Disclaimer: This blog post focuses on a new piece of research from Rethink Priorities. I was not involved with the funding or execution of this research, and therefore write this piece merely as a consumer. However, I am the Executive Director of Giving Green and a board member of Rethink Priorities, and acknowledge that these affiliations may bias my...
I am writing up two charity ideas I’ve wanted to investigate, but haven’t been able to, in the hopes someone will investigate them further. If you end up investigating either, I'd be most interested to see what conclusions you come to!
Vulture preservation as a global health intervention
Since the mid 1990's the vulture population in India has been rapidly declining. The reason is due to a few chemicals which are fed to livestock, which is highly poisonous to vultures.
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Summary
1. With new funding potentially entering the effective altruism ecosystem, we wanted to estimate how much more the wild animal welfare (WAW) movement could productively absorb. We asked organizations with a public, dedicated WAW workstream to estimate their own room for more funding (RFMF). Although this does not capture the whole movement, we believe it captures a substantive fraction of it.
2. Summed across the five organizations that took part, the estimates point to...
Hi, in the city I am presiding there are a lot of homeless people.
A lot of these people are near grocery stores. Considering meat is a high protein source, like if you buy turkey slices, I feel like that lasts (compared to buying something like tofu). So I was wondering whether its okay to buy meat to give it to a homeless person. This forum seems to think veganism is highly impactful so I don't know.
Or perhaps, rather than donating meat, I could donate money to them? I don't know if that is good either because there isn't really much of a big difference if a homeless person buys meat vs I buy the meat for them.
Furthermore, there are some instances where some argue that homeless people would spend the money on drugs and alcohol. But when I'm not in a position to give food (because I don't have it with me currently), I donate like a dollar. Would this be considered good or bad?