EA Forum Bot Site
EA Forum

Hide table of contents
Comment Permalink
alex lawsen5
0
0

If someone has a project which potentially spans multiple funds, should they apply to both noting that they have done so, or apply to one noting that they are happy for their application to be passed on to the other?

Reply
15
Habryka [Deactivated]
The new funds UI actually has this specific point covered. At least for the (at least historically) larger overlap for the EAIF and the LTFF. See this section: 
alex lawsen2
0
0

Thanks! This seems like a good system for it.

Reply
See in context
by Jonas V
5 min read 15

79

CommunityBuilding effective altruismEffective altruism fundingEffective Altruism FundsRequests (closed)Application announcements
Frontpage
Show all topics

Summary

  • The Animal Welfare Fund, the Long-Term Future Fund, and the EA Infrastructure Fund (formerly the EA Meta Fund) are calling for applications.
  • Applying is fast and easy – it typically takes less than a few hours. If you are unsure whether to apply, simply give it a try.
  • The Long-Term Future Fund and EA Infrastructure Fund now support anonymized grants: if you prefer not having your name listed in the public payout report, we are still interested in funding you.
  • If you have a project you think will improve the world, and it seems like a good fit for one of our funds, we encourage you to apply by 7 March (11:59pm PST). Apply here. We’d be excited to hear from you!

Recent updates

  • The Long-Term Future Fund and EA Infrastructure Fund now officially support anonymized grants. To be transparent towards donors and the effective altruism community, we generally prefer to publish a report about your grant, with your name attached to it. But if you prefer we do not disclose any of your personal information, you can now choose one of the following options: 1) Requesting that the public grant report be anonymized. In this case, we will consider your request, but in some cases, we may end up asking you to choose between a public grant or none at all. 2) Requesting we do not publish a public grant report of any kind. In this case, if we think the grant is above our threshold for funding, we will refer it to private funders.
  • We are currently appointing new fund management teams. We have introduced a process by which fund managers are evaluated and (re-)appointed every two years and expect some changes to the fund management teams for the upcoming funding round. We plan to announce the new teams on the EA Forum in a few weeks.
  • The upcoming application deadlines and funding decision dates are:
    • 7 Mar 2021, decision by 2 Apr 2021
    • 13 Jun 2021, decision by 9 Jul 2021
    • 3 Oct 2021, decision by 29 Oct 2021
    • 6 Feb 2022, decision by 4 Mar 2022
    • 5 Jun 2022, decision by 1 Jul 2022
    • 2 Oct 2022, decision by 28 Oct 2022
    • All dates are at 11:59pm, Pacific Time. Please note that these dates are subject to change up to a month before the application deadline.
    • In addition, the Long-Term Future Fund and EA Infrastructure Fund can evaluate time-sensitive applications more quickly. Just let us know in the application form.
    • This is now out of date, you can now apply anytime. Please refer to our website for up-to-date information.
  • As a reminder, the minimum grant size at EA Funds has been reduced from $10,000 to $1,000.

Long-Term Future Fund

The Long-Term Future Fund aims to positively influence the long-term trajectory of civilization, primarily via making grants that contribute to the mitigation of global catastrophic risks. Historically, we’ve funded a variety of longtermist projects, including:

  • Scholarships, academic teaching buy-outs, and additional funding for academics to free up their time
  • Funding to make existing researchers more effective
  • Direct work in AI, biosecurity, forecasting, and philanthropic timing
  • Up-skilling in a field to prepare for future work
  • Seed money for new organizations
  • Movement-building programs

See our previous grants here. Most of our grants are reported publicly, but we also give applicants the option to receive an anonymous grant, or to be referred to a private donor.

The fund has an intentionally broad remit that encompasses a wide range of potential projects. We strongly encourage anyone who thinks they could use money to benefit the long-term future to apply.

