows.

Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)

EJI is committed to ending mass incarceration in the US and challenging racial and economic injustice.

Founded in 1989 by Bryan Stevenson, a widely acclaimed public interest lawyer and bestselling author of Just Mercy, EJI is a private, 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that provides legal representation to people who have been illegally convicted, unfairly sentenced, or abused in state jails and prisons. We challenge the death penalty and excessive punishment and we provide re-entry assistance to formerly incarcerated people.

EJI works with communities that have been marginalized by poverty and discouraged by unequal treatment. We are committed to changing the narrative about race in America. EJI produces groundbreaking reports, an award-winning wall calendar, and short films that explore our nation’s history of racial injustice, and we recently launched an ambitious national effort to create new spaces, markers, and memorials that address the legacy of slavery, lynching, and racial segregation, which shapes many issues today.

EJI provides research and recommendations to assist advocates and policymakers in the critically important work of criminal justice reform. We publish reports, discussion guides, and other educational materials, and our staff conduct educational tours and presentations for thousands of students, teachers, faith leaders, professional associations, community groups, and international visitors every year.

Equal Justice Initiative

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).

Climate Change Fund

We're finding solutions to the world’s most pressing problems through evidence-led and thoughtful approaches to impact.

Founders Pledge is a community of over 1,700 tech entrepreneurs finding and funding solutions to the world’s most pressing problems. Through cutting-edge research, world-class advice, and end-to-end giving infrastructure, we empower members to maximise their philanthropic impact by pledging a meaningful portion of their proceeds to charitable causes. Since 2015, our members have pledged over $7 billion and donated more than $700 million globally. As a non-profit, we are grateful to be community-supported. Together, we are committed to doing immense good.

Founders Pledge

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Advisor, co-founder & ex-COO of Every.org. We're all connected in this world and nonprofits help with healing.