Hi, thanks for raising these questions. I lead Open Philanthropy’s biosecurity and pandemic prevention work and I was the investigator of this grant. For context, in September last year, I got an introduction to Helena along with some information about work they were doing in the health policy space. Before recommending the grant, I did some background reference calls on the impact claims they were making, considered similar concerns to ones in this post, and ultimately felt there was enough of a case to place a hits-based bet (especially given the more permissive funding bar at the time).

Just so there’s no confusion: I think it’s easy to misread the nepotism claim as saying that I or Open Phil have a conflict of interest with Helena, and want to clarify that this is not the case. My total interactions with Helena have been three phone calls and some email, all related to health security work.

There is scant public information that could justify it as the best-placed and most appropriate recipient, a clear risk of nepotism inherent in the recipient organization, and [...]

When I read this part of your bullet point summary, I thought someone at Open Phil might be related to someone at Helena. But then it became clear that you mean that the Helena founder dropped out of college supported with money from his rich investor dad to start a project that you think "(subjectively) seems like" self-aggrandizing. 

(The word "inherent" probably makes clear what you mean; I just had a prior that nepotism is a problem when someone receives funding, and I didn't know that you were talking about other  funding that Helena also received.) 

I think it's valuable to write critiques of grants that you believe to have mistakes, as I'm sure some of Open Philanthropy's grants will turn out to be mistakes in retrospect and you've raised some quite reasonable concerns.

On the other hand, I was disappointed to read the following sentence "Henry drops out of school because he thinks he is exceptionally smarter and better equipped to solve 'our problems".  I guess when I read sentences like that I apply some (small) level of discounting towards the other claims made, because it sounds like a less than completely objective analysis. To be clear, I think it is valid to write a critique of whether people are biting off more than they can chew, but I still think my point stands.

I also found this quote interesting: "What personal relationships or conflicts of interest are there between the two organizations?" since it makes it sound like there are personal relationships or conflicts of interest without actually claiming this is the case. There might be such conflicts or this implication may not be intentional, but I thought it was worth noting.

Regarding this grant in particular: if you view it from the original EA highly evidence-based philanthropy end, then it isn't the kind of grant that would rate highly in this framework. On the other hand, if you view it from the perspective of hits-based giving (thinking about philanthropy as a VC would), then it looks like a much more reasonable investment from this angle^[1], as for instance, Mark Zuckerberg famously dropped out of college to start Facebook. Similarly, most start-ups have some degree of self-aggrandizement and I suspect that it might actually be functional in terms of pushing them toward greater ambition.

That said, if OpenPhilanthropy is pursuing this grant under a hits-based approach, it might be less controversial if they were to acknowledge this.

1. ^{^}

   Though of course, if the grant was made on the basis of details that were misrepresented (I haven't looked into those claims) then this would undercut this.

The most relevant bit of the Page Six article:

A press release heralding the launch of Henry Elkus’ startup Helena — which said it “brings together global influencers to create positive world change,” but remained, at best, hazy on exactly how — also claimed that luminaries from pop star Selena Gomez to Gen. Stanley McChrystal were on board in various roles.

But when we asked Gomez’s publicist about her role, we got a curt, “She’s not involved.”

Henry explained the discrepancy to Page Six: “Selena was asked directly to be part of the group. We haven’t been dealing with her press team.”

Gawker reported that a prominent Harvard scholar, Jennifer McCrea, also denied being involved, saying through her rep, “It must be a different Jennifer McCrea.” Henry oddly countered to Page Six, “We’ve had the pleasure of working with Jennifer McCrea since last October.”

This post is a bit weak in making its case but it is blindingly obvious that Helena is a grift and I'm a bit unimpressed by galaxy brain'd reasons (hit based, etc)  for thinking it might be good. 

But in the big picture, occasionally a grant is bad. We can't treat every bad grant as a scandal. 

Only thing I can add here is Helena is a longtime joke in VC/finance circles for being an almost comical example of nepotism and ego. Haven’t seen their name come up for a few years but it was a kind of meme for a while. Their new public facing stuff looks better but it used to be hard to distinguish from parody (Yale rich kid and his buddies behaving as if they were members of some kind of World Congress Davos intelligentsia). I have no idea about their biosecurity work and it could be good / it could be the case everyone has grown up and started doing serious stuff, but it’s worth noting the history and reputation. As someone who thinks EA massively underrated PR/vibe/reputation I thought I’d bring this up. I have a lot of respect for ASB so I assume there’s more to the story.