Animal Welfare Fund

The Animal Welfare Fund aims to effectively improve the well-being of nonhuman animals, by making grants that focus on one or more of the following:

  • Relatively neglected geographic regions or groups of animals
  • Promising research into animal advocacy or animal well-being
  • Activities that could make it easier to help animals in the future
  • Otherwise best-in-class opportunities

For more information about the fund’s focus, see its request for proposal and past grants.

EA Infrastructure Fund

The EA Infrastructure Fund recommends grants that aim to improve the work of projects that use the principles of effective altruism, by increasing their access to talent, capital, and knowledge. We are interested in applications from organizations and individuals working on new or established projects.

Please note that if your project relates to community building for local, regional, or national groups, you should apply to CEA’s Community Building Grants (CBG) programme. However, the EA Infrastructure Fund is still keen to fund projects initiated by local groups which are unrelated to community building. If you are uncertain whether you should apply to the EA Infrastructure Fund or the CBG programme, please contact us.

To get a better idea of what kinds of projects we might be interested in funding, you can review our past payout reports.

What types of grants can we fund?

For grants to individuals, all of our funds can likely make the following types of grants: 

  • Events/workshops
  • Scholarships
  • Self-study
  • Research projects
  • Content creation
  • Product creation (e.g., a tool/resource that can be used by the community)

We can refer applications for for-profit projects (e.g., seed funding for start-ups) to EA-aligned investors. If you are a for-profit, simply apply through the standard application form and indicate your for-profit status in the application.

For legal reasons, we will likely not be able to make the following types of grants: 

  • Grantseekers requesting funding for a list of possible projects
    • In this case, we would fund only a single project of the proposed ones. Feel free to apply with multiple projects, but we will have to confirm a specific project before we issue funding.
  • Self-development that is not directly related to the common good
    • In order to make grants, the public benefit needs to be greater than the private benefit to any individual. So we cannot make grants that focus on helping a single individual in a way that is not directly connected to public benefit.

Please err on the side of applying, as it is likely we will be able to make something work if the fund managers are excited about the project. We look forward to hearing from you.

 

Apply here.

79

0
0

Reactions

0
0
Mentioned in

More posts like this

Comments15
Sorted by
New & upvoted
Click to highlight new comments since:
Anonymous 930
0
0

Major kudos for publishing the upcoming application deadlines and funding decision dates until the end of 2022! It's very useful for me for planning, as someone who might apply at some point.

Reply
Jonas V9
0
0

These dates are now out of date, you can now apply anytime. Please refer to our website for up-to-date information.


 

Reply
AnonymousEAForumAccount17
0
0

Please note that if your project relates to community building for local, regional, or national groups, you should apply to CEA’s Community Building Grants (CBG) programme.

 

CEA’s Community Building Grants page currently says applications are closed. When the closing was announced (August 2020), applications were expected to reopen in January. Do you know when applications are now expected to reopen? If it will be a long time and/or if CEA will only fund a narrow set of groups through CBG (which sounds like it may be the case), would the fund managers reconsider accepting applications from groups that don't have access to CBG?

Reply
Jonas V4
0
0

That's a great suggestion, thank you. It will take me a few days to figure this out, so I expect to reply in a week or so. (Edited Sat 27 Feb: Still need a bit longer, sorry.)

Reply
AnonymousEAForumAccount1
0
0

Thanks for investigating Jonas!

Reply
Jonas V-2
0
0

After looking more into this, we've decided not to evaluate applications for Community Building Grants during this grant application cycle. This is because we think CEA has a comparative advantage here due to their existing know-how, and they're still taking some exceptional or easy-to-evaluate grant applications, so some of the most valuable work will still be funded. It's currently unclear when CBG applications will reopen, but CEA is thinking carefully about this question and I'll be coordinating with them.

That said, we're interested in receiving applications from EA groups that aren't typical community-building activities – e.g., new experiments, international community-building, spin-offs of local groups, etc. If you're unsure whether your project qualifies, just send me a brief email.

I'm aware this isn't the news you and others may have been hoping for, so I personally want to contribute to resolving this gap in the funding ecosystem long-term.

