This is an update to my previous post on changes in the funding landscape for wild animal welfare. My goal is to provide context for people considering donating to @Wild_Animal_Initiative (WAI^[1]), so I discuss the implications for the movement as a whole, but I focus on the implications for WAI.

Summary

• Background: Good Ventures is requiring Open Philanthropy (OP) to exit the wild animal welfare space.
• Recent development: The Navigation Fund (TNF) plans to fill the gap left by OP, at least through the end of 2026.
• Implications for the movement: This extends the NYU Wild Animal Welfare Program's runway by about 1.5 years. If TNF continues to support the movement, they could play a pivotal role both by scaling existing initiatives and by launching new ones.
• Implications for Wild Animal Initiative: This extends our total runway by 3-6 months. While we hope TNF will continue funding us beyond 2026, we don't think we can rely on them. So while this has moderately reduced the urgency, it leaves us in roughly the same position as when I last posted: We need to develop a more sustainable funding base, so our organizational strategy will be responsive both to the total amount raised and to how many people donate, which means smaller-than-million-dollar donors will have an especially high impact this year.

Recent developments

Recap: OP is exiting wild animal welfare

This summer, we learned that Good Ventures would no longer allow Open Philanthropy to fund work on wild animal welfare. (OP is WAI's biggest funder, supporting about half our annual budget.) I wrote about that here.

Support for neglected animals

TNF has made a non-binding commitment to sustain funding through 2026 for all of the recurring grantees that the OP Farm Animal Welfare Program will no longer be allowed to fund, including the affected wild animal welfare organizations: Wild Animal Initiative and the New York University Wild Animal Welfare Program. This does not affect Animal Ethics or the wild animal welfare program at Rethink Priorities, because those organizations had not been receiving OP funding for wild animal welfare.

Support for Wild Animal Initiative

For WAI, that equates to six more months of OP's level of funding, i.e., the amount of time between the end of our current OP grant on June 30, 2026 and the end of the 2026 calendar year. Our current OP grant is for $2 million per year, so TNF is planning to make us a grant of ~$1 million.

Potential future support

In late 2026, TNF will decide whether to support WAI (and the other OP alums) through 2027. They plan to do the same in later years as well. At this point, we’re quite uncertain about the probability of them renewing our grant. We’ve gotten positive signs, but TNF only launched last year, so there’s plenty of room for their plans and priorities to change. My current best case is there’s a moderate chance they’ll renew our grant for 2027 and a low chance they’ll renew after that.

Implications for the movement

Sustaining the NYU program

OP’s funding for the NYU Wild Animal Welfare Program goes through August of 2025. TNF's support gave them another 1.5 years of runway at a level of about $200,000 per year, preserving a key actor in the emerging field of wild animal welfare (but note that they have some exciting plans for growth that remain unfunded). As the world's first academic program dedicated to wild animal welfare, they're a useful testament to the field's credibility at a key point in its growth. By taking a big-tent approach (sciences and humanities, welfare and rights, naturogenic and anthropogenic harms, etc.), they offer opportunities for a much wider set of scholars to contribute. Counterintuitively (to me at least), their pluralism has actually made it easier for us (WAI) to advocate for our priorities: When they take over the role of welcoming others to the table, we can focus on being a clear voice at the table.

Keeping the door open to growth

OP had been gradually increasing and diversifying their funding for wild animal welfare since 2019, when they made their first grant in the space. We had hoped that OP would not only maintain their support for the cause, but also continuing increasing it -- both by investing more in WAI and the NYU WAWP and by helping new initiatives get off the ground (e.g., a field trial of wildlife contraception; a multi-university research consortium). While we continue to attract new donors from all walks of life, TNF is the only funder we know of that both has the capacity to give at a comparable scale to OP (i.e., $3+ million per year) and has at least some interest in our unusual approach to helping wildlife.

We're quite uncertain about how likely TNF is to increase its support for wild animal welfare. They clearly appreciate that they're in a unique position to save several high-impact projects, and they seem enthusiastic about continuing to do what Open Philanthropy can’t. However, wild animal welfare was not a priority for TNF before the OP exit, and their clearly defined priorities for farm animal welfare suggest a wariness of scope creep.

However, even if TNF were to play the movement-scaling role that OP was poised to play, it won't be soon. They won't be making any more grants in the WAW space at least until 2027.

Implications for WAI

Extended runway

TNF's pledged grant of $1 million would extend our total runway by 3 months if we sustain our current level of expenditures (~$4 million per year), or by 5 months if we cut our budget by 40% (~$2.4 million per year). We won't make final budget decisions until early next year (i.e., once we know how much we've raised and how diversified our funding is after the end-of-year giving season), but the latter scenario seems more likely (see below).

Remaining risk

As I explained above, I think there's something like a low-moderate chance that TNF will fund wild animal welfare beyond 2026. Specifically, I think it's more likely than not that they'll extend funding for WAI through 2027, and less likely than not that they'll extend funding for WAI through 2028.

Reducing reliance

Our goal is to be able to fully fund our budget without OP or TNF by the end of 2027.

We will likely  need to make substantial budget cuts; doing so will lower the funding bar we need to reach and give us more time to reach it. Our latest guess is that most of these cuts will be to our Grants Program. That would mean keeping most or all of our staff, but cutting 50-80% of the funding we give to academic researchers, drastically reducing both the amount of research that gets done and the number of new people joining the field.

To avoid putting ourselves back in the position of relying on a single funder, our upcoming budgeting decisions will depend on not only how much money we raise, but also how diversified our funding is. That means gifts from smaller donors will have an unusually large impact. The less you normally donate, the more disproportionate your impact will be, but the case still applies to everyone who isn’t a multi-million-dollar foundation. Specifically, our goal is to raise $240,000 by the end of the year from donors giving $10k or less.

1. ^{^}

   "WAI" is an awkward acronym, I know. "Why" sounds like a question, and "Double-you ay aye" is so many syllables you hardly get the benefit of abbreviation. We've decided to embrace the "Why" pronunciation because it's easiest. And it's kind of fitting, after all: Despite all our uncertainty about wild animal welfare, "Why should we try to help?" is the one question we definitely know the answer to.