Machine intelligence is a neglected risk for humanity. #FallGivingChallenge

Catalyzing resilient solutions, scaled to meet the climate challenge.

CATF is a nonprofit organization dedicated to reducing atmospheric pollution through research, advocacy, and private sector collaboration.

Clean Air Task Force

Animal Charity Evaluators helps people help the most animals.

Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit registered in the United States with a globally distributed team dedicated to impactful animal advocacy. Our mission is to find and promote the most effective ways to help animals. We work toward that mission by evaluating charities, sharing our findings, awarding grants to organizations and promising projects, and fundraising for our recommended charities and grantees. Our organization opposes all systems of oppression and recognizes that they are connected and mutually reinforcing. Ultimately, our vision is a world in which no individual is given less than full moral consideration on the basis of any morally irrelevant feature of their identity, including species membership.

ACE is proud to be considered a leader in the effective animal advocacy movement. Our research comparing the different approaches to reducing the suffering of animals has led to rigorously reviewing charities that work to end factory farming and create meaningful change for farmed and wild animals. Through our Recommend Charity Fund, we have raised and distributed $8.1M to our effective recommended charities. Our Movement Grants program has awarded $5.3M to promising animal advocacy projects around the globe. Since we began tracking this metric in 2014, we estimate that ACE has helped to influence nearly $60M within the animal advocacy movement.

Thanks for helping ACE help animals!

Animal Charity Evaluators

One of GiveWell's top charities for the past several years, AMF provides anti-malarial bednets to people in need. 

From Givewell: 
What do they do? AMF (againstmalaria.com) provides funding for long-lasting insecticide-treated net (LLIN) distributions (for protection against malaria) in developing countries. (More)

Does it work? There is strong evidence that distributing LLINs reduces child mortality and malaria cases. AMF conducts post-distribution surveys of completed distributions to determine whether LLINs have reached their intended destinations and how long they remain in good condition. AMF's post-distribution surveys have generally found positive results but have some methodological limitations. (More)

What do you get for your dollar? We estimate that the cost to purchase and distribute an AMF-funded net is $4.95, or $4.65 excluding in-kind contributions from governments. The numbers of deaths averted and other benefits of distributing LLINs are a function of a number of difficult-to-estimate factors, which we discuss in detail below. (More)

Is there room for more funding? We believe that AMF is likely to be constrained by funding. We estimate that AMF could use up to an additional $37.8 million to support LLIN distributions that will occur between now and late 2023. 

AMF is recommended because of its:

Focus on a program with excellent evidence of effectiveness and cost-effectiveness.
Processes for ensuring that nets reach their intended recipients and monitoring whether they remain in homes and in good condition over the long-term.
Room for more funding – we believe AMF will be able to use additional funds to deliver additional nets.
Transparency – AMF shares significant information about its work with us and we are able to closely follow and understand its work.

The Against Malaria Foundation

Protecting sight and fighting for disability rights

Sightsavers works in more than 30 countries worldwide, focusing on Africa and Asia.
We work with local, regional, national and international partners and governments. With their help, we distribute treatments to prevent disease, carry out eye operations, advocate for disability rights and improve health services to create sustainable development projects. 

Our vision is of a world where avoidable blindness is eliminated, and people with disabilities have the same rights as everyone else. We can only get there thanks to the generosity of our supporters, so we aim to be as transparent as possible so you can be sure your money is being used wisely.

Sightsavers

FLI catalyzes and supports research and initiatives for safeguarding life and developing optimistic visions of the future.

To catalyze and support research and initiatives for safeguarding life and developing optimistic visions of the future, including positive ways for humanity to steer its own course considering new technologies and challenges.

Future of Life Institute

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

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. 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.
- **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.


To learn more about our approach to Animal Welfare as a cause area, please visit [www.founderspledge.com](https://www.founderspledge.com/research/topic/animal-welfare).

Founders Pledge: 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

The Centre for Effective Altruism helps to grow and support the effective altruism community.

Effective altruism is about using evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible, and taking action on that basis.

The Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) is a charity dedicated to building and nurturing a global community of people who are thinking carefully about the world’s biggest problems and taking impactful action to solve them.

We hope that this community can help to build a radically better world: by connecting students and young professionals with relevant experts, we can help them consider their values and find an effective way to contribute that is a good fit for their skills and inclinations.

Centre for Effective Altruism USA

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

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 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.