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EA Meta Is Important
Here is my first post in a series about EA Meta work. I plan to cover what Meta is, why it is important, and where I see gaps given my view on the ecosystem and with a view toward the incoming third wave of philanthropy.
This first post is probably a bit basic for this crowd, although I'd expect some people newer to EA to learn some things. I'm sharing here anyway as I've been lowering my bar to post on the forum and fighting a tendency to think that everyone knows all this stuff anyway, duh.
What follows is most of the post. If you want the original version please click through to Substack link.
Meta work is any work that is at least one level above direct intervention work. A direct intervention is one that directly improves or saves lives of the humans or animals the intervention is aimed at. This is what people normally think of if you asked them to name a charity. An example of a direct intervention in global health is Healthy Futures – they support countries to screen pregnant women with rapid Syphilis/HIV dual tests, and treat syphilis-positive women with penicillin.
Meta work, on the other hand, doesn’t help people or animals directly, but is one level up. Building on the syphilis case, a meta organization might be dedicated to bringing people working on the problem together, by building community for people in the industry, hosting conferences, making sure that the major players are sharing notes, or setting up an evaluator that aims to determine the cost-effectiveness of each organization in the space to better inform impact-oriented funders.
In this way, meta organizations are not tackling the problem at hand directly, but building infrastructure and supporting others that are.
So why is this important? Meta organizations solve public goods problems that no one else is strongly incentivized to tackle. In that sense, you can view them as just another problem to tackle and that problem, like all others, has a cost-effectiveness that may or may not compete with the other top opportunities out there.
The effective giving/talent ecosystem is still just a tiny fraction of the overall philanthropic space and meta is just a small portion of that. It often takes some time and stewing in the ecosystem to realize that meta is even a thing worth prioritizing as coming into it you often want to tackle a global problem directly. In that sense, I think meta work is generally undersupplied by the community and would be excited to see many more organizations that take a stab at doing it well.
Meta, done well, has really strong cost-effectiveness, due to its high-leverage nature. One obvious example is in the effective giving ecosystem. Organizations in this space generally take in donations for opex funding to do the work they are doing and then go out and spread the message of effective giving to their audience in the hope of raising even more money than they took in. In that sense, the answer to the question “what is the most cost-effective use of my marginal dollar?” might be to give to an effective giving organization who can turn that one dollar into many dollars that ultimately go to effective direct intervention charities. If you had given the dollar to the charity itself, they’d have one dollar, which is good. But if you give it to a meta organization that has a positive multiplier, that charity can instead get many dollars1.
An example is Effektiv Spenden, which is a German effective giving organization where I worked for a short stretch of time, and which in 2025 raised ~30 million EUR for other top cost-effective charities on a budget of 1.15 million EUR and which has raised over 100 million EUR since its founding in 2019. In addition to marshalling these funds for effective charities, they provide German, Swiss, and Austrian donors with a tax write-off for their donations, allowing donors to give more than they otherwise would2. So, giving a Euro to Effektiv Spenden has a large impact return on investment, since they can turn it into many Euros going to the top charities in their portfolio.
There are many more such examples.
I am very bullish on effective giving organizations and I think they provide a particularly clear way of measuring impact since you can look at dollars in dollars out, but there are many types of meta organizations one can make:
In some sense the sky is the limit here – if there is a coordination gap or public goods problem in the ecosystem, a meta organization can fill it.
For some reason people’s mind goes here when I talk about this, so let me address it: this…is…wrong. In the same way Y Combinator is a meta organization that isn’t a startup directly doing good and they provide value in the value chain – a lot, in fact – an incubator in the non-profit space can provide a lot of impact value in an analogous way.
This is not to say they are not without their downsides. It is hard enough to measure the impact of a direct intervention charity well. It is much harder to measure that of a meta organization well, because you not only need to nail your measurement and evaluation, but that of the organizations downstream that you are helping. Further, since the impact is harder to measure it is easier to trick yourself (and funders) into thinking you are doing a good job and are “of course very cost-effective” because the numbers can be squishy.
So it is of the utmost importance to take this seriously and do it well! If you are taking in meta dollars, you are taking in that rarest of dollar: the one from someone who has thought about this so much and deeply that they came to the logic that meta makes sense to prioritize. If you didn’t exist, they would certainly be giving to an extremely cost-effective direct intervention charity. And so the counterfactual is extremely painful.
All of that being said, I strongly believe we need many more organizations working in meta, but also funders who can support their work. You can count the orgs and HNWIs who grant to the meta space on about one hand. And while there are a decent amount of organizations in the ecosystem, there can be many, many more that provide a lot of positive value to the ecosystem and are critical to it scaling up.
In my next piece, I’ll write more about the major gaps I see in meta that are holding the broader impact ecosystem back from achieving its potential, especially with respect to the important and unique moment we find ourselves in where we will likely see a large influx of money for high-impact work.
