Note: This post was crossposted from the Coefficient Giving Farm Animal Welfare Research Newsletter by the Forum team, with the author's permission. The author may not see or respond to comments on this post.
Subtitle: On vegan advocacy, effective altruism, and FIFA
I turn 40 today. Here are some hot takes.
On factory farming
1. Our biggest challenge is salience. If factory farming led the evening news, it wouldn’t last lo...
On October 22nd starting at 10:00am Pacific Time, Every.org is matching donations to select animal welfare organizations at a 2:1 rate, up to $2,000 per donor per nonprofit (so if you give up to $2,000, they will contribute up to $4,000 and the nonprofit will get up to $6,000). The first donation a donor makes to each eligible nonprofit will be matched, and donors can get the match for multiple $2,000 donations. So, you can get more than $2,000 matched by donating $2,000 one time to multiple...
When speaking to candidates who are considering working with us at 80,000 Hours, I often hear people worry about replaceability.
The familiar version of the worry is about whether the organisation will hire someone else in your place. If it will, then the difference you make by taking the job is only the difference between you and them.
There are a couple of well-known answers to that. The person hired in your place probably cares about the world too, and would go on to do somethi...
Nonprofit organizations should make their sources of funding really obvious and clear: How much money you got from which grantmakers, and approximately when. Any time I go on some org's website and can't find information about their major funders, it's a big red flag. At a bare minimum you should have a list of funders, and I'm confused why more orgs don't do this.
Hmm, reasonably fair point. I might add some language to the Lightcone/Lesswrong about pages.
This is ideal, yet many funders individual or otherwise either probably this or would rather you didn't. Maybe even most.
I think this is as good idea, but less important than many other factors about organisations.
I think this dynamic is generally overstated, at least in the existential risk space that I work in. I've personally asked all of our medium and large funders for permission, and the vast majority of them have given permission. Most of the funding comes from Open Philanthropy and SFF, both of which publicly announce all of their grants—when recipients decided not to list those funders, it's not because the funders don't want them to. There are many examples of organizations with high funding transparency, including BERI (which I run), ACE, and MIRI (transparency page and top contributors page).
That makes sense I was talking about my global health and development space only.
Even when that's true, the org could specify all the other sources of funding, and separate out 'anonymous donations' into either one big slice or one-slice-per-donor.
Yep! Something like this is probably unavoidable, and it's what all of my examples below do (BERI, ACE, and MIRI).
Why do you think that? (I agree fwiw)
(Not deeply thought through) Funders have a strong (though usually indirect) influence on the priorities and goals of the organization. Transparency about funders adds transparency about the priorities and goals of the organization. Conversely, lack of funder transparency creates the appearance that you're trying to hide something important about your goals and priorities. This sort of argument comes up a lot in US political funding, under the banners of "Citizens United", "SuperPACs", etc. I'm making a pretty similar argument to that one.
Underlying my feelings here is that I believe charities have an obligation to the public. The government is allowing people to donate their income to a charity, and then (if they donate enough) to not pay taxes on that income. That saves the donor ~30% of their income in taxes. I consider that 30% to be public money, i.e. money that would have otherwise gone to the government as taxes. So as a rule of thumb I try to think that ~30% of a US charity's obligations are to the public. The main way charities satisfy this obligation is by sticking to their IRS-approved exempt purpose and following all the rules of 501(c)(3)s. But another way charities can satisfy that obligation is by being really transparent about what they're doing and where their money comes from.
Literally never even considered it. Would you mind sharing an example of this being done well?
There are many examples of organizations with high funding transparency, including BERI (which I run), ACE, and MIRI (transparency page and top contributors page).