Read the grantmaking strategy as a visualized PDF here. 

Over the last year and a half, the Animal Welfare Fund (AWF) has implemented organizational improvements, such as increased staffing, communications, evaluation, and fundraising efforts, enabling us to expand the scope and sustainability of our impact. To capitalize on these changes, we are refining our 3-year grantmaking strategy to maximize our support for non-human animals. In this update, we describe the role we believe AWF can play in the animal welfare space, outline our approach to key trade-offs, and summarize our funding priorities in each of our focus areas. While we planned the strategy for the next 3 years, we expect that through this period our strategy will inevitably evolve as the landscape of opportunities changes and we learn about the impact of the work we supported; we plan to revisit our portfolio annually and publish updates if we make any significant changes.

The Problem We See

Most animal suffering occurs among groups of animals, regions, and supply chains where animal welfare has received disproportionately little attention from philanthropists, governments, businesses, and even the animal advocacy movement. In many of these areas, animals are raised and sold through independent, often smaller-scale farmers, traders, distributors, processors, and local markets, and governments often lack the resources or authority to monitor conditions or enforce standards. These areas also tend to have fewer validated interventions and less developed animal advocacy movements. 

Barriers to making progress

We believe that making progress in these areas requires testing novel ideas and scaling proven ones. However, there are numerous barriers to making this progress, including:

• Many existing funding sources favour large, established organisations in familiar networks, doing interventions with established track records.
• Many large, established organisations have built strategic positions that would make it hard for them to add novel experimental approaches to their portfolio.
• Individual donors lack the capacity to vet all high-potential experiments and assess how these opportunities complement existing efforts or fill critical gaps in the ecosystem.
• Talented individuals in neglected regions face cultural, language, and network barriers to accessing funding.
• There is a thin pipeline of highly-agentic entrepreneurs in animal welfare with the support to try unproven but promising approaches.

Even in areas that receive a lot of attention, critical opportunities can fall through the cracks when they are in difficult-to-reach geographies, time-sensitive, or not yet ready to absorb the minimum amount of funding other grantmakers provide because they lack necessary structures, staff, or maturity.

Our Role in the Movement

AWF will remain a place where promising ideas to help animals have access to opportunities at any time and where work that would provide counterfactual, cost-effective impact will be supported when and where it is needed most.

We believe we can further add value to the ecosystem by:

• Identifying high-leverage opportunities in neglected areas through active scouting and open applications. We proactively monitor the landscape, build relationships with potential grantees, and directly reach out to promising individuals or organisations to create cost-effective opportunities that might not otherwise be initiated, while at the same time being exposed to a wide range of movement initiatives through an always-open application form.
• Prioritising early-stage work and helping novel interventions scale until other funders can take over.
• Scaling proven work and making urgent grants that other funders won’t or can’t support, either because the work falls outside their portfolios or because of time-limited grantmaking cycles.
• Strengthening the ecosystem by supporting grantees with monitoring and evaluation; linking applicants to co-funders, collaborators, and advisors; and de-risking novel areas for follow-on funders.
• Pushing frontiers by actively seeking interventions to address emerging or newly recognised sources of suffering, ensuring these novel interventions can compete with existing opportunities.

By playing this role, we aim to provide value to:

• ​​Donors: Those seeking to create counterfactual impact, who value evaluation based on reasoning, evidence and deep movement expertise and want to leverage our connections to co-funders, experts, and applicants to move funds quickly to the best opportunities.
• Grantees: Especially early-stage, risk-tolerant, regionally isolated, or niche-focused projects, including, but not exclusive to, those without access to major philanthropic capital. We offer an open, rolling, and low-bureaucracy application process, and sustainable funding for grantees achieving their goals and making an impact.
• Other Grantmakers: We provide rigorous evaluation and de-risking of more neglected, unproven areas, enabling larger donors to scale proven interventions. We also provide partnerships to co-fund projects that could not make progress with support from a single source alone.

Our Goals

We exist to reduce animal suffering by rigorously evaluating, funding, and catalyzing the most effective interventions for the world's most neglected animals, supporting the people and programs with the greatest potential to create lasting impact.

We fund projects that:

• Reduce suffering and improve the lives of animals in factory farms.
• Advance the end of factory farming.
• Address other large-scale animal suffering (e.g., in the wild).
• Support these aims through research, meta-work, movement building and coordination, and piloting novel interventions.

