Animal Welfare Fund: Ask us anything!

Some differences here:

• For the counterfactual that someone unknown to me dropped ~$17.5M in the fund only a few weeks out from the payout, I think this round we would have perhaps would have given something like $3M-$4M out. This is because due diligence for larger grants takes longer than only a few weeks for us to do. However, in the round following we would look to do ~2.5-3.5X that $3-4M for something like $7M-$14M next round. 
• Alternatively, if, instead, we knew that 6 months in advance there would be a sum like that (~$20M), then I would imagine we would be in a much better position to significantly scale our giving and likely would have given something like ~$12M out in this round. Importantly, I think we’d push to give it to some of the outstanding bigger orgs (e.g. THL and GFI). Another way to put this would be: the Fund's current strategy (mostly smaller orgs / mostly things Open Phil & other big funders aren't funding) is constrained by applicants & our capacity (though those constraints have gotten better over time). But that doesn't constrain total funding in the space. I think that point is worth emphasizing because I think our field as a whole could easily absorb >$20M annually (and really needs it if we're to make major progress). Further, to the extent that the AWF were to have significantly more funds in it, then we would somewhat shift our strategy towards funding more established groups who are able to productively take on >$M per grant.  
• Actually, for ~$5M a few weeks out from payout or several months in advance, I think we would have given out ~$3M now. 

One important factor that ties into the above; we aim to grant out all that we get in a calendar year in that same calendar year. 

Another is some of the grantees from this round could certainly absorb more funding in a pretty productive fashion. To briefly gesture at some groups, my view is that Rethink Priorities still has at least several hundred k of RFMF and Global Food Partners, too. 

There are some other promising grantees that we pushed to the next round in order to further evaluate them (e.g., Equalia and Good Food Fund). I think that the entire set of promising grantees from this last round that we pushed to the next round could take on ~$1M now. With further funding, we would also look to further push some promising groups, say Fish Welfare Initiative, who may not have a tonne of RFMF right now, to further develop plans for what they could do if we were to 2-3X our grant to them in this round. 

 Responding to your points, Michael: 

I think good applicants with good proposals for implementing good project ideas and grantmaker capacity to solicit or generate new project ideas, are more our bottlenecks for the current AWF strategy (but as I mentioned above, I could see our strategy shifting towards more established groups if we were to have much more in the AWF) as opposed to grantmaker capacity to evaluate project ideas. 

Thanks for your further distinctions, too. 

My quickish take is: I think now there are too few applications in general on some promising ideas (hence our RFP) and the applications that we have which aren’t sufficiently high quality, are more due to the quality of the idea. 

I think we have too few applications on quality ideas, because there are now too few such people interested in effective animal advocacy, to a greater extent than there are such people who are in EAA  but they’re applying less often than would be ideal.

I'd also be interested in an answer to this question, though I think there are probably more possible bottlenecks than just those two (or maybe you meant "good ideas" very broadly and I'd want to subdivide it). I imagine that other possible bottlenecks could include: 

• good applicants with good proposals for implementing the good project ideas
• grantmaker capacity to evaluate project ideas
  • Maybe this should capture both whether they have time and whether they have techniques or abilities to evaluate project ideas whose expected value seems particularly hard to assess
• grantmaker capacity to solicit or generate new project ideas

A good rule of thumb is that ACE’s Recommended Charity Fund tends to donate to fewer, larger charities that have a demonstrated track record of success. In contrast, the EA Animal Welfare Fund tends to donate to more numerous, often earlier-stage projects that are higher-risk and, arguably, higher-reward. Perhaps also relevant, ACE Movement Grants focus on a wider-range of interventions with less rigorous supporting evidence that aim to build a more pluralistic farmed animal advocacy movement. 

The EA Animal Welfare and ACE Recommended Charity Fund sometimes act as a pipeline, where a nascent project will seek support from the EA Animal Welfare Fund before growing into a more established charity that receives support from the ACE Recommended Charity Fund. One example of this pipeline is Wild Animal Initiative, which has received EA Animal Welfare Fund grants since 2017 (under the name Wild Animal Suffering Research), and became an ACE Top Charity in 2020. 

In the just completed round we got several applications from academics looking to support research on plant-based and cultivated meat projects though we ultimately decided not to support any of them. We definitely welcome grant applications in this area and our new requests for proposals explicitly calls for applications on work in this space. Additionally, I would direct them to consider applying to GFI’s alternative protein research grants, and the Food Systems Research Fund, among other locations, if they believe they have promising projects in this space.

On the specific reasoning, there are reasons against funding some work in this area, as there are every area we consider, but ultimately I don’t think the general case for or against grants in this space is decisive. It’s definitely true, as you point out, that some grant requests in this area can be high relative to the median grant request but this prior round featured five grants over $100,000. So, to me, the ultimate concern is the expected rate of return on the particular grant relative to other possible options we have before us. In this particular instance we didn’t fund one of these projects but I definitely wouldn’t want to deter researchers with valuable ideas from applying, as I think work in this space has the potential to be extremely valuable.

All the said, I think there are a some reasons other places might be a better fit for some other funders:

• Academic social science research is often a better fit for the EA research fund or Food Systems Fund because of their expertise + focus.
• Academic plant-based + cultured meat research is often a better fit for the GFI fund because of their expertise + focus.
• Academic farm animal welfare science research is often a better fit for Humane Slaughter Association, or a bunch of other scientific funders.

I think we should be open to funding all of the above, but I think a $1M academic grant will always be a heavy lift if we only have ~$1-2M to give away (i.e. the academic grant would be almost the whole thing).

Funding is also a major constraint in wild animal welfare.

At Wild Animal Initiative, our core objective is to establish a self-sustaining academic field dedicated to improving wild animal welfare. This welfare focus is a major paradigm shift from the naturalness focus that currently dominates conservation biology and related disciplines.

That means one major constraint is the availability of interested scientists. Many researchers need to be persuaded before they can develop relevant projects.

