I donated to the Malaria Consortium because GiveWell ranks it as one of their top charities in terms of evidence-base and cost-effectiveness.

 
Climate Change needs to be addressed now!
That being said, it can be difficult to know which organizations to donate to. That’s why I’m donating to the Climate Change Fund by Founders Pledge. They do incredible research on the efficacy of different climate change organizations, so I can trust that my gift will go to the best methods of tackling the issue. 


I trust Founders Pledge's research and decision-making on how best to spend my donation to support high-impact solutions for climate change.

As COVID showed us, healthcare cannot only be a local issue. VillageReach does an amazing job of bringing high quality healthcare into hard-to-reach places.

I use Wikipedia every day and learn so much from it, and I've never had to pay a penny. Thank you, Wikipedia!

I've been really impressed by GiveDirectly's pioneering and research-driven approach to using direct cash transfers to help people climb out of poverty. They've helped show that just giving money to people so they can make their own decisions about what they need is not only empowering but also one of the most potent forms of aid. Thank you, GiveDirectly!

When I was in first grade, I planted a tree in my backyard that I got from school for Earth Day. I loved watching it get bigger and bigger. Today it's taller than me!

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

Mary's Place believes that no one's child should sleep outside. We provide safe, inclusive shelter and services that support women, children, and families on their journey out of homelessness.

Since 1999, Mary’s Place has helped hundreds of women and families move out of homelessness into more stable situations. We provide safe, inclusive shelter and services that support women, children and families on their journey out of homelessness. Across nine emergency family shelters in King County, we keep struggling families together, inside, and safe when they have no place else to go, providing shelter, services, resources, community, and hope.  

Meals, showers, and laundry facilities–children are connected with schools. In the evening, families in shelter eat dinner, do homework, socialize, and prepare for the week ahead. Each day, Housing Specialists work with families to address barriers and empower parents to build family stability, secure housing, and prepare for employment. Kids do homework, participate in fun and enriching activities, and go on outings and adventures in Kids Club. 

Children with life threatening illnesses should not be living in cars and tents awaiting chemo or dialysis. Families who have lost everything in the struggle to get their child well have a place to receive care and support in shelter at Mary's Place Popsicle Place shelter program.

Still, capacity is limited and hundreds of families are outside each night in cars and tents. Mary’s Place Diversion program and team of mobile outreach specialists work with unsheltered families where they are, to address barriers and help move them quickly into stable housing, bypassing a shelter stay.

The women’s drop-in Day Center in downtown Seattle provides meals, showers, laundry, access to resources, safety and  relationship to over a hundred women each day.

The support of the community keeps our doors open. The path out of homelessness can be long and challenging. Each person that finds housing is ultimately responsible for his or her accomplishment, but often a community of support, education, and advocacy has helped along the way. 

Mary's Place

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

VillageReach transforms health care delivery to reach everyone. 

VillageReach transforms health care delivery to reach everyone, so each person has the health care they need to thrive. 

Last year, we increases the availability of quality health care for more than 58 million people across sub-Saharan Africa by increasing access to medicines and vaccines, improving the capacity of the health workforce and enabling better decision-making for patients, health workers and policy-makers.

VillageReach

Covering America’s criminal justice system.

The Marshall Project is a nonpartisan, nonprofit news organization that seeks to create and sustain a sense of national urgency about the U.S. criminal justice system. We achieve this through award-winning journalism, partnerships with other news outlets and public forums. In all of our work we strive to educate and enlarge the audience of people who care about the state of criminal justice.

The Marshall Project

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. 

TerraPraxis

A free, collaborative, multilingual Internet encyclopedia.

The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation is to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally.  In collaboration with a network of chapters, the Foundation provides the essential infrastructure and an organizational framework for the support and development of multilingual wiki projects and other endeavors which serve this mission. The Foundation will make and keep useful information from its projects available on the Internet free of charge, in perpetuity.

Wikipedia

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

The destruction of healthy forest systems causes so many different problems. Trees provide a habitat for animals, purify water sources, control flooding and erosion and help to replenish the soil with nutrients needed for farming. When farmers can’t grow anything their farms fail and they have no option but to move to the overcrowded cities looking for work. Often they have to resort to selling themselves or their families into slavery just to survive.

We start by hiring the local community to plant trees. This gives them a decent income so they can provide for their families again. As the reforestation effort goes on, healthy forests begin to emerge and all the negative effects of deforestation begin to disappear.

Eden Reforestation Projects

The Pacific Rim Institute equips people and communities to live sustainably and care for creation. Based on Whidbey Island, WA.

Pacific Rim Institute for Environmental Stewardship

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

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Co-founder & Head of Product @ Every.org. Especially excited by small nonprofits doing big things for underprivileged people and our planet.