More specifically, key long-term objectives we are working towards include (but are not limited to):

• End the confinement of egg-laying hens in cages globally, focusing on accelerating this transition in the Global South
• Improve the welfare of aquatic animals in the Global South by establishing and scaling on-farm welfare improvements
• End the worst forms of death for billions of animals by making effective, humane slaughter for farmed shrimp the default standard in European and U.S. supply chains
• Protect numerous and neglected species from intensive confinement systems as new forms of animal agriculture emerge
• Reduce wild animal suffering at scale by validating and implementing cost-effective interventions in urban and agricultural settings
• Close the gap between where animals suffer most and where funding flows by scaling welfare interventions across Asia, Africa, and Latin America - the world's largest producing regions

Key Pillars for Delivering Impact

We maintain a balanced portfolio that includes both:

• Evidence-based grants with a high probability of significant impact (low-risk opportunities)
• Exceptionally high expected value opportunities with lower chances of success (medium to high-risk opportunities)

AWF aims for maximizing “total” diversity of approaches addressing animal suffering rather than “AWF’s” diversity, which means that AWF will specialise in particular segments as long as there are good grantmakers who prioritize other areas we find important. In fact, in many cases, AWF’s success will be contingent on other grantmakers successfully holding their own distinct strategic position in the ecosystem. Our strategy includes a focus on flexibility and frequent reevaluation of our strategic priorities to ensure we remain supportive of neglected opportunities if other funders’ priorities change.

AWF will devote the greatest effort to finding, creating, funding, and supporting opportunities with these key factors in mind:

1. Large neglected groups of animals: Shrimp, other invertebrates, wild animals in large numbers, and farmed animals (including chickens and fish) in the Global South. These collectively make up the bulk of current and projected future animal suffering but receive relatively little attention from other major funders. While we believe searching for opportunities in areas that do not already have dedicated funding is a key instrument for finding counterfactual value, we will not support more fringe areas unless we find opportunities with promising paths to impact.
    
2. Global South focus, Global North opportunism: We believe our active effort should be placed on work based anywhere in the world that affects farmed animals in the Global South because of its large share of animal suffering and relatively small amount of support from animal welfare funders. We remain excited to support work affecting animals in the Global North when important gaps or opportunities emerge. 
    
3. Intervention pluralism: We don’t believe there is one silver bullet that solves all problems in animal suffering. As we focus on paths to impact that influence institutional actors rather than individuals, we will support various reinforcing ways of targeting different stakeholders. This includes, but is not limited to, corporate engagement, producer/farmer engagement, government advocacy, research and development of technologies, and movement-building.
    
4. Strategic funding across organizational stages: For large groups of neglected animals (shrimp, other invertebrates, wild animals), where other funding doesn’t exist, we actively offer support, from piloting novel interventions to scaling organizations that can deliver significant impact. For less neglected groups of animals (chicken and fish), we focus primarily on early and mid-stage work, with exceptions for top-tier opportunities when funding gaps threaten promising work of later-stage organisations (e.g., a sudden unexpected shortfall in a keystone campaign).
    
5. Uncovering new areas: We will maintain some share of funding for exploring new opportunities that might offer the same or larger counterfactual impact as existing areas (e.g., humane pest control, pain reduction, wild animal interventions).

Areas where AWF does not expect to provide future support  

Given what other grantmakers are doing, the scale of the problem, or the current evidence on tractability, we do not expect our support to deliver additional impact in:

• Farm sanctuaries and direct animal care,
• Farm transitions,
• Groups of animals suffering in small numbers or animal groups already sufficiently covered by other grantmakers relative to the size of the problem e.g., large wild animals like elephants and whales, animals used in experiments or entertainment, companion animals, farmed cows and horses,
• Individual outreach,
• Institutional meat reduction or alternative protein advocacy and development,
• Late-stage/large organizational operational expenses, unless within our key focus areas.

Learning, Evaluation, Adaptation

Track success

AWF will track the success of grants to discover interventions that lead to measurable changes in laws, corporate policies, or welfare practices. We will double down on what is working, support promising projects to overcome obstacles to progress and monitor their outcomes, and help talent to shift to more promising work if their experiment fails.

Review portfolio annually

AWF will revisit its portfolio balance annually to respond to shifts in the funding landscape, new evidence, and changes in peer funders’ priorities. We intend to refresh the entire strategy in three years.

Respond to the ecosystem 

We are prepared to step into areas deprioritised by other funders if this is necessary to achieve optimally impactful ecosystem coverage and to step out of areas that become crowded and no longer offer high impact.

Join us in making impact for animals

• Provide funds to make this strategy a reality: You can increase your impact on animal welfare by contributing to the fund.

• Read our funding proposal here.
• Give us feedback: You can provide us with anonymous feedback on how AWF could improve here.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the experts, grantees, fund advisors, AWF fund managers and communication staff who all contribute to this work.