Hannah Tookey
Bio
Participation6
I connect animal advocates with opportunities to create high-impact solutions for some of the world’s most numerous yet overlooked animals.
At Rethink Priorities, our Animal Welfare team strengthens the movement today while building the strategies and infrastructure it needs for the future.
Read some of our impact stories here:
- Uniting for impact: Improving farmed animal welfare across the EU - how we helped mobilize $1.9m to help animals in response to an urgent legislative opportunity.
- Uncovering neglected issues: Advancing shrimp welfare - the story of our years-long effort to encourage the movement to take shrimp seriously. This led to influencing the founding of Shrimp Welfare Project, contributing to the launch of the world's first corporate campaign to help shrimp, and resulted in a citation in Peter Singer's updated version of Animal Liberation.
Outside of RP, I wear a few other hats as:
- A film, audio and digital arts producer (I still produce part-time, and spent a decade doing this full-time before part-transitioning into EA and animal advocacy)
- Board member at Thrive Philanthropy
- Co-organiser of EA Manchester
- Coordinator of Salford's Plant-Based Councils Campaign
Posts 16
Comments2
Hi Vasco,
Thank you for your follow-up questions about our funding allocation.
You noted it's interesting that wild animal welfare isn't supported by unrestricted funds, suggesting this might imply we believe other work is more cost-effective at the margin. In fact, this allocation isn’t a reflection of our views on the comparative cost-effectiveness of wild animal or invertebrate welfare work. Rather, it stems from the practical reality of having a very limited pool of truly unrestricted funding.
Even when donations are technically unrestricted, donors often express strong preferences for the areas they'd like their gifts to support. This means that, in practice, an even smaller percentage of our funds are treated as fully discretionary. Of that small portion, we have to prioritize operational stability - especially core infrastructure such as finance and operations which supports all research areas. This currently accounts for over 90% of this year's unrestricted funds.
The remainder is allocated strategically based on a mix of considerations beyond just cost-effectiveness, including urgent needs, time-sensitive opportunities, fundraising challenges in different departments, and more.
On invertebrate welfare and wild animal welfare specifically: Increasing our capacity in both areas remains a priority. While we’re not currently able to allocate unrestricted funds to them, there are valuable opportunities where targeted donations can still make a marginal difference without displacing existing funds.
Our funding situation evolves year to year though. In stronger years, we've allocated close to $500K in unrestricted funding to animal welfare. For example, the Moral Weight Project was only made possible because of that flexibility.
With greater unrestricted support in future, we could potentially distribute more to historically underfunded areas like invertebrate and wild animal welfare, while still meeting our essential operational needs.
I hope this clarifies our approach. Please don’t hesitate to reach out if you have further questions.
Hannah Tookey (Development Officer, Rethink Priorities)
You're welcome! And thank you for recommending our invertebrate welfare work - it's much appreciated :)