Center for Reducing Suffering's post for Marginal Funding Week 2025.
Quick Summary
CRS is a non-profit organization that aims to alleviate and prevent the worst forms of suffering, in the present and in the long-term future, across all sentient beings. We believe reducing suffering is an urgent moral priority and in this post we will share how your support can help us expand our work.
What We Do
We conduct research with the goal of understanding how to best reduce and prevent suffering. Our outputs include books and essays that are accessible free of charge to everyone.
Here are some:
In terms of content and focus areas, we concentrate on suffering-focused ethics and avoiding worst-case outcomes such as s-risks. S-risks are scenarios in which future suffering occurs on an astronomical scale. These risks can arise in several ways, such as:
- Authoritarian global rule supported by advanced surveillance technologies, potentially enabling oppression and cruelty that persists across generations with little opportunity for meaningful reform.
- The rise of extremist belief systems, which, if embedded in influential future institutions or powerful AI agents, could normalise large-scale cruelty or retribution.
- The deliberate infliction of suffering by malicious actors wielding advanced technologies, such as tools designed for psychological torment, coercive manipulation, or refined forms of torture.
- The mistreatment or exploitation of artificial beings capable of sentience, such as through coerced labour, harmful experimentation, or large-scale simulations run without moral safeguards.
- Escalating strategic conflict among highly capable AI systems, where attempts at coercion, retaliation, or dominance could lock in enormous and possibly long-lasting suffering.
- The spread of wild animal suffering or factory farms (or similar high-tech analogues) into space.
A key priority in our research is to better understand these risks and to identify strategies that might prevent them.
What Has Happened in 2025?
We are growing!
We are delighted to have four new members joining our team. In addition to the existing trio consisting of Magnus Vinding, Tobias Baumann and Alistair Webster, CRS was recently joined by Ada Sevimli, Alistair Stewart, David Veldran and Zoe Roy-Stang.
Towards the end of 2025 we have increased our efforts on communicating our research thoughtfully, building a community of thinkers, and prospective collaborators, as well as reaching out to existing and new audiences in novel ways.
For example, we are launching a Substack to make our work more accessible. Here is our announcement post, and our first blog piece is 'Building the Fortress: Reframing Suffering-Focused Ethics' by David Veldran.
Furthermore, Magnus Vinding recently finished the first draft of his forthcoming book Compassionate Purpose, a highly ambitious “ethics meets self-help” book that will be published early next year. The book seeks to address some of the personal challenges associated with reducing suffering, and points to evidence-based suggestions for how we can become better agents for change. You can read some draft chapters here.
We have also published new essays on reducing suffering, such as:
- Addressing challenges for s-risk reduction: Toward positive common-ground proxies by Teo Ajantaival
- Reducing suffering given long-term cluelessness by Magnus Vinding
- A virtue-based approach to reducing suffering given long-term cluelessness by Magnus Vinding.
What We Plan to Do with Marginal Funding?
Every contribution to CRS supports the priority of reducing suffering and helps direct more work and investment to the field overall.
Your financial support will be channeled into four key areas:
- Fellowship Programme: We will run introductory fellowships, supporting and empowering new researchers to explore neglected questions, thereby building essential research capacity.
- Research: We plan to further advance our research and produce new publications to deepen the understanding of s-risks and suffering-focused ethics.
- Expand Our Reach: We will enhance our outreach and community-building efforts targeting engaged audiences. This means improving our communications, increasing our participation in major conferences, and actively fostering a vibrant network of people dedicated to suffering reduction.
- Innovate and Solidify Foundations: We will explore new and impactful ways of working toward suffering reduction, which will both broaden the field's reach and strengthen its long-term health and stability.
The Size of Our Funding Gap
Our yearly budget has historically been in the ballpark of USD 125k, but due to our recent growth, we expect next year’s budget to be at least USD 200k.
Taking into account our current reserves of USD 75k, we estimate that our funding gap is at least USD 150k. This level of funding would allow us to reach 12 months of runway, thus providing the necessary financial stability to realise our ambitious plans.
Additional funding beyond this would still be valuable and could support further scaling, though it may be deployed at a later stage.
Funding CRS
If you share the priority of reducing suffering, we kindly invite you to support our work this Giving Season.
We deeply appreciate contributions of any amount. Your generosity will be used to sustain and expand our efforts across research, outreach, and community-building.
To make a donation and find details on tax-efficient giving options, please visit our website: centerforreducingsuffering.org.
If you have any further questions about supporting us, please do not hesitate to contact our team at alistair@reducingsuffering.org or ada@reducingsuffering.org