However, we've been finding that we consistently underestimate the number of scientists who don't need any persuasion at all. Plenty of people pursue careers in wildlife sciences because they love wildlife the same way they love their pets: they just want animals to be happy. Then there are the people who pursued careers in wildlife sciences for other reasons, but devoted themselves to helping them after seeing wild animals suffer in their labs or in the wild. (One such researcher was so radicalized by her experiences studying flying snake biomechanics that she eventually became our executive director.)

Funding is the main thing keeping these scientists from researching the highest-priority wild animal welfare questions. Often, they have to put aside their welfare concerns to focus on projects that appeal to traditional conservation funders. Sometimes they manage to fund welfare research by appealing to funders' other priorities. These compromises tend to lead to suboptimal projects (e.g., exploring high-cost ways to improve rare species' welfare, rather than low-cost ways to improve common species' welfare). And even the best welfare projects funded by traditional funders tend to have limited impact, because the conservation spin makes it harder for other scientists to recognize the work and contribute to a cohesive research agenda.

More funding would give these scientists the support they need to come out of the woodwork. Eventually, Wild Animal Initiative would like to start a research fund we can use to issue calls for proposals on key themes in wild animal welfare. We're also really excited about the possibility of the EA Animal Welfare fund supporting academic wild animal welfare research. It's a big enough space that we're years away from funging each other, but it's still worth noting that the EA AWF will be a better funder for many projects that WAI could be, including:

• Small scoping projects
• Projects that need funding quickly
• Projects outside the natural sciences, especially policy and social science projects

That's right, there is growing support for invertebrate welfare work.

• For the EA Animal Welfare Fund, it is a matter of the availability of new opportunities. Historically we have been limited by the applications we received and the talent pool for active grantmaking in this space—both of those increased over time, corresponding to greater support of such initiatives from the fund.
• We can already see growing interest from animal advocates. Outside our last funding round grantees, we can see groups like Material Innovation Initiative working on silkworms or Charity Entrepreneurship planning to incubate shrimp welfare charity. I believe it may be a matter of time when work on invertebrates will become part of mainstream effective animal advocacy movement.

Yeah, I feel uncertain about how to weigh these. Here are some things that feel important: 

• What feels like one of the stronger considerations for me, is I am generally more excited about the EA AWF taking on some of the more high-risk stuff given that it's easier for Open Phil and others to pick up the proven stuff. It’s also easier for the more proven stuff to fundraise from non-EA sources. E.g., with a group like Crustacean Compassion we gave them a few smaller grants, prior to them getting significant Open Phil funding. 
• All else equal, we look to explore and vet projects that donors to the AWF are less familiar with. At least two reasons as to why: so we can add value over what their counterfactual donations may have been, and the AWF can play an important role in signalling the quality of groups to other donors, or in pioneering certain areas or subfields (somewhat like what we’ve done in invertebrate welfare) for others then to hopefully take up in future.   
• Wild Animal Initiative is a special case right now. Namely, so far, WAI hasn’t received much support from major individual donors focused on animal suffering. As they are a quite promising and relatively established group that major donors such as the Open Phil don’t yet fund (though they recommend others do), that creates somewhat of a unique comparative advantage for the AWF, and results in our presently being the major wild animal welfare funder. If that situation were to change, our level of support may also change. 
• In some cases, I am wary of us funging Open Phil or OWA or some other funder. E.g., potentially at times with some corporate chicken campaigns in a neglected region, or even with larger promising groups based in Europe or the US.  
• Larger groups often are active in a variety of locations and do a number of different programs. I can be pretty wary of us just getting funged within their overall budget. 

I made a doc on this a while ago! :) 

Here are my not very informed guesses at where some of the bigger possible productivity gains include:

• Nailing the fundamentals
• Doing the rights things rather than doing any old thing efficiently
• Reflective Practice
• Establishing Productive Habits
• Task Management Systems

Also, recommend Lynette Bye's interview with Lewis on this.

Ha! Excellent question and should be raised in every AMA :) 

100 hundred duck-sized horses!

Hard to improve on Will's answer here: 

> I’d certainly rather save a hundred duck-sized horses. It’s hard to know how to compare the moral importance of different creatures’ experiences. How many happy chicken-days is as good as a happy chimp-day? The best guess I currently have is to use the logarithm of neural mass. And I think that the total log(neural mass) of a hundred duck-sized horses is much greater than that of one horse-sized duck. There’s just a lot more experiencing entities, and even if the horse-sized duck’s experiences are a bit more valuable in light of greater computational resources powering them, it’s not that much greater.Moreover, horses live a little longer than ducks (25-30 years compared to about 20 years, according to a quick google). Insofar as I think we should care not about number of lives saved, but number of quality-adjusted life-years saved, then saving the duck-sized horses is clearly going to have the bigger impact. 

Not sure logarithm of neural mass is the best way to approach this... but the selection seems right to me! 

For those interested, stay tuned, as RP has some really exciting work upcoming on moral weights that I think may help give a truly cutting edge response to this age old question :)  

I think I would name the categories a bit differently but your point still stands. Fwiw, I would name the categories:

• Large-scale and neglected animal populations (for instance, farmed fish and wild animals) 
• Large-scale and neglected geographies (for instance, China and India) 

On THL UK and OBRAZ being exceptions, briefly, a few thoughts: 

THL UK: 

• We think THL UK has been instrumental to the successes of the broiler movement. 
• The THL UK team plays a major role in OWA’s global & European progress (e.g., last years helped with training in eastern Europe. 
• Pretty interested in the specific ways that they are expanding, with more work on fish and legislative efforts. 
• Generally less concerned about funging with them than we are for some of the other bigger groups in Europe or the US. 

OBRAZ:

• They do seem to have made, relatively speaking, quite good progress on cage-free. Honestly, to an extent, we have been blown away by the progress they have made on cage-free. 
• This group has won two major victories in Czechia in recent years. In 2017, the group achieved a ban on fur farming that went into effect in 2019; more recently, they successfully pushed for a ban on cages for laying hens that will become effective in 2027. The recent ban on cages was preceded by successful corporate campaigning efforts led by OBRAZ in partnership with the Open Wing Alliance.

