kierangreig🔸
Bio
Kieran Greig is the Chief Strategy Officer at Rethink Priorities. He works with the Leadership Team to advise on Rethink Priorities’ strategy and execution, at all levels. Prior to that, he was the Director of Research for Farmed Animal Funders, a group of large donors who each give over $250,000 annually to end factory farming. He previously worked as a researcher at Animal Charity Evaluators, and prior to that was a co-founder of Charity Entrepreneurship and Charity Science Health. He has written about topics like improving the welfare of farmed fish and supporting plant-based alternatives to animal products. He has a B. Sc. from Monash University and a Masters from La Trobe University.
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Thanks for engaging Michael!
Would you be open to taking funding earmarked for one of your specific proposed projects? And generally for a specific department?
Yes, donors can restrict their contributions to Rethink Priorities or specific projects. When making a donation, donors should specify their desired restrictions, and we will ensure the funds are allocated accordingly in our accounting. However, for relatively small donations, restricting funds to a specific project may be less practical if the project requires significantly more funding to proceed.
How might more general funding shift around in that case, i.e. funging?
The only way this would cause fungibility is if it changes how we allocate unrestricted money. Based on our current plans, this would not happen for donations to our animal welfare or AI work but could happen for donations to other areas. If this is a concern for you, please flag that and we can actually go and increase the budget for the area by the size of your donation, thus fully eliminating fungibility concerns.
We take donor preferences very seriously and do not think fungibility concerns should be a barrier to those giving to RP. That being said, we do appreciate those who trust us to allocate money to where we think it is needed most.
A few months ago, Good Ventures, the primary funder behind Open Philanthropy, decided to exit grantmaking in the areas of farmed invertebrates and wild animals, which had supported much of Rethink Priorities' work over the last 18 months, including recent publications on shrimp welfare and farmed insect welfare. While The Navigation Fund has committed to sustaining our insect welfare portfolio through 2026, other invertebrate and wild animal projects lack secure funding, making additional support crucial for their continuation. The switch in funding approaches has also (in my albeit speculative estimation) resulted in a loss of significant funding for digital sentience for Rethink Priorities as well. Some funds have been raised there in lieu but no long-term commitments secured. My main concern is the long-term outlook for these areas; while there is some short-term interest for the next year or two, sustained funding remains uncertain, and the overall impact opportunities in these areas now seem significantly diminished by the more uncertain and reduced funding landscape.
Sure. Before doing that a couple of quick notes. First, I think it takes a while for grants to mature and impact to play out, so that makes it difficult to judge at this point which were the biggest hits from the past year. Second, there are some grants that I have a COI with, but think may have been hits from 2022, but nonetheless won’t list them here. Third, as some further background context, the general categories of grants that I am most excited by are early-stage support to aligned groups, working on neglected animals, or in neglected places.
Then being quite brief, some hits that come to mind for me:
- Our early 2022 grant of $185,000 to the team at EA Singapore to run a capacity-building fellowship throughout SE Asia. They have run multiple iterations of a 14-week fellowship, have had tens of people go through that fellowship, and partnered with tens of organizations on the fellowship. They were renamed as Welfare Matters, and secured a $1M grant from Open Phil earlier this year. In my view, the movement basically went from not really having a very promising movement-building option for much of SE Asia (which is a critical area for the movement[1]) to having one in the space of 1-2 years, in large part because of the EA AWF.
- Our early 2022 grant of $45,000 grant to the Shrimp Welfare Project (SWP). I think our support of SWP was quite important to their growth and they went on to secure larger grants from us, and be ACE-recommended. In my view, the movement went from not really having a promising option for addressing shrimp welfare, to having one in the space of 1-2 years, in large part because of the EA AWF. And by SWP’s estimates, they already now (in expectation) help 1 billion shrimps per annum.
- Various grants we have made to support chicken welfare campaigns internationally seem to have been quite good investments in my view (e.g., Sinergia Animal and Çiftlik Hayvanlarını Koruma Derneği).
I hope that gives some more sense of the potential upside but feel free to follow up further. Also as noted in response to a different question, there is variance in views within fund managers. Here I am reporting my own relatively quickly put views, while others on the fund may have slightly to somewhat different views.
Hi David, thanks for engaging! Responding to your questions below.
- Yes, sometimes we do this if we think that some opportunity is a particularly good fit for a different funder. Yeah, I would say applicants usually remain active long enough to reapply again in the future. It seems rare to me that our funding is the deciding factor for their continued existence.
- I can’t easily pull that information, and I think it depends on the year, but my very rough guess is between 3-30% of funds raised in any given year of the fund’s existence so far were crypto-related. Note that variance too, wherein some years we don’t receive any major crypto-associated donations, and other years our largest donations are crypto-related. When I think about fluctuations for this year or next, I am more thinking about, as Luke put it in one comment:
One thing that I've found when speaking with pledgers/donors and other people in the charitable sector is that economic conditions are also a very important part of the story. This has held since early 2022 when the dollar value of large donations dropped when financial markets and crypto markets declined (our larger donors tend to be more likely to have made money in tech or finance instead of other industries).
3. As far as I know this has never happened.
Hope that helps.
In terms of the present funding allocation, it is much more focused on farmed than wild animals. An important factor contributing to that is there are very few opportunities that we can support on the wild animal side at this point. The promising opportunities for wild animals that exist now receive funding from us and are some of our bigger grantees. But there’s only so far we can go with research there, and we haven’t yet identified some promising wild animal welfare intervention that groups could implement. That contributes to there being significantly fewer grantmaking opportunities on that side of things right now.
In contrast, on farmed animals there do seem to be various grants that can be made now around a) implementing promising interventions, b) coordinating around promising interventions, or c) building up the field in order to do more promising interventions later. At this point, such opportunities don’t seem to exist to nearly the same extent on the wild animal side.
Also note there is in general some variance in views within fund managers and that adds some nuance to describing overall views on this, and other questions related to the “fund’s current views.” Here I am reporting my own relatively quickly put views, while others on the fund may have slightly to somewhat different views.
Thanks for the question, Vasco :)
It is possible to donate specifically to a single area of RP?
Yes. Donors can restrict their donations to RP. When making the donation, the donor should just mention what restriction is on the donation, and then we will restrict those funds for only that use in our accounting.
If yes, to which extend would the donation be fungible with donations to other areas?
The only way this would be fungible is if it changes how we allocate unrestricted money. Based on our current plans, this would not happen for donations to our animal welfare or longtermist work but could happen for donations to other areas. If this is a concern for you, please flag that and we can actually go and increase the budget for the area by the size of your donation, thus fully eliminating all fungibility concerns completely.
We take donor preferences very seriously and do not think fungibility concerns should be a barrier to those giving to RP. That being said, we do appreciate those that trust us to allocate money to where we think it is needed most.
Like Toby, this is my initial vote, but I may revise it as more information becomes available over time.