Thank you for this writeup Luke, and in general for the tireless work you do to help improve these organizations.

I'm likely to make my end of year donations toward something in this space, and would be excited to chat through the decision with others, and possibly coordinate. If you're willing to spend some time on this, feel free to leave a comment or DM for setting up a call. :)

Hi Cassidy!

Thanks for being so generous in offering up your time for EA initiatives, I hope you find a good fit that is full of both impact and meaning :) You might be interested in helping out in the Nordic effective giving landscape, where I am Chairman for Ge Effektivt.

At Gi Effektivt and Ge Effektivt in Norway/Sweden respectively, we work to fundraise for charities recommended by GiveWell, Animal Charity Evaluators, and Giving Green. You might be familar either with us or counterparts from other countries like Effektiv Spenden or Ayuda Efectiva. The total money raised is a few million dollars per year, with significant increase in the past year.

Norway and Sweden share backend and most aspects of frontend, and we have a full-time CTO who is significantly capacity constrained. It sounds like you have skills that could come in handy, and I think we could have the right size where you'd get the right kind of support/counterpart to get you leverage on your time – and still an org small enough that you could make an impressive difference in a few months.

Happy to answer any questions at an initial stage, but in case interested I think it would be even more useful would be for you to speak to our CTO to get an idea of whether you could be helpful and if the projects excite you. You can either DM me here, email henri[at]geeffektivt.se, or reach out to the technical team directly.

I am quite receptive to caveats about how easy it is so scale current orgs and interventions, but that seems more of a practical issue (than can partially be solved through more money?).

Other than that, I just think it's a crazy scale of very neglected suffering and the sooner we figure out how to make significant changes to the system the better.

I was super surprised by this, but then discovered that indeed GW top recommended charities are all listed on the top of the page, in some kind of main set of recommendations. E.g. Humane League is absent in the same way from animal welfare. 

Maybe makes sense to list them in both groups (cause area, and top recs), @Sjir Hoeijmakers🔸 ?

That makes sense, and thank you for the suggestion :)

For what it's worth, I was also on a personal level quite excited about the smaller type of projects that could get funding through something like this and otherwise might not make the effort of going through a long application process.

Thank you for an interesting and useful post, the style of narration made it an enjoyable read.

I wanted to briefly address the below statement:

Rethink's requesting funding for specific projects says to me 'we basically think these are the least important things we'd spend money on, otherwise we'd spend it on them out of our primary budget

As I was part of the group at Rethink Priorities that chose what project to front on Manifund, I can honestly share that this is not how our thought process went. Rather, we focused mostly on ...
I) relatively small asks, that would be a better fit for the crowdfunding format of people giving hundreds of dollars
II) projects we thought were best suited for the "EA Community" framing of the funding round, i.e. meta efforts rather than broader .

Relative to our scale, we also don't have a large "primary budget" that we can use to fund projects we think are impactful. Some of our departments do not have grants for general team work, and have to fundraise for any specific next research project. Even the ones that do have department-level earmarking, are often somewhat restricted by funder(s) in what types of projects they can choose to work on by default. My experience is that it's more likely that a particular project that doesn't get funded gets put on hold in hope of another funder, than that we're able to use general unrestricted funds for it. 

With more unrestricted funds available to RP, I think our reality would look at least a bit more like what you described in your comment. I think we have some very astute thinkers internally when it comes to cause prio, so I think that would be a good thing.

If I have done this some previous year, and got charged membership this year as well, do I need to do anything else? :) 🇩🇰 🤝 🇸🇪

Will try to spread the word!

Thank you so much for what you have done for the effective giving community over the years, Luke! 
I'd be hard pressed to find anyone who has been as responsive, friendly, helpful, sharp, or inspiring as you have – let alone all these qualities combined into one awesome human being!

Enjoy the well-earned personal time, I sincerely look forward to what wonders you will do for the world in your next professional endeavors!

You can now find a recording of the webinar on this link.
Thank you to those that attended, and contributed with meaningful questions!

Thank you for the work that you do – the forum is one of the best products I use that just WORKS! :)