Good question!

In short, I think it may be important but I feel pretty unsure about what the implications are. I guess it generally updates me somewhat towards some of the more speculative things that fall inside our remit, including wild animals and invertebrate welfare.

But basically, I think that longtermism is still way underexplored... so when we start talking about longtermism’s intersection with something like animal welfare, I think it is just really really underexplored. At this point, there may have been a few blog posts looking at that intersection. 

So yes, I would be interested in potentially supporting someone to look further into this intersection and believe we mentioned a point on that in our RFP.    

Quick thoughts, in terms of subtopics that could be interesting (only if the right person(s) were to do it): 

• Further examine, from a longtermist perspective, to what extent is wild animal welfare or invertebrate welfare important
• Further examine plausible ways emerging tech may entrench bad practices for animals 
• Explore how likely animal friendly values are to be adopted/accounted for by an AI (obviously do so in a way that isn’t going to put any AI folks offside) 
• Doing some initial scoping out of possible ways a philanthropist might give if they were interested in building a field/subfield around AW and longtermism

That said, I don’t feel I have particularly well developed thoughts on what subtopics look most promising at this intersection. I would also be keen to further hear from the community what sub-topics may seem promising, and if anyone is interested in completing work/research at this intersection, please reach out!   

You’re right that farmed animal advocacy has benefited from increased funding in recent years. Interestingly, though, the majority of philanthropic dollars in this space doesn’t come from EA-aligned donors. Perhaps because of this, the overwhelming majority of funding to alleviate farmed animal suffering comes from donors who live in and support projects in North America. On this point alone, by supporting more neglected, important, and tractable interventions particularly in LMICs, the EA Fund has a comparative advantage. Then, in comparison to EA-aligned donors, the EA Fund has an additional comparative advantage in that it funds higher-risk, earlier-stage projects that may lack a track record of success. Larger foundations like Open Phil and some members of Farmed Animal Funders don’t often have the ability to support nascent, higher-risk projects for a variety of reasons, including minimum grant size, struggling to get unproven charities or certain interventions approved by their boards, and lacking the time to find and assess many smaller, higher-risk projects. 

On your second question, we’d like to see an EA-aligned donor bet on promising individuals and give them latitude (e.g. giving a few top EA animal welfare advocates $100k each to pursue promising and cool ideas). Most foundations and Donor Advised Funds don’t have the ability to directly fund individuals (without affiliations to charities or universities to accept the funds). You’d need to make sure your donation vehicle legally permits you to directly donate to individuals, and you’d need to trust the individual to act in a values-aligned way. 

> To what extent do you worry that we're underinvesting in approaches outside of incremental welfare reform work right now? 

Hmmm… I think it is fair to say that this isn’t in my top-tier of worries. Some things that inform that take are:

• Some other major funders, that I am aware of through FAF, focus more on non-incremental welfare stuff but at the same time seem aligned with some principles of EA 
• As other funders focus more on it, the movement as a whole seems to adequately experiment with and explore some things that look promising from that perspective. E.g., I have been somewhat interested in institutional meat reduction work, or on more generalized field-building stuff, and some documentary efforts. 
• Even within EA aligned funders/ orgs a significant amount of that focused on alt-proteins. 
• Underappreciated but welfare stuff should increase price which can be useful for longer term decreases in demand 
• A decent number of the now welfaristy groups seem interested in doing some more abolitionist things, but we just haven’t identified much with a proven track record outside of corporate welfare reforms right now. If we were, I would expect them to be interested in doing that. 
• I would add that under your definition we have historically funded some of those efforts abolitionist efforts, eg. Crustacean Compassion working on legal recognition of sentience of some crustacean, or legal ban on cages for eggs-laying hens are good examples of more "abolition-like" approaches that we still consider good opportunities.

> Do you have any sense for when (if not now) we might reach that point where it makes more sense to invest in more abolitionist approaches?

To some extent, this whole endeavor is like a multi-armed bandit. Using that analogy, I feel across the movement we are adequately pulling on the abolitionist levers. But we are just yet to see much in terms of payouts or signs of payouts from them. If we were to see better payouts or signs of, then EA aligned funding should be more keen to allocate towards them! I could imagine this happening if there were to see further promising signs on alternative proteins or meat reduction work but I think we are yet to see those signs. Particularly on institutional meat reduction work, I think that could be internationally scaled if the evidence base were stronger.  

One complicating factor I’d quickly flag is that my impression is compared to animal rights groups, animal welfare groups tend to place relatively more epistemic weight on quantitative/ scientific evidence whereas abolitionists focus more on specific theories regarding the dynamics of past societal changes. I think this has something to do with our abolitionists reason about evidence that has historically made it hard for me to get quite excited about their approach. 

It could also be worth saying that I do get pretty excited about some notable exceptions to this, like, cage-free bans, or even fur bans. Note too, that a lot of the “welfarey” cage-free work seems a necessary precursor to the “abolitionisty” cage bans.

I'd add that even if these organizations are already very well funded from Open Phil and the EA Animal Welfare Fund, there still is a lot of value in getting additional donations from other donors...

`1.) diversity of donations is generally important for organizational health, to avoid overreliance on any one funder and to provide more independence from intentional or unintentional pressures from that funder. (That being said, for some organizations, having pressure from these funders is a really good thing, as many times I trust the strategy of these funders more than the strategy of these organizations.)

2.) if you trust an organization and its leadership and are not personally as constrained (say by cause area or mission or need to justify decisions) as the big funders, providing fully unrestricted funding can be much more valuable to the organization per dollar than money received from large institutions in allowing them to try new initiatives, etc. (Though of course you would want to understand more about why these large funders aren't also funding these new initiatives or other ideas.)

