Luke Moore 🔸
Bio
Participation4
At Giving What We Can I work to support the global effective giving community and help with the development of new effective giving initiatives.
I also am the Executive Director of Impact Books.
How I can help others
I am committed to supporting the the effective giving ecosystem. As such I may be able to help you in the following ways:
- Provide context about the global effective giving ecosystem. I am particularly interested in understanding the context in which your project or problem exists, including how it fits into the broader landscape of effective giving initiatives and organisations. To this end, I may ask you questions such as:
- What are your goals for this project, and how do they fit into the broader landscape of effective giving?
- How do you see your project contributing to the overall mission of effective giving?
- What challenges are you or do you anticipate facing, and how do you plan to address them?
- Are these challenges specific to your organisation/situation or might they be more general?
- What kind of support or resources do you need in order to be successful?
- How might you be able to work better with the broader effective giving community to create synergies and collaborate on shared goals?
- Share informational resources. As the effective giving community grows, we have an ever-increasing bank of case studies, charity profiles, tech resources, databases (e.g. potential hires), and examples people can learn from. I can share these resources with you and help you identify the most useful elements.
- Review project proposals related to effective giving. I can offer limited guidance on your proposal and potentially pass it on to others who might have more insight.
- Introduce you to contacts in effective giving. I can potentially make introductions to useful contacts within the effective giving ecosystem, including other organisations, individuals, and experts. Often, someone else is going to provide you with much better advice and more relevant expertise, so getting you in contact with them is the highest value thing I can do.
- Provide funding leads. I can potentially provide you with some leads to follow-up with about getting funding, including individuals and organisations that may be interested in supporting your project. While I cannot make any guarantees about the success of these efforts, I can offer some guidance on how to approach potential funders and how to present your project in a compelling way.
Posts 10
Comments41
Agree that they are focused on effectiveness and ss an ecosystem, we are increasingly building connections with the Gates Foundation. However, currently do not have enough information to be able to make a good conclusion regarding how much of their grantmaking is high-impact.
Hopefully at some point we can include info from the Gates Foundation's high-impact grants in this overview.
Hi @Unwobblypanda! It’s honestly incredibly impressive to see how many pledges you’ve driven through your tabling. Amazing work!
I'm Lucas, Partnerships Manager at Giving What We Can and I’d love to jump on a call with you all to hear more about what you’re doing and how you've had such success. We’d be really keen to explore how we might support your work and whether your approach could be replicated in other student groups as well.
Might be worth looking at GWWC's evaluators research to get an overview of our thinking about some of this. Not exactly what you're looking for, but might be helpful.
Thank you all for your comments and for your enthusiasm for this project. After careful consideration we have decided to discontinue our investigation into whether there’s some value in (someone) building a community for those in the earning to give (EtG) space and to close down the EtG Pledge Club.
At GWWC, we’ve recently made the difficult decision to retire a number of initiatives in order to focus our attention on our ambitious new strategy.
Note: CEA have indicated to us that they might be interested in filling this gap directly or indirectly (see their most recent strategy post).
Hey Joe, this is a really interesting idea! I’d love to dig in more and explore how I—and the broader effective giving sector—might support it. I work as the Effective Giving Global Coordinator and Incubator at Giving What We Can, helping connect and support effective giving initiatives.
I think the best audience for this could be self-improvement enthusiasts—people who follow pop psychology and are drawn to giving as a way to boost wellbeing (e.g., Laurie Santos’ Happiness Lab listeners, Atomic Habits readers, etc.). Framing it as a daily micro-donation—“the cost of a cup of coffee” to a pre-vetted high-impact charity—could really work.
Would love to chat more. Feel free to book a time here: Calendly link or email me at lucas.moore@givingwhatwecan.org!
Thank you for sharing this insightful post! As the Effective Giving Global Coordinator and Incubator at Giving What We Can, my role involves incubating new effective giving initiatives and I’m particularly keen to connect with anyone interested in exploring the idea of launching a Christian giving initiative. The intersection of Christian generosity and effective giving is incredibly compelling, especially given the substantial opportunity to engage Christians in the U.S., where the largest market exists for such an initiative.
If you're interested in discussing this further, or if you have ideas or projects you’d like to share, I’d love to hear from you. Feel free to reach out or connect with me directly via email at lucas.moore@givingwhatwecan.org.
This year, I’m giving 20% of my income—double my 🔸10% Pledge.
I believe that growing the total amount of money directed toward high-impact charities is a crucial bottleneck. As part of this, I’m giving 20% of my donation budget to Giving What We Can. In my view, our multiplier at GWWC is exceptionally high, and I’ve written more about why I think effective giving organizations could do with more support here. While I’d love to give to other effective giving organizations, my role as Effective Giving Global Coordinator and Incubator means that I see value in avoiding any appearance of bias that could complicate my work.
Another clear decision for me this year is giving 20% to AIM’s Incubated Charities Fund. I’ve had the privilege of working closely with AIM, and I’ve been consistently impressed by the rigor and ambition of their work. Their track record is very strong and I think that they are likely to continue incubating exceptionally high impact charities.
For the rest of my giving, I’ve leaned on recommendations from Giving What We Can’s evaluator reports, filtered through my own values and priorities:
- 20% to GiveWell’s All Grants Fund
- 10% to the EA Animal Welfare Fund and 10% to ACE’s Movement Grants Program
- 20% to Longview Philanthropy’s Emerging Challenges Fund
Outside of my 10% pledge, I’ll give to Giving Green’s Grantmaking Fund to offset my annual carbon footprint and to a variety of animal welfare charities, inspired by FarmKind’s Compassion Calculator, to offset the harm caused by my (minimal) animal product consumption as a vegetarian.
Thanks for this follow-up! In my view the key distinction is between:
- Taking a lower-paying job for impact (opportunity cost)
- Explicitly sacrificing part of your available salary (active sacrifice)
While both involve financial sacrifice for impact, only the second case counts towards the pledge. This is because pledge is specifically about donating a portion of the income you actually receive or could immediately receive in your current role. It's not about the opportunity cost of career choices or hypothetical alternative salaries you could earn elsewhere.
So in your example - if someone has offers for $2X but takes a $X job for impact, this opportunity cost doesn't count towards their pledge amount. The pledge would be calculated based on the $X they actually earn.
There are a few reasons for this approach:
- Clarity and consistency in pledge calculations across different situations
- Avoiding complex counterfactuals about alternative career paths
- Maintaining the pledge as an active commitment to give from current income
- Preserving the behavioural and advocacy benefits of regular giving
What are your thoughts on this distinction? I'm curious to hear your perspective on how we might better support people making career changes for impact while maintaining the integrity and clarity of the pledge.
Fair point, however, for OP the figure I have is somewhere between 600-700M (depending how you measure it ). Likely close to 650M. In this case I think that >600M is more acurate than ~600M. Similarly for GW its 200-230M.
Curious if you disagree?