Edit: Huh, some people downvoted. If you have concerns about this comment or decision, please leave a comment or send me a PM.

Reply
AnonymousEAForumAccount3
0
0

I didn’t downvote your comment, though I am disappointed you won’t be considering applications this cycle. I hope that if CEA does choose to restrict CBG applications going forward (which seems to be under consideration per Harri) that the EAIF will fill the gap. FWIW I’d like to see EAIF funding this space even if CEA does open up applications, as I’d value diversifying funder perspectives more than any comparative advantage CEA might have.

Reply
Harri Besceli3
0
0

Hi, sorry for not responding to this comment sooner. 

It's taking us longer than we expected to decide on our plans for reopening applications. For context, some of the options of the programme that we're considering:
1. Continue to accept applications for funding group organizers from any EA group
2. Only accept new applications from a subset of groups

We will give an update on this by June 1st latest (~2 weeks before the deadline for the next application deadline for EA Infrastructure Fund), and either let people know when they will be able to apply for CBG funding or recommending that they should apply for EAIF funding. 

We're chatting about the above with the EAIF, though it's ultimately up to them what they choose to accept applications for (so this comment shouldn't be seen as me speaking on their behalf)

Reply
AnonymousEAForumAccount1
0
0

Thanks for the update Harri. I'd suggest putting this info on the main CBG page so applicants have an up to date picture.

Reply
Harri Besceli1
0
0

Thanks, we've now updated the page. 

Reply
alex lawsen5
0
0

If someone has a project which potentially spans multiple funds, should they apply to both noting that they have done so, or apply to one noting that they are happy for their application to be passed on to the other?

Reply
Habryka [Deactivated]15
0
0

The new funds UI actually has this specific point covered. At least for the (at least historically) larger overlap for the EAIF and the LTFF. See this section: 

Reply
alex lawsen2
0
0

Thanks! This seems like a good system for it.

Reply
Jonas V2
0
0

I just published this article about some potential misconceptions that may help people decide whether to apply.

Reply
Jonas V2
0
0

Someone asked me via email for what grant amount they should apply, and whether we would consider a large grant for several full-time positions at once. I'm sharing my response here, as I think it may be useful for others as well:

The short answer is: Please apply for whatever amount and duration makes the most sense for the project itself, and explain your reasoning to us.

Us not making such grants in the past is due to us not receiving any high-quality applications of this kind.

E.g., how long does it take for you to test some key hypotheses and get some early traction? Perhaps that duration plus 1-3 months of extra slack and runway should be your initial ask. If things work out as intended, you can then use the initial results to apply for follow-on funding. If there are no good results after that time, you may want to abort the project anyway (not primarily because you wouldn't get further funding from EA Funds, but because the people involved might decide that their time could be better spent elsewhere).

Depending on the details of this, I think an initial ask could be anywhere between 2 and 12 months for 1-4 FTE salaries plus other expenses, and depends on the details of the project.

I don't think you need to try and get funding from outside sources at the initial stage, as that sounds like it would be a hassle for you.