3.) some large funders are capped in the amount of a budget they are willing to be for an organization (say max 50%) and it can be much harder to get the other part. By providing money to an organization, you may be unlocking more funding from these larger funders due to the cap. (Though as far as I know the "max 50%" thing is no longer true for Open Phil or any of the EA Funds and I think these funders are much more comfortable now funding very large portions of a budget. However I think this factor still exists to some degree.)

4.) it can be a useful signal to larger funders that individual donors trust the organization enough to support it

I think we would be interested and able to do this. However, I am not sure exactly what that would look like. I can think more about this and might look to implement something! 

In the meantime, if you’re a donor who is interested in our thoughts, please feel free to contact us. 

Another solution is to allocate to the fund, and we can then distribute it from there! 

My guess is that the EA AWF's grantees almost always have room for more funding. In addition to the reasons I think effective orgs generally tend to have room for more funding, the EA AWF does an excellent job highlighting neglected orgs in neglected areas.

I think the grantees least likely to have room for more funding are individuals, teams of less than 4 people, and high-impact projects within lower-impact organizations. But these are also the cases where it tends to be easiest to cold-call the grantee and get the full answer in a quick call. For example, an independent researcher could tell you "I'm doing this alongside my PhD so I really can't actually take on more projects" or "My last grant just ran out so I can keep working on this new project as long as I can pay for it."

Note that my reasoning might be motivated by the fact that I work for an org that receives substantial support from the EA AWF (Wild Animal Initiative), and part of my job includes fundraising. Hopefully my perspective contributes more than my bias detracts!

Of the 85 non-desk-reject proposals we reviewed, 38% fell outside of our request for proposals and 62% in some way pertained to our RFP. (I took a liberal approach to calculating this number—for example, if we received a proposal about advancing alternative proteins in any way, I counted it as pertaining to our RFP.) It’s probably worth noting that 17 out of the 18 proposals we ended up funding in the latest round fell *within* our RFP. 

1. Many of the fund managers interact with NGOs seeking grant funding through our day jobs, so we've built up a network of potential grantees that we can refer to the EA Fund. We also ask people in neglected areas, where we're less likely to have connections or speak the language, to refer promising people and projects to the EA Fund. Those referrers are often movement leaders whose work we value and opinions we trust. We rarely haven’t heard of an EA Fund applicant. When that’s the case, the quality of the idea presented in the application becomes all the more important. If we don’t know the applicant, we often make a point of checking their references before making a decision. 
2. In terms of how highly we weigh a referrer’s opinion, it depends. If we’re on the fence about funding someone and we hear glowing reviews of their work (and depending on how much money they request + the EV of the project), a positive reference could tip us towards funding them. On the flip side, if we’re skeptical of a proposal and we hear mixed or negative reviews about the project manager, we’re more likely to pass on funding. The answer to this question is also influenced by the quality of the other proposals we receive. 
3. In general, I’d say yes. 

I don’t think it is true the EA AW Fund is essentially neartermist, though this may depend somewhat on what you mean. We definitely consider grants that have potential long term payoffs beyond the next few decades. In my opinion, much of the promise of PBM and cultivated meat relies on impacts that would be 15-100 years away and there’s no intrinsic reason held, for me and I believe other funders, to discount or not consider other areas for animal welfare that would have long term payoffs.

That said, as you suggest in (2), I do think it is true that it makes sense for the LTFF to focus more on thinking through and funding projects that involve what would happen assuming AGI were to come to exist. A hypothetical grant proposal which is focused on animal welfare but depends on AGI would probably make sense for both funds to consider or consult each other on and it would depend on the details of the grant as to whose ultimate domain we believe it falls under. We received applications at least somewhat along these lines in the prior grant round and this is what happened.

Given the above, I think it’s fair to say we would consider grants with reasoning like in your post, but sometimes the ultimate decision for that type of grant may make more sense to be considered for funding by the LTFF.

On the question of what I think of the moral circle expansion type arguments for prioritizing animal welfare work within longtermism, I’ll speak for myself. I think you are right that the precise nature of how moral circles expand and whether such expansion is unidimensional or multidimensional is an important factor. In general, I don’t have super strong views on this issue though so take everything I say here to be stated with uncertainty.

I’m somewhat skeptical, to varying degrees, about the practical ability to test people’s attitudes about moral circle expansion in a reliable enough way to gain the kind of confidence needed to determine if that’s a more tractable way to influence long run to determine, as you suggest it might, whether to prioritize clean meat research or advocacy against speciesism, which groups of animals to prioritize, or which subgroups of the public to target if attempting outreach. The reason for much of this skepticism (as you suggest as a possible limitation of this argument) is largely the transferability across domains and cultures, and the inherent wide error bars in understanding the impact of how significantly different facts of the world would impact responses to animal welfare (and everything else).

For example, supposing it would be possible to develop cost-competitive clean meat in the next 30 years, I don’t know what impact that would have on human responses to wild animal welfare or insects and I wouldn’t place much confidence, if any, in how people say they would respond to their hypothetical future selves facing that dilemma in 30 years (to say nothing of their ability to predict the demands of generations not yet born to such facts). Of course, reasons like this don’t apply to all of the work you suggested doing and, say, surveys and experiments on existing attitudes of those actively working in AI might tell us something about whether animals (and which animals if any) would be handled by potential AI systems. Perhaps you could use this information to decide we need to ensure non-human-like minds to be considered by those at elite AI firms.

I definitely would encourage people to send us any ideas that fall into this space, as I think it’s definitely worth considering seriously.

For what it's worth, I think there is a good case to be made that WAI is somewhere between a neartermist and longtermist organization (mediumtermist?) — e.g. this research and similar seem to be from a relatively longtermist perspective. Though I'm biased because I know that I am sympathetic to some aspects of a longtermist worldview (though obviously no longer work there), and that several of the staff there are also somewhat sympathetic to longtermism. These views might be separated from the work of the organization. And they received around 25% of the total made in this grant cycle.

Relatedly, I'm vaguely curious as to whether you have any thoughts on the longtermist case for working on farmed animals that I sketched in that post.

