Giving Compass' Take:

· Brendon Wong discusses research he conducted that shows the differences in funding among various effective altruism organizations, new and established, and provides a few ideas on how it can be improved.

· Is effective altruism a worthwhile use of grantmaking dollars? How do funders evaluate problems and choose where to put their money? 

· Here is a guide for getting started in effective altruism.

Shortly after the first EA Tech Initiatives video call this past weekend, I started thinking about a lot of observations I’ve had over the years about useful EA projects not getting funded or facing funding constraints. Several years ago I thought the EA community was highly funding constrained due to these observations. My updated model is that large organizations have significant funding available (for instance, via large Open Philanthropy Project grants), but projects/grants/startups are highly funding constrained, due to the fact that there are no centralized efforts to fund them, and also no promotion of or culture of funding smaller initiatives.

In thinking about funding for EA causes, I created a 2x2 funding grid with “organizations” and “individuals” on one axis, and “existing” and “new” on the other axis. It looks like funding “existing organizations” and “new individuals” joining the movement gets a lot of funding, but funding “new organizations” and improving the efficacy of “existing individuals” in EA gets significantly less funding. It could be worth exploring these two neglected funding areas further.

I generated a lot of ideas before I went online and realized that other EAs have already been discussing the need for better project/grant funding in considerable detail.

Read the full article about improving funding for EA by Brendon Wong at Effective Altruism Forum.