Sanity check - effectiveness/goodness of Trans Rescue?

I’m really happy to see you asking this question and doing an investigation of a charity and a cause yourself. It makes intuitive sense to me that moving from a very dangerous place to a very safe one would have long term benefits to well-being and seems worth doing additional investigation on the intervention.

It’s hard to know how much risk people are facing and how much improvement people will experience by moving; migration has upsides (eg better economic opportunity) and downsides (eg isolation from family). I’m not an expert on either but would be excited to see you do any additional analysis on this that you can do and post about it.

I think an ideal version of the EA Forum would have a lot of people willing to help you analyze this issue and work out answers for yourself. Please don’t get discouraged if you don’t get a lot of feedback here though. The EA Forum has happened to develop into a place with a high concentration of people primarily interested in AI, biosecurity, and animal welfare. There are definitely people around with other interests but you might have to hunt around for them.

A few things that come to mind:

1. This will be less than 1650 pounds to move someone on the margin, since 33k is total funding and some of it must be covering fixed costs.
2. This is a crazy low cost to migrate people once you consider visa/legal costs, and it makes me worry that they are not providing a good enough landing pad for people in the countries that they move to. That's not a fatal flaw - it could be easily fixed if they had more money - but that will push up the cost of moving someone.
3. In general, one time interventions that cause persistent benefits to people will be quite effective because they don't have any cumulative costs.
4. The effectiveness of Trans Rescue will depend tremendously on the implementation and trustworthiness of the organization, like you pointed out. I think it would make sense for EA grantmakers to reach out to them for a vetting/offering them a small grant and monitor them. If all goes well this could be pretty effective.

One possible concern for people settled as refugees in other countries: if the countries have set a maximum number of refugees they accept and would have met that number anyway, then someone else who would have been accepted won't be, and the counterfactual impact could be much lower.

I am one of the people who helped who helped write the Medium piece.

Let it be known that after Anne Ogborn doxxed the location of the Eden House safehouse to the world, on the Associated Press youtube channel. The Safe House was soon after raided by the police, destroying the lives of the "passengers" who lived there.  https://twitter.com/Trans_Rescue/status/1666848794686763026 

Many of the passengers where sexually assaulted by the local police, tortured, and worse. This has been posted on Trans Rescue's own Mastodon page. This is the reason why wrote the article in the first place, to warn people about how dangerous working with Trans Rescue is for the people they try to "help". 

The entire trans community has been telling Anne Ogborn / Trans Rescue to stop playing with the lives of trans women of color, and putting them in danger by posting their faces online for fundraising.

In my opinion every penny is given to this organization, is another chance for Anne Ogborn and Trans Rescue to destroy the life of another Trans person of color.

Enough is enough, not another dime for these neo-colonialist exploiters of human life.

I had the opportunity to talk to one of the board members of Trans Rescue and wrote a post with some additional information, focusing on their operations in East Africa helping LGBTQ+ Ugandans of all sorts escape the wave of homophobic violence happening there. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/zC5CNAv8dCMyhtxW2/trans-rescue-s-operations-in-uganda-high-impact-giving