(To be clear, as I say in the post, I don't know if I endorse that case myself.)

We grade all applications with the same scoring system. For the prior round, after the review of the primary and secondary investigator and we’ve all read their conclusions, each grant manager gave a score (excluding cases of conflict of interests) of +5 to -5, with +5 being the strongest possible endorsement of positive impact, and -5 being a grant with an anti-endorsement that’s actively harmful to a significant degree. We then averaged across scores, approving those at the very top, and dismissing those at the bottom, largely discussing only those grants that are around the threshold of 2.5 unless anyone wanted to actively make the case for or against something outside of these bounds (the size and scope of other grants, particularly the large grants we approve, is also discussed).

That said, in my mind, grants for research are valuable to the extent they unlock future opportunities to directly improve the welfare of animals. Of course, figuring out whether, or how much, that’s feasible with any given research grant can be very difficult. For direct work, you can, at least in theory, relatively straightforwardly try to estimate the impact on animals (or at least the range of animals impacted). We try to estimate plausible success and return on animal lives improved for both but given these facts there are some additional things I think we keep in mind. Some considerations:

• Path to impact for research. If the research is on, say, a certain species of fish you can estimate how many of those fish are killed/raised/farmed per year and any trends in these figures. You could use that number of animals as a kind of upper bound on the animals possible to be impacted, before figuring out how many could plausibly be affected by actors, aligned (on this topic) foundations or governments or NGOs that could plausibly act on this information. And if these parties can act, how likely is it, and how big of change would it be.
• For research with more diffuse or longer term impacts, you can attempt similar calculations or approximations, it can be difficult to assess with any precision, but this is also true of some direct work that involves field-building or, say, conferences.

There are other considerations, notably that research and direct work may have different counterfactual support options depending on the topic. There may be less funders interested in supporting certain types of research (say, non-academic work on neglected animals) and more on other topics that may be more established.

Smallest grant we can do through the EA Fund is $1k. If you are interested in something smaller than that, please get in touch and I might be interested in funding in order to reach my personal giving pledge. 

Yes and yes to your examples!

Great question! Multi-decade forecasts are hard, so take all these quick thoughts with some salt :)  

• Amount of funding in our space increases significantly. Sometimes I find it pretty inspiring to think that over the past decade or so, we have almost gone from no field really existing to a budding one. It has gone from <$20M/yr to ~$200M/yr. Predict (75%) that positive trend continues and we would be at >$500M/yr by 2040. 
• Alt-proteins have significant progress and are really important. Again, it can be inspiring to look back on our progress. Circa ~2015, GFI didn’t exist, alt-proteins were barely a thing. Now GFI is one of (if not the biggest) group in our space. Since, ~2015 we have also seen the 2.0 of PB alts. The likes of Beyond and Impossible suggest that taste and price-competitive alternatives for some animal products are likely, and we are actually now quite close to (if not at) parity for some product categories like beef patties. I predict that we would see this trend continue and there would be at least a couple of other product categories where we reach parity. I think 65% chance that we will see >5% of meat consumption be from alt-proteins. I am hopeful that we may even see some big government funding (scale: tens or hundreds of millions) in open access-research on pb alts, and think that the folks at Mobius have been doing some great work on this recently!      
• Movement becomes even more global. Again, past progress seems inspiring. We have gone from basically not much happening throughout large parts of Asia to now a number of groups active there. I would expect that general trend to continue and we will significantly scale up in the likes of Latin America, Africa, and the Middle-East, too. 
• Continue to expand on the neglected animal frontier. To an extent, I think that over twenty years for our movement we will see: fish become the new chicken, crustaceans the new fish, invertebrates the new crustaceans, wild animals as being established, etc. To flesh that out a bit I think that over that time we will see big groups (e.g., THL, MFA, CIWF, etc.) increasingly focus on fish through their corporate outreach efforts, and hopefully also a significant shift to also include farmed shrimp/prawns. Other farmed invertebrate’s welfare will also significantly move from the fringe to mainstream and some large groups will also incorporate that into their programmatic portfolio. Regarding wild animals, it feels a bit harder to say. On quick reflection, I would predict (75%) that area has at least 10 EA aligned NGOs active in it, with total size of the area at >$5M. 

We had aggregated the data from 2017 (when the fund started) to 2020. 

One caveat is that it doesn't represent the ideal distribution of funding that we are aiming at. For example, if we had received more applications from groups working in Asia, the amount granted to that region would have likely increased as well. Additionally, the difference in cost of running a program in various parts of the world also makes the amount look slightly disproportional, so I outlined the amount and number of grants made in each region. 

The current breakdown looks like the following:

• North America: $2,646,000 (44 grants)
• Europe: $1,430,210 (36 grants)
• Asia: $1,177,000 (35 grants)
• South America: $565,000 (15 grants)
• Africa: $80,000 (2 grants)
• Australia/New Zealand: $60,000 (1 grant).

I think we’re looking for promising projects and one clear sign of that is often a track-record of success. The more challenging the proposal, the more something like this might be important. However, we’re definitely open to funding people without a long track record if there are other reasons to believe the project would be successful.

Personally, I’d say good university grades alone is probably not a strong enough signal, but running or participating in successful small projects on a campus might be particularly if the projects were similar in scope or size to what was being proposed, and/or this person had good references on their capabilities from people we trusted.

The case of a nonprofit with a suboptimal track record is harder for me in the abstract. I think it depends a lot on the group’s track record and just how promising we believe the project to be. If a group has an actively bad track record, failing to produce what they’ve been paid to do or producing work of negative value, I’d think we’d be reluctant to fund them even if they were working in an area we considered promising. If the group was middling, but working in a highly promising area, I’d guess we would be more likely to fund them. However, there is obviously much grey area between these two poles and I think it really depends on the details of the proposal and track record of the group in determining whether we’d think such a project would be worth funding.

