In June this year, Good Ventures announced that it would stop supporting certain sub-causes, and not expand into new cause areas by default. Neither Good Ventures nor Open Philanthropy included a public list of the sub-causes or organisations they were no longer supporting.
Both Good Ventures, and Alexander Berger, on behalf of Open Philanthropy, expressed (as they have before) that they would like to see more diversity of funding across the cause areas that they support.
From the Good Ventures blog: “Our hope is that other donors will be in a position to take on some of these opportunities and that, over the longer term, this will lead to healthier and more resilient ecosystems with more diversified bases of funding.”
It’s been a few months now. Wild Animal Initiative have shared the effect that the funding shift had on them, and later announced that their funding gap was being filled by The Navigation Fund, through 2026. But I haven't heard from many other organisations.
Knowledge of the other areas where funding has been cut, and alternative funders who have stepped in, is currently diffused through the community. I think it would be valuable to share this information more widely. This could help donors find out about important funding gaps, and organisations find out about possible alternative funders.
If you represent an organisation, and you are able to share your story, please do so in the answers below. Thank you!
PS— in my opinion the EA movement wouldn’t be as vibrant and capable as it is today without Good Ventures and Open Philanthropy. I doubt people would take it as such, but I’d like to clarify that I’m not asking this question as a rhetorical dig at Good Ventures. Getting more information here would be useful, regardless of your opinions on Good Ventures’ decision to shift funding from certain sub-causes.
It would be great if you could provide evidence (beyond your word) for that! Even saying that you talked to people at OP, or any other epistemic status would be helpful.
I have talked to multiple people at OP and close to OP who seem to agree that OP is very hesitant to fund anything right-coded. The correlations are extremely obvious, Dustin has made relatively concrete statements to this affect, and I really can't reconcile this kind of extremely sparse and confident public communication with the very obvious and clear feedback I get from people working closely with OP and looking at OPs actual granting track record.
I am also frustrated with then Max giving as a counter-example a Norwegian think tank, which of course has nothing to do with what I meant by left/right coded, since what it means to be right or left coded of course is drastically different in different countries, and the underlying cause here is US political polarization and reputation management, which does not generally extend to foreign countries.
Look, it's really hard to provide any kind of commentary or transparency on organizations like OP. The communication around the whole Dustin/GV/OP shift has been extremely limited, and the power-dynamics are extremely tense and messy. It really doesn't help to have someone show up and just plain contradict something I said without any further evidence, arguing purely from authority.
Like, what is the next step of this conversation supposed to be? I have shared my observations, I commented extensively on why I believe what I believe, and I clarified what I mean by my statements in a huge amount of detail, only for you to show up and give a contextless "This is false". I think it's useful for you to share what you believe, but I think it's really clear that in this domain it is extremely rarely appropriate to just make a blanket statement like this. At least say something like "I don't currently think this is true" as opposed to this weirdly aggressive, authoritative and contextless statement from high up.
Ideally you would say something like "while it is true that OP has become much more hesitant to fund right-leaning political organizations, I think saying that OP does not want to fund 'anyone even close to right of center' is too strong. It is true there is a large left-leaning bias, but I think we will see OP overcome those in many cases if something looks good enough by theirs and Dustin's values, such that describing it as much as a hard line as you are doing here seems more heat than light-producing".
Like, I am pretty sure you believe something like this, because you are not blind and you see the same evidence as I have, but your comment sure does not communicate that.