Bringing up potential issues with a grantee seems useful, especially if they're things the grantor may have missed or underappreciated. The discussion around a history of claiming false affiliations (see additional details quoted in Shakeel) especially seems important.

On the other hand, there are several points in the post that, while I would find them apt in a discussion of a grant by GiveWell or one of the EA Funds, don't make sense in the context of an organization like OP that doesn't solicit funding from individuals and doesn't aim for that level of transparency. Specifically, I think it's fine for them to make a grant in cases where the public information about an organization would't be enough to justify the grant, the org doesn't have a public track record, or the org and it's leaders haven't participated in EA. There are many valuable funding opportunities that are only available to grantmakers who are willing to work directly with organizations and make decisions based on privately shared information, and we shouldn't be pressuring OP to avoid these.

Holden's 2016 OP blog post, Update on How We’re Thinking about Openness and Information Sharing, gets into some of these questions, and I think it's pretty reasonable.

A semi-cynical take: Could Open Phil have decided to fund an otherwise weak grant proposal because (a) there is a good chance that Elkus will receive a lot of money for philantrophy from his father; and (b) there is a reasonable chance that funding this grant would influence Elkus toward spending significantly more of that outside-of-EA money on biosecurity and pandemic preparedness work rather than on quasi-academic sociology experiments?

I'm not judging that possible rationale -- it feels uncomfortable, but uncomfortable doesn't mean wrong. I think this is illustrative of a potential challenge with transparency -- this rationale would be undermined by its disclosure. If you're trying to influence a grantee, releasing a statement that says "yeah, we thought their work was weak, but we funded because the CEO's father is loaded and we were aiming for influence over how future money was spent" isn't going to help your influence campaign.

A less cynical possibility would be that the CEO's father is funding most of Helena, but requires it to raise a fraction of the costs of each project (say 20%). If that were the case, the project doesn't need to clear Open Phil's bar to justify funding. If we assume that the alternative project Helena would pursue would be essentially worthless, this project would only need to be 21% as effective as the bar to justify funding it.

I also want to specifically address the elephant in the room: Open Phil has significantly raised its bar for funding, and a lot of people are doubtless anxious about that. To the extent that Elkus' father was a positive factor in evaluating the grant -- under an influence theory, a matching-funds theory, or anything else -- that is not fair to everyone else who wasn't born with a silver spoon.  Particularly under the current circumstances, it would be completely valid to experience negative emotions at the possibility that parental megawealth could factor into grantmaking decisions. 

We haven't seen the grant proposal, but I am thoroughly unimpressed with Helena -- both as an organization and as a potential biosecurity grantee -- based on its public-facing materials. In addition to the horrible taste the marketing materials leave in my mouth, it is far too spread out in cause areas for its size to make me think it would be effective in a new area.

About "PPE procurement activities."

I was on the board of directors for the NY chapter of AAEM ( American Academy of Emergency Medicine), as a student representative. During the first wave of COVID in NYC, we were tasked by the leadership with a PPE procurement drive; this was later delegated to medical students around the city who were eager to help with the COVID effort and who had a lot of free time due to suspended classes. The drive was quite successful at a time when manual resources to track down suppliers, warehouse stocks, and sifting through the black market sources was difficult for hospital administrators. 

Having seen this process up close, done by the volunteer time of medical students, the price tag of  ~1M$ for this seems exceptionally ridiculous. The PPE procurement activities they proposed must have either been on an entirely different scale/direction or just over budgeted.



 

Have you tried writing to OP to ask about the grant?

I think that we should probably trust people to make some more speculative grants if we trust them in general. My sense is the bio team at openphil do pretty good work in general (though I haven't looked it up) so I'm willing to give a few speculative grants a pass.

I will circle back if this goes terribly or if there are lots more like it.

As much as I dislike their marketing (I'm clearly not the target audience), I don't think it requires much imagination to see why open phil may have gone ahead with the grant.

see for example this event they put on: 
https://helena.org/magazine/the-story-of-america-in-one-room
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America_in_One_Room

The event was widely covered and Obama himself tweeted about the event. If they came to open phil with some similar idea, intended to make catastrophic risks salient to a wide audience I can see why they would seriously consider funding it.

Open phil aren't stupid. If they are doing something seemingly stupid, they probably have information we don't.

A bit late to the party here but I want to note for anyone that is still looking for more information about Helena that there is a roughly ten-thousand word essay about the program from the founder on the organization's website.