There are multiple benefits I see:

• More time for in-depth evaluation, therefore increasing the average ROI of grants, 
• Increased capacity for active grantmaking. Previously we were mainly evaluating applications submitted through the application form. Now we have more time to create RPF, individually distribute it to potential grantees, and help with coordinated efforts. As a result, we may be able to create uniquely impactful opportunities that wouldn't have existed counterfactually, 
• Enabled more specialization and therefore even more informed decisions, especially in relation to more unusual opportunities, e.g., neglected species, research, or new approaches,
• Increased ability to support grantees with resources other than funding, e.g., connecting with relevant experts, 
• Increased capacity for communicating Fund's approach, like this AMA.

To some extent, we are only able to work with what is available to grant to. And I think we have been pretty good at granting to things as soon as they’re ready. But we could probably have done more to get some projects/NGOs ready for grants. 

So the main thing that comes to mind when I think about this, is I think we probably should have started doing more active grantmaking sooner. That would look like us more actively trying to bring new promising projects into existence. And note that could be either through seeding new groups or having existing groups further incorporate certain considerations into their efforts. In doing so, perhaps we could have been a bit more ahead of the curve on fish, crustaceans, wild animals, and invertebrates, as well as some of the international groups, or even some alt-protein items.   

Separately, I think we also probably could have been better in referring funding opportunities to other funders or in further providing support, connections, and guidance for our grantees.

I would be pretty surprised if I was somehow resurrected, or otherwise able to observe, millions of years from now and factory farming was still happening! 

In terms of probabilistic predictions as to the chance that factory farming is still around x years from now, I think mine pretty roughly looks like some exponentially decaying function. If you want to model it, I would put P₀ at 1 and alpha at ~0.988. 

So, I’d guess there are decent chances forms of it are still around at the end of this century, but 200 years from now, I think there are pretty good chances that we will have ended it :)

Thanks for all your questions! :)

>What processes do you have for monitoring the outcome/impact of grants? 

We have a ~10 question questionnaire that we send grantees. We send these out 6 months after the grant's starting date - which coincides with the payment date usually. We then send them out every six months and then a final report at the grant’s end date. E.g., if the grant was for an 18-month project, we would send the progress report to that grantee at the 6-month mark, 12 months, and then 18 months. 

I feel like I am also just fairly regularly in touch with a lot of grantees in addition to that. Or across all of us we usually have a pretty good sense of where things are at. 

> Relatedly, do  the AWF fund managers make forecasts about potential outcomes of grants? 

Not as of now. I would like us to use forecasts more often and think there might be some low effort ways where we could get most of the value out of them.

>And/or do you write down in advance what sort of proxies you'd want to see from this grant after x amount of time?  

We haven’t historically done this. But again, I am interested in possibly adopting in future rounds. 

I would expect that people with deep expertise in software engineering may have a better understanding of how they can apply those skills than a person without such background. We are always keen to hear people's ideas, so you can encourage others to think of an impactful project and apply to the fund! 

One example of an idea we funded in this category was a prototype algorithm that identifies the exact location and number of animals in each Iowa egg farm based on Google Earth data developed by Charles He. 

One of the projects I would be keen to see is an interactive data visualization of issues faced by different animals in different countries and conditions, similar to what GDP Compare created to aggregate and visualize sources of DALYs lost due to different conditions in humans. Maybe some software engineering skills could be helpful in research on wild animals, e.g. tracking patterns of behaviors. Again, I have very low confidence in those ideas, so they should be treated as creative brainstorming rather than a recommendation. :)

Lastly, I would recommend checking out services offered by Animal Advocacy Careers, including their job board and career coaching. They may be aware of some opportunities available for people with a background in software engineering.

Hi William, 

> What is the EA fund?

Briefly, the EA AWF is a regranting mechanism for donors interested in maximizing their impact on non-human animal welfare. Contributions to it are allocated out to grantees by fund managers three times per year.  

> How does it work and how does it make decisions?

As outlined in another question by Karolina. We solicit applications via an open process advertised on relevant sites, Facebook groups, and by individually reaching out to promising candidates. Additionally, we create an RFP and distribute it accordingly. AWF applications are initially triaged, rejecting applications that are out of scope or clearly below the bar for funding, we reject <5. The remaining applications are assigned to a primary and secondary fund manager with relevant, compatible expertise.

The assigned fund manager will read the application in detail, and often reaches out to interview the applicant or ask clarifying questions. In addition, they may read prior work produced by the applicant, reach out to the applicant's references, or consult external experts in the area. They produce a brief write-up summarizing their thinking.

What follows is voting by all fund managers. As outlined in another question by Marcus, we grade all applications with the same scoring system. For the prior round, after the review of the primary and secondary investigator and we've all read their conclusions, each grant manager gave a score (excluding cases of conflict of interests) of +5 to -5, with +5 being the strongest possible endorsement of positive impact, and -5 being a grant with an anti-endorsement that's actively harmful to a significant degree. We then averaged across scores, approving those at the very top, and dismissing those at the bottom, largely discussing only those grants that are around the threshold of 2.5 unless anyone wanted to actively make the case for or against something outside of these bounds (the size and scope of other grants, particularly the large grants we approve, is also discussed).

We provide feedback to a subset of applications (both approved and rejected) where we believe our perspective could be particularly beneficial for the applicant's work in the future, however, we only provide feedback if asked by a grantee. 

> And finally, how does its focus differ from ACE's Movement Grants?

I would be keen for someone from ACE to comment on this further, but I would note ACE’s Movement Grants focus on a wider-range of interventions that aim to build a more pluralistic farmed animal advocacy movement. The fund managers are different too. ACE’s fund is somewhat newer, tends towards smaller grant sizes, and they also have one grant round per year. 

I think those factors lead to most of the difference between the two funds. 

Would be happy to further expand on this if you would like!  

