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this is: Rethink Priorities 2020 Impact and 2021 Strategy, published by Marcus_A_Davis on the effective altruism forum.
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Summary
Rethink Priorities is an EA research organization focused on influencing funders and key decision-makers to improve decisions within EA and EA-aligned organizations.
This year we expanded our operations team and hired multiple researchers across multiple causes, allowing us to expand and improve our animal welfare and EA movement building work, and build a dedicated longtermism team.
Rethink Priorities currently has a staff of 16 people, corresponding to 13 full-time equivalents (including 3 FTE operations staff). This year we spent 72% of our time working on research relevant to farmed and wild animal welfare, 9% on movement building, 8% on longtermism, and 11% on other research projects. By the end of the year, we’ll have spent about $833K in 2020.
We track our impact in multiple ways. This year we found qualitative interviews with key decision makers and leaders at EA organizations particularly helpful in understanding how to improve. Given the feedback we’ve received, we think two areas for improvement are more focus on communication with key funders and groups and also improving the visual communication of our work.
Over the next few years we plan to expand our work in animal welfare, relaunch our work in longtermism, and continue our work in movement building.
We continue to be constrained by a lack of funding to hire talented researchers and execute promising projects, having to turn down or delay very high-value projects. In particular, our non-animal growth is constrained by depending too heavily on EA Funds. We would strongly benefit from new individual donors to support our work and diversify our funder base.
If funded we would hire 1-2 additional researchers to tackle our ambitious research agenda and the opportunities we have to work with more groups. We would also create an intern program. In addition to resulting in additional directly valuable research, this program would also benefit both our future growth and the growth of other EA-aligned research efforts, by helping us identify new talented researchers, helping them build their skills, and helping our existing staff develop their management skills.
Currently, our goal is to raise $1.57M by the end of 2021. This consists of gaps of $757K for animal research, $503K for longtermism research, $261K for meta and movement building, and $46K for other research. We do accept and track restricted funds by cause area if that is of interest.
If you’d like to support our work, you can donate to us as part of Facebook’s donation matching on Giving Tuesday or donate directly to us here. If you’re interested in supporting our work with a major gift, contact Director of Development Janique Behman.
Our Mission
Our mission is to help funders make better grants and help organizations do higher impact work. We accomplish this by doing and communicating research that analyzes existing interventions, broadens and refines the scope of possible consideration, and deepens our understanding of what interventions are possible and effective.
Rethink Priorities Theory of Change
Organizational Structure
Staff
Over the course of 2020, we made a number of hires to improve our team. Thanks to support in 2019, Peter Hurford, Co-Executive Director, became full-time in March 2020, and in May we hired a Director of Operations, Abraham Rowe. Janique Behman joined as our Director of Development in November 2020.
We also expanded our research team, hiring five researchers (~3.75 FTE) to continue and expand our work across animal welfare, movement building, and longtermism.[1]
Michael Aird - Associate Researcher - Previously did longtermist and macrostrategy research for Convergence Analysis and the Center...
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