Summary
- The animal welfare movement has already seen an influx in funding and should prepare for the possibility of more.
- The EA Animal Welfare Fund is encouraging those working in animal advocacy to actively set aside time and resources now to concretely plan for scaling sustainably, and we’ll support you in doing that.
- We’re requesting advocates set concrete ambitious goals and submit plans to be able to achieve them.
- This is a call for more ambitious concrete plans, not for lowering the bar for the sake of spending more.
- Our strategic priorities are here. We’ll be launching a series of calls for proposals stemming from these (see our first on cage-free here), but if you have related ideas, don’t wait. You’re encouraged to apply here and reach out to us to discuss here [email protected].
A call to prepare for scaling impact
The animal welfare space is looking to absorb an influx of funding this year, and could see more funding in future, as with other cause areas. We've seen a lot of online discussion and excitement about this, but relatively few concrete action plans proportional to the significance of the opportunity. We’re not talking about plans to absorb trillions of dollars to buy Tyson Foods and build cultivated meat on the Moon. But we are talking about multi-year plans about how you would 2x spending and sustain that level of spending without impact dropping through the floor. We expect such grants that meet the bar from AWF in particular will range from $100k to $5M+, with most in the $250k-$2M range. Most grants will align with our strategic priorities.
Importantly, we’re not just talking about increasing impact in 2026, we’re looking to build foundations to grow the movement’s productive absorption capacity for 2027 and beyond. At some increase in money, deployed marginal cost-effectiveness will decline. However, we’d like that to be because the opportunity space has been so exploited that only the small or hard to reach sources of impact remain, rather than we’re unable to tap into large fertile grounds for impact because of a lack of talent or organisational bottlenecks or lack of planning. Let's avoid the absorption problem.
So this is a direct question to grantees, potential applicants, and key stakeholders: how are you planning to scale?
- Have you developed specific scaling OKRs and roadmaps?
- Have you written down what you would do, concretely, if your budget doubled or tripled next year?
- Are you planning not just to grow what you already do, but to make a step-change to match a larger funding environment?
If you haven't, that's the work we're asking you to start and accelerate.
We're offering support
- We'd like to see these plans and, if helpful, discuss based on what we're seeing in the funding landscape and wider ecosystem.
- We’ll be releasing a series of public and private calls for proposals over the coming months to stimulate action around some key gaps and actionable opportunities we see for reducing animal suffering.
- We’re strongly encouraging applicants to consider a much wider set of asks beyond their own core near-term programmatic goals. We expect there are many narrowly scoped quick actions one could take costing anywhere from $5K-$100K that could facilitate fully fledged requests for larger amounts of funding later e.g.,
- Buying time and expertise to plan for scaling
- Run or attend forums and workshops specifically on scaling strategy internally within your organisation or alongside partners in your space.
- Hire or contract executive assistants and a chief of staff to free up leadership time for scaling planning.
- Talk to career coaches and advising services about what else you could be doing to achieve impact.
- Apply for funding specifically for you to leave what you’re doing to set something else up.
- Commission a dedicated scaling sprint e.g., a 4-8 week engagement with an external strategist to produce a costed "2x budget" roadmap.
- Apply for multi-year grants, with concrete plans on what you want to pilot and test.
- Draft multi-organisation pooled project plans and grant applications.
- Exchange key personnel and ideas with incubators like AIM's animal incubation round, RP’s neglected animal project founders program, Sentient Futures Project Incubator and other incubators and platforms.
- Prepare your organisation for scaling
- Work with the scaling capacity builders to level up your HR, finance, management, decision-making structures, e.g., see the list of providers in Hive's list. And this includes the capacity building orgs too! You will need to ensure you can absorb this extra demand.
- Promote internally and backfill roles to elevate people who can take programmes to the next level.
- Paying for upskilling and training of your existing talent, to take on leadership positions, larger responsibilities, to add new capabilities to your organisation.
- Recruit 1–2 board members who've actually scaled an organisation from ~$1M to $10M+.
- Stand up monitoring & evaluation capacity before you pour money into an intervention.
- Spinning off departments or programmatic areas into their own entities so they can perform nimbly outside of a larger bureaucracy.
- Don’t allow talent to become the bottleneck
- Contract professionals from outside the movement, with lower mission alignment, to deliver expert services and capacity, but with few strings attached.
- Fund recruiter retainers and headhunting aimed at adjacent sectors e.g., supply chain logistics, R&D, politics, marketing.
- Build low-commitment on-ramps: paid advisory engagements, board seats, fractional/interim senior roles, and short fellowships that let a mid-career professional contribute without a full career leap.
- Running fellowships and outreach to increase the availability of talent to draw upon.
- Paying for career transitions and to shut down programs that aren't performing or scalable, while retaining talent.
- Don’t just increase your headcount
- Increase tactical spending not just permanent salaried headcount e.g., events, equipment, campaign materials, PR agencies and advertising (physical and digital), and legal support.
- Consider other mechanisms where capital is a key resource e.g., prizes, advance market commitments, conditional commitments, credits, threatening campaigns with larger war chests of funds.
- Regranting budgets so a domain expert and talent scout in your area can identify time-sensitive opportunities and act on them fast.
A major caution here is to not sacrifice impact and sustainability for the sake of scale.
- Weight reversible moves over irreversible ones. Fund fixed-term contracts, pilots, and tactical spending (advertising, equipment, events) that can flex down if the funding environment changes or the programs turn out to be less effective than you hoped.
- Keep the actual suffering of the animals central in how you justify a scaling bet, and be willing to stay smaller and more focused if the ambitious version pulls you away from impact. Scale is a means; reducing animal suffering is the end.
- Look for opportunities to use scaling to crowd in additional funding from other sources e.g., private, government, philanthropic dollars from much lower impact areas.
- As always, proposals to AWF will be evaluated rigorously based on your track record, Theory of Change, and context-specific potential to drive change.
You’re encouraged to apply here and reach out to us to discuss here [email protected].
This post aims to inform and encourage potential grantees and partners to reach out directly with their scaling ideas and plans. Due to our current capacity limitations and strong prioritization on grantmaking for high-impact projects, we will limit time spent on responses to forum comments and likely will not respond to all comments. We appreciate your understanding of our bandwidth limitations and prioritization for animals.