We think that this list on EA Forum hits some of the best-written works to date. For books, specifically, here are some that we’d recommend: 

• Animal Liberation by Peter Singer 
• Grilled: Turning Adversaries into Allies to Change the Chicken Industry by Leah Garces
• The Animal Activist's Handbook: Maximizing Our Positive Impact in Today's World by Bruce Friedrich and Matt Ball
• Moo's Law: An Investor’s Guide to the New Agrarian Revolution by Jim Mellon
• Food, Animals, and the Environment by Christopher Schlottmann and Jeff Sebo
• Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why it Matters by Richard Rumelt
• Engines of Liberty: How Citizen Movements Succeed by David Cole

Hmm… on first-pass, two main points I would make:

1) I think that trying to take into account the flow-through effects of just about everything will make you more skeptical of just about everything. Stated differently, I am not sure there is much in particular about diet change and flow effects from it which leads to this being a particular problem for it. 

So I think that if you apply that lens elsewhere you’ll run into similar issues. Reality is just really complicated and it’s nigh on impossible to truly know how our actions reverberate throughout. Fwiw, I often find myself identifying with some sort of clueless skeptic position.   

2) I feel one solution to this line of analysis was put forward in this comment several years ago. That solution seems appealing to me. Basically, for farmed animal welfare work, focus on the primary impacts, which would be for farmed animals. For wild-animal welfare work, focus on the primary impacts on wild animals. 

So I guess I don’t think this is a strong factor in decisions about interventions that impact diet, and I probably wouldn’t prioritize it. But if you do look into it, I would be pretty interested to see what you come up with. :) 

Not strongly considered longer write-ups at this point. Basically, it takes a lot of work to publicly and extensively communicate our views in the form of longer-write ups. We generally don’t think that work adds much value to our primary output; it’s not a big part of how we make grant decisions, and donors rarely ask about it. So we usually prefer to focus our time on other parts of grant reporting, as well all the other work the Fund requires.

That said, if you have any questions about any of the decisions we’ve made, please feel free to contact us.

Fwiw, we are doing somewhat longer write-ups for our biggest grantees of the round. However, these are more like a page or a bit over a page rather than a paragraph, but in the scheme of things, that may not be that much longer of a write-up.  

>A similar idea would be to sometimes investigate a smaller funding opportunity or set of opportunities in detail as a sort of exemplar of a certain type of funding opportunity, and produce a write-up on that. 

Yeah, that feels pretty interesting to me. I won’t make any commitments but I could see us doing more of that in the future. It could be worth experimenting with that.

Similarly to LTFF, we solicit applications via an open process advertised on relevant sites, Facebook groups, and by individually reaching out to promising candidates. Additionally, we create an RFP and distribute it accordingly, which I believe LTFF decided not to do. Although similarly to LTFF, at AWF applications are initially triaged, rejecting applications that are out of scope or clearly below the bar for funding, we reject <5% instead of 40% of applications at that stage. The remaining applications are assigned to a primary and secondary fund manager with relevant, compatible expertise.

From the LTFF: 

The assigned fund manager will read the application in detail, and often reaches out to interview the applicant or ask clarifying questions. In addition, they may read prior work produced by the applicant, reach out to the applicant's references, or consult external experts in the area. They produce a brief write-up summarizing their thinking, and assign a vote to the application.

This is applicable to AWF as well. However, before the primary reviewer assigns their vote, they notify the secondary reviewer and ask for their input. We’re also a bit less likely to reach out to interview the applicant. 

What follows is voting by all fund managers. As outlined in another question by Marcus, we grade all applications with the same scoring system. For the prior round, after the review of the primary and secondary investigator and we've all read their conclusions, each grant manager gave a score (excluding cases of conflict of interests) of +5 to -5, with +5 being the strongest possible endorsement of positive impact, and -5 being a grant with an anti-endorsement that's actively harmful to a significant degree. We then averaged across scores, approving those at the very top, and dismissing those at the bottom, largely discussing only those grants that are around the threshold of 2.5 unless anyone wanted to actively make the case for or against something outside of these bounds (the size and scope of other grants, particularly the large grants we approve, is also discussed).

Similarly to LTFF, 

we provide feedback to a subset of applications (both approved and rejected) where we believe our perspective could be particularly beneficial for the applicant's work in the future,

however, we only provide feedback if asked by a grantee. 

We don’t have any immediate plans to write a longer post about the process outside of this AMA. However, we are generally planning to increase communication of the fund’s approach, so that is something we could potentially draft in the future unless other higher priority write-up will take precedence. 

On who to be in touch with, I would suggest such a prospective student is in touch with groups like GFI and New Harvest if they would like advice on attempting to find advisors for this type of work.

On advice, I would generally stay away from career advice. If forced to answer, I would not give general advice that everyone or most people are better off attempting to do as high impact research as soon as is feasible.

I would like to see more applications in the areas outlined in our RFP and I’d encourage anyone with interest in working on those topics to contact us.

More generally, I would like to see far more people and funding engaged in this area. Of course, that’s really difficult to accomplish. Outside of that, I’m not sure I’d point to anything in particular.

Some funders share data, typically when they’re considering funding a project and want other funders to co-fund it with them, but I’m not aware of any funders standardizing what they look for in grant requests, renewals, or progress reports. I think this a good idea—though it would require a high level of collaboration between funders that I think could be a bit challenging to achieve. FWIW, I pitched a few funders on this idea roughly a year ago at Farmed Animal Funders but didn’t get enough buy-in to warrant moving ahead. My sense is that many EA-aligned donors (excluding Open Philanthropy) don’t require too much in the way of grant applications or reporting from their grantees, so that’s some comfort. 

Thanks, Max! :) 

There certainly are. Here’s what we listed in our RFP: 

We’d be interested in hearing from you if:

• You want to tackle some “big-picture” question regarding wild animal welfare
• You would like to launch a new non-profit venture, or you would like to trial something new, in the wild animal welfare space
• You’re a scientist and want to pursue field-building activities, such as organizing conferences, trainings, courses, or events
• You’re a scientist that could add welfare metrics to your current or planned research
• You’d like to do some research regarding wild animal welfare field-building opportunities
• You’d like to scope some opportunities for initial policy work on wild animal welfare
• You’d like to explore the potential of non-controversial means to improve the lives of any relatively large-scale population of wild animals
• You’re interested in exploring what for-profit business ideas might exist in the wild animal welfare space

We would love to hear from you regarding any of the above! If in doubt, please err on the side of reaching out.

