[Update: I no longer stand by the main point I expressed in this post. Now, I only wish ACE were less committed to using woke ideology in their evaluations, or that there were another EAA meta charity who could serve donors from the ~half of the general population who are put off by woke ideology or consider it counterproductive.]
I love Animal Charity Evaluators, and I deeply value what they are doing for animals as a meta charity. I want ACE to be as effective as possible. While I will criticize an aspect of ACE, it’s meant in the spirit of “we need a better ACE, but we definitely don’t want less ACE”.
ACE is woke, and in this post I won’t attempt to convince them to change that. I will take it as a given that ACE leadership is and will remain committed to those ideas.
However, even if they are committed to woke ideas, they still need not advertise themselves as woke, but they do. Woke ideas are highly controversial, at least half the US population finds them somewhere on the side of the spectrum from “somewhat offputting” to “absolutely abhorrent”. Therefore, even if ACE is committed to them, it’s in the interest of animals that they stop shouting it from the rooftop, so as to avoid actively alienating half the population.
ACE should not advertise a public posture on highly controversial topics that have nothing to do with animals, like abortion, whether any god exists, or the Israel/Palestinian conflict, because animals need help from all people, whatever their views on those controversial topics. And just like that, ACE should not have a public posture on the culture war, even if it has a strongly woke internal posture.
There are many examples of ACE advertising its wokeness I can recall over the years, like endorsing Ibram X Kendi’s book in a blog post (an endorsement that fortunately has now been edited out), but to take something more recent, a few months ago they published the blog post 2024 Staff Diversity Survey Results. The mere phrase “diversity survey” should have no place in a public communication because it’s such a giveaway. It’s fine if ACE wants to conduct internal staff diversity surveys, but ACE should not publish them, it should be an internal affair.
Such clear woke signaling risks alienating a substantial pool of potential donors, volunteers, and advocates who might otherwise be strong supporters of animal welfare but disagree with or are put off by these ideological stances.
ACE should not have a public posture on transgender people, homosexuality, race, indigenous peoples, or any of the other topics that are part of the culture war. While there is a benefit in publicizing intersectional views to attract support from individuals in other social justice movements, in my view this is outweighed by the significant risk of alienating a larger segment of the population whose support is also needed by animals.
Thanks for sharing. I think I actually disagree - if a donor finds this off-putting, this is a good thing, because it is the result of them getting more accurate information about ACE. It is hard for non-experts to evaluate experts on the subject of expertise because of the information asymmetry. It is often easier to evaluate them on other topics that you know more about, and then make inferences based on their revealed epistemics.
This seems especially appropriate here because we know that their woke views do affect their charity reviews.
Thank you for your response, Larks. It floored me. I no longer stand by my original post.
Years ago I read the forum post by Hypatia that you linked to. I was aghast back then, but going though that post again this morning made me realize that my post asking ACE to be "a little quiet" about being woke is LOL ridiculous, in no small part because it's asking them to be less transparent about who they are and what posture they want the EAA movement to have with respect to woke ideology (as detailed in the blog post "Apply for funding from ACE movement grants", which you quoted).
Sadly, as the only meta charity in the EAA space, they are in a good place to force their ideology onto EAA charities.
It suggests a strategy for individual EAA donors: look for EAA charities like Anima International who had their ACE recommendations downgraded due to insufficient woke alignment, and consider whether they could deserve your funding to the extent that ACE downgraded them for bad reasons.
A less than half-baked idea: Maybe Charity Entrepreneurship could consider incubating an EAA meta charity for the half of the population who dislike (or worse) woke ideology? It could be just a 1-2 people gig who try to imperfectly correct for ACE's bias in recommending charities, looking for good EAA charities left behind for ideological reasons. But they could only get so far without duplicating part of ACE's research efforts.
Just to note that I think we should be sceptical that a review from 4 years ago still applies today. I'm fairly sure that the staff and research direction has changed over the last 4 years such that this may no longer apply (though I'm not stating that it doesn't for sure).
Sidenote: I don't think a "diversity survey" is egregious side-taking. Just going off the title, seems pretty normal and (at least) mildly good. Also, so much of animal advocacy is at least somewhat left-coded that I'd be very surprised if someone who would be scared off by "diversity survey" in a title hadn't already been scared off by something else.
'I don't think a "diversity survey" is egregious side-taking. Just going off the title, seems pretty normal and (at least) mildly good.'
If the title diversity survey doesn't get to someone who thinks woke ideology is bad, the first sentence of the report might:
"In June 2024, ACE’s Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice (DEIJ) Committee conducted(...)"
Just 12 months ago they had an active Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice (DEIJ) Committee, that of course was completely unconcerned with viewpoint diversity, as in having at least one right-leaning member.
But since I no longer stand by my original post, I'm just nitpicking at this point.
Current language for Movement Grants is: "However, we are not able to fund groups or projects that: . . . . Conflict with our commitment to representation, equity, and inclusion." That is indeed softer than the requirements language in the 2021 Forum post.
(I express no opinion on whether ACE's recommendations in 2025 are being influenced by "woke ideology" in a way a meaningful number of donors would find objectionable, so I wrote the comment below about an evaluator more generically.)
Pressuring an organization to commit to flagging cases in which "woke ideology" (or similar controversial factor) upgraded or downgraded a classification might be more viable. That's imperfect, but so is the idea of a secondary organization trying to identify and flag those cases.
An evaluator's best defense against claims of bias might be that it's a private organization that can consider whatever it wants (as long as it is sufficiently transparent about that so would-be donors are not misled). I could respect that, but I think that rationale would affect the extent to which other community actors should be deferring to the evaluator absent flagging. For instance, when effective-giving organizations defer to an evaluator to decide which organizations can receive donations on their website, it is implicitly ratifying the evaluator's idiosyncrasies in a sense. That strikes me as more problematic than the direct effect of evaluator's recommendations -- it closes off third-party opportunities for disfavored organizations, gives one organization's views on a controversial topic too much weight, and makes interorganizational cooperation unreasonably difficult.
Always happy to see someone change their mind on the forum!
I agree it would be great for there to be a competitor. My only doubt would be whether the market is large enough to support a second group. My guess is they would probably have to be significantly better than ACE along multiple axis.