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I am writing up two charity ideas I’ve wanted to investigate, but haven’t been able to, in the hopes someone will investigate them further. If you end up investigating either, I'd be most interested to see what conclusions you come to!
Vulture preservation as a global health intervention
Since the mid 1990's the vulture population in India has been rapidly declining. The reason is due to a few chemicals which are fed to livestock, which is highly poisonous to vultures.
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Epistemic status: Wrote this pretty fast, probably ~70% confident some version of the thesis claim is true, would welcome being proven demonstrably wrong.
Context: I’m a grantmaker focused on alt-protein and am fairly well-connected/moderately in the loop of what animal welfare grantmakers are doing.
This post was significantly inspired by “...
Recent opportunities to take action
If you can wait and donate when there's a particularly good matching opportunity (for example the Facebook match on Giving Tuesday), you'll end up giving a slightly higher total that way. The big downside to this is that it's much easier to set up a standing order and not cancel it than it is to make a large annual donation on a particular day while focusing on where to get the best match for it.
The other advantage of a standing order is that it keeps you connected to the community. I set up a trivially small standing order in 2012 while I was still a student, and I think it played a part in keeping me aware of the community, with me ending up getting increasingly involved over the last few years (and now donating more than 100x more).
Thanks Alexrjl!
I think I will pay monthly to start with.
One more thing to keep in mind for small monthly payments is that many payment services take a small fee on every transaction. This might make it better to donate annually (though it's going to be a very small difference in most cases, so I think Alex's point is also good).
For example, if your credit card company takes a 15-cent fee from each payment you make, the charity you support will lose $1.80 if you donate monthly, and only 15 cents if you donate yearly.
Thanks Aaron.
I will pay from my visa debt card and they don’t charge me for transactions, so it should be fine.
Actually maybe they do charge me if I did non UK transaction. Thanks for making me aware!