Hi Max!

I may not have much to add, because I know you've thought a ton about this and I'm obviously not on the AWF panel. But for what it's worth, here's how I would rate those categories, in descending order of expected impact:

1. Research to inform future interventions
2. Advocacy to raise concern about the subject
3. Current interventions to improve wild animal welfare

Most of all, I think we should be measuring projects by how they contribute to the formation of a movement around wild animal welfare. That points in a slightly different direction than if we just think about the direct impact of a particular project. For example:

1. Research: Developing methods or concepts might catalyze further research better than simply developing technologies or species-specific knowledge.
2. Advocacy: Appealing to conservation organizations ("grasstops") might build coalitions quicker than appealing to the general public ("grassroots").
3. Current interventions: Conceptually simple interventions on somewhat likable species (e.g., rat contraception) might attract more resources to the cause than counterintuitive interventions on alien species (e.g., humane insecticides), even if the latter would have more impact in the short term.

Feel free to reach out if you want to bounce around ideas! [email protected]

In terms of the process, I drafted the RFP and then ran that by the other fund managers. After that, I incorporated their feedback. 

Hearing that, I suspect you might be somewhat less interested in the process and more interested in how we reached those areas and ideas. I think a quick response to this is:

• All of us fund managers try to stay quite up to date on the body of evidence in our sector 
• We also routinely have calls with others involved in our sector and bounce ideas off of them, and try to hear their ideas 
• We then try quite hard to apply EA considerations in our sector (such as scale, neglectedness and cost-effectiveness)
• We spend a lot of time reflecting on it 
• A lot of us are directly working on research into effective animal advocacy as part of our full-time job

All that, feeds into and generates what we think priority areas are. 

But I am not sure that adequately addresses your question. Please feel free to follow up. 

> would you say there are any key priorities (either overall or per category) that you would definitely like to see in your next grant round?

In terms of key priorities: 

• I would like us to fund further work in Asia 
• I would like us to fund further work on farmed fish  
• I would like us to fund further work on wild animals  
• I would love to find some promising new initiative on pb alternatives. 

I would say the current focus areas are: 

1. Large-scale and neglected animal populations (for instance, farmed fish and wild animals) 
2. Large-scale and neglected geographies (for instance, China and India) 
3. Exploratory work regarding the scaling of alternative proteins (for instance, a novel and potentially scalable intervention on plant-based alternatives)

In terms of projections, I think it is hard to say. There are going to be a lot of inputs into that output. Inputs that will only become known over the next couple of years

Here are some plausible priority areas that come to my mind for the fund on a 2-5 year timeline:

• Seeding some groups in the Middle-East and further seeding groups in Africa.  
• Alt-proteins 
• Fish welfare
• Field building on wild animal welfare

Sure. :) 

Somewhat random sample of past grantees includes: 

• FIAPO 
• Essere Animali
• Environment & Animal Society of Taiwan
• Compassion in World Farming USA

The full list with description regarding the grants are available in our payout reports! 

Some specific grants that I have been particularly proud of include early stage grants to:

• Crustacean Compassion 
• Equalia 
• Rethink Priorities 
• Wild Animal Initiative
• Fish Welfare Initiative
• Sinergia Animal

In terms of lessons learned, I would quickly say: 

• Active grantmaking is important 
• Take the growth approach to evaluating startup non-profits, not the marginal approach
• Double-check grantees understand any restrictions 
• References are useful in evaluations, although remember to ask for reasons behind references
• Don’t spend some minimum amount of time on each grant out of a fairness intuition – instead, just focus on the grants that really matter. 
• It can be surprisingly difficult to get applications for funding out of some international groups 

Given we know so little about their potential capacities and what alters their welfare, I’d suggest the potential factory farming of insects is potentially quite bad. However, I don’t know what methods are effective at discouraging people from consuming them, though some of the things you suggest seem plausible paths here. I think it is pretty hard to say much on the tractability of these things, without further research.

Also, we are generally keen to hear from folks who are interested in doing further work on invertebrates. And, personally, if you know of anyone interested in working on things like this I would encourage them to apply to be ED of the Insect Welfare Project.

How is NIMBYism helpful?

We don’t have a cost-effectiveness estimate of our grants. The reason as to why not, is it’s likely very difficult to produce, and while it could be useful, we're not sure it's worth the investment for now.

That is interesting! 

Haven’t really thought much about doing it. But I think a lot of that is because I have not really come across anyone who has expressed this desire. It seems interesting, though, and could be worth exploring further. 

If someone is curious about doing something like this, I think it is worth reaching out to either me or Jonas.

Yeah, I think your impression of the ratio is correct.

Briefly, as Michael St Jules notes, AWF interfaces with a much bigger community/movement than the LTFF currently does. I think that goes some of the way to explaining the difference in the ratio. Within the respective remits of each fund, it seems the AWF just generally has a more developed movement that it can grant to. The total FAW movement is  > $100M per year. My guess is the total EA-aligned LTF movement is now just a pretty small fraction compared to that total.     

I think the research point is also important. My impression is that they tend to have a higher % of grantees focused on research than we do, and that in general, a higher number of research projects tend to be by individuals.

I would guess it's because there just are a lot more animal charities, and because the LTFF is mostly research-focused, and research is doable as an individual, whereas the other activities charities work on are less so.

It might make sense to compare research grants at both funds, specifically.

One major difference could be that EAA research requires more data collection, which could be harder as an individual.

Another reason might be due to the existence of the research fund at ACE, which does fund individuals.

Another could be that the LTFF space is much better funded, especially the organizations by large grantmakers, so what's left to fund is mostly individuals.