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this is: What would you do if you had half a million dollars?, published by Patrick on the effective altruism forum.
I won the 2020/2021 $500,000 donor lottery. I’m interested in maximizing my positive impact on the long-term future, and I thought it would be helpful to elicit thoughts from the effective altruism community about how best to do this.
In this post I outline the high-level options I’m considering. (I wrote more about the options that readers may be less familiar with.) If you’d like to share your opinion, please fill out this short survey. I’m most interested in
whether I failed to mention any considerations that would make one option much worse or much better, and
your subjective opinion about how good each option is.
Donate directly to charities
Previous donor-lottery winners who have written about their donation decisions have given directly to charities rather than to re-granting organizations (see here, here, and here[1]). But my impression is that I don’t have sufficient local knowledge or relevant expertise that would give me an advantage over existing longtermist grantmakers. This could change if I were to invest a lot of time into discovering donation opportunities. Having more effort put into discovery and evaluation of EA funding opportunities would be valuable. But grant evaluation that’s sufficiently well-informed would require both getting up to speed as a grant evaluator and evaluating the grants themselves, and this would be a lot of work.
Long-Term Future Fund (LTFF)
The Long-Term Future Fund gives out small grants (typically less than $100k), usually to individuals. Its managers also consider making larger grants to organizations, though these account for a minority of their grantmaking. In the last funding round, six people worked part-time on evaluating grant applications, with the Centre for Effective Altruism providing additional support. They say they have room for more funding:
We anticipate being able to spend $3–8 million this year (up from $1.4 million spent in all of 2020). To fill our funding gap, we’ve applied for a $1–1.5 million grant from the Survival and Flourishing Fund, and we hope to receive more funding from small and large longtermist donors. [source]
They plan to add more fund managers so that they can evaluate more grants.
Longview Philanthropy
Longview Philanthropy advises large donors (primarily those who give $1 million or more per year). Though the LTFF and Longview each give both to organizations and to individuals, Longview tends to give relatively more grants to organizations and fewer to individuals. Another difference is that the LTFF has a high volume of grant applications that it evaluates quickly, whereas Longview does fewer, more in-depth grant investigations. Finally, the LTFF publishes its grant evaluations publicly, but Longview shares information about its grant decisions with only its donors and other grantmakers. (Because of its focus on large donors, communicating this information publicly is less valuable.)
If I were to give to Longview, the donation would go to their recently created general-purpose fund. This fund has some advantages over Longview’s other grantmaking:
Longview can better take advantage of time-sensitive giving opportunities, such as funding that would affect hiring decisions. (Job candidates may not be willing to wait for weeks or months for funding to come through.)
Grantees would have increased certainty about funding, which would help with planning.
Longview currently has one full-time staff member, Kit Harris, whose primary focus is grantmaking (there are plans to hire more full-time grantmakers); four other staff members are also involved in the grantmaking process, and Longview has recently hired four part-time research assistants. Longview is in regular contact with people wo...
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