Reply
More from Jonas V
View more
Curated and popular this week
 ·  · 7m read
 · 
This is a linkpost for a paper I wrote recently, “Endogenous Growth and Excess Variety”, along with a summary. Two schools in growth theory Roughly speaking: In Romer’s (1990) growth model, output per person is interpreted as an economy’s level of “technology”, and the economic growth rate—the growth rate of “real GDP” per person—is proportional to the amount of R&D being done. As Jones (1995) pointed out, populations have grown greatly over the last century, and the proportion of people doing research (and the proportion of GDP spent on research) has grown even more quickly, yet the economic growth rate has not risen. Growth theorists have mainly taken two approaches to reconciling [research] population growth with constant economic growth. “Semi-endogenous” growth models (introduced by Jones (1995)) posit that, as the technological frontier advances, further advances get more difficult. Growth in the number of researchers, and ultimately (if research is not automated) population growth, is therefore necessary to sustain economic growth. “Second-wave endogenous” (I’ll write “SWE”) growth models posit instead that technology grows exponentially with a constant or with a growing population. The idea is that process efficiency—the quantity of a given good producible with given labor and/or capital inputs—grows exponentially with constant research effort, as in a first-wave endogenous model; but when population grows, we develop more goods, leaving research effort per good fixed. (We do this, in the model, because each innovator needs a monopoly on his or her invention in order to compensate for the costs of developing it.) Improvements in process efficiency are called “vertical innovations” and increases in good variety are called “horizontal innovations”. Variety is desirable, so the one-off increase in variety produced by an increase to the population size increases real GDP, but it does not increase the growth rate. Likewise exponential population growth raise
 ·  · 4m read
 · 
Sometimes working on animal issues feels like an uphill battle, with alternative protein losing its trendy status with VCs, corporate campaigns hitting blocks in enforcement and veganism being stuck at the same percentage it's been for decades. However, despite these things I personally am more optimistic about the animal movement than I have ever been (despite following the movement for 10+ years). What gives? At AIM we think a lot about the ingredients of a good charity (talent, funding and idea) and more and more recently I have been thinking about the ingredients of a good movement or ecosystem that I think has a couple of extra ingredients (culture and infrastructure). I think on approximately four-fifths of these prerequisites the animal movement is at all-time highs. And like betting on a charity before it launches, I am far more confident that a movement that has these ingredients will lead to long-term impact than I am relying on, e.g., plant-based proteins trending for climate reasons. Culture The culture of the animal movement in the past has been up and down. It has always been full of highly dedicated people in a way that is rare across other movements, but it also had infighting, ideological purity and a high level of day-to-day drama. Overall this made me a bit cautious about recommending it as a place to spend time even when someone was sold on ending factory farming. But over the last few years professionalization has happened, differences have been put aside to focus on higher goals and the drama overall has gone down a lot. This was perhaps best embodied by my favorite opening talk at a conference ever (AVA 2025) where Wayne and Lewis, leaders with very different historical approaches to helping animals, were able to share lessons, have a friendly debate and drive home the message of how similar our goals really are. This would have been nearly unthinkable decades ago (and in fact resulted in shouting matches when it was attempted). But the cult
 ·  · 4m read
 · 
TLDR When we look across all jobs globally, many of us in the EA community occupy positions that would rank in the 99.9th percentile or higher by our own preferences within jobs that we could plausibly get.[1] Whether you work at an EA-aligned organization, hold a high-impact role elsewhere, or have a well-compensated position which allows you to make significant high effectiveness donations, your job situation is likely extraordinarily fortunate and high impact by global standards. This career conversations week, it's worth reflecting on this and considering how we can make the most of these opportunities. Intro I think job choice is one of the great advantages of development. Before the industrial revolution, nearly everyone had to be a hunter-gatherer or a farmer, and they typically didn’t get a choice between those. Now there is typically some choice in low income countries, and typically a lot of choice in high income countries. This already suggests that having a job in your preferred field puts you in a high percentile of job choice. But for many in the EA community, the situation is even more fortunate. The Mathematics of Job Preference If you work at an EA-aligned organization and that is your top preference, you occupy an extraordinarily rare position. There are perhaps a few thousand such positions globally, out of the world's several billion jobs. Simple division suggests this puts you in roughly the 99.9999th percentile of job preference. Even if you don't work directly for an EA organization but have secured: * A job allowing significant donations * A position with direct positive impact aligned with your values * Work that combines your skills, interests, and preferred location You likely still occupy a position in the 99.9th percentile or higher of global job preference matching. Even without the impact perspective, if you are working in your preferred field and preferred country, that may put you in the 99.9th percentile of job preference
Recent opportunities in Building effective altruism
61
80,000 Hours for Global Development
Benh713
· · 4m read
3
3
117
What's your experience with elitism in EA? [Survey]
Q
Yi-Yang
· · 2m read
70
70
108
A UK residential retreat space for EAs
Kestrel🔸
· · 3m read
6
6
View more