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This is: 2020 Top Charity Ideas - Charity Entrepreneurship, published by KarolinaSarek on the AI Alignment Forum.
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This article was also published at Charity Entrepreneurship's blog.
We’re proud to announce our 2020 Top Charity Ideas!
Each year Charity Entrepreneurship identifies highly effective interventions in chosen cause areas. Our Incubation Program gives participants the skills they need to start high-impact nonprofits based on our top intervention recommendations.
Our 2020 research period focused on four cause areas: mental health, animal advocacy, family planning, and health & development policy. We began with several hundred ideas in each cause area. Progressive stages of our extensive research process whittled down to eight recommended ideas.
Eighty-hour reports linked below illustrate how we came to recommend this year’s top interventions. We also provide Incubation Program participants with implementation reports, which provide specific recommendations to map a path forward for a new charity.
Our 2020 top recommendations are as follows (in no particular order):
MENTAL HEALTH:
1. Guided self-help – Distributing workbooks to enable individuals to work independently on their mental health, supported by short weekly calls from lay health workers.
HEALTH & DEVELOPMENT POLICY:
2. Lead paint regulation – Advocating for tighter regulation of lead paint to reduce the burden of lead exposure on human health and economic prosperity.
3. Alcohol regulation – Advocating for increased alcohol taxation to mitigate the harmful effects of consumption.
ANIMAL ADVOCACY:
4. Shrimp welfare – Improving the welfare of farmed shrimp, e.g. through collaborating with Vietnamese farmers to better oxygenate the water, thus reducing chronic suffering for shrimp.
5. Feed fortification – Fortifying feed with micronutrients to combat deficiencies and improve the health of laying hens.
6. Ask research – Helping organizations and policy-makers decide what best to ask of the animal agriculture industry. (We explored this intervention during our 2019 research period and passed it on to 2020, as despite its promise it was not started.)
FAMILY PLANNING:
7. Mass media campaigns – Broadcasting information about family planning to reduce misconceptions and empower women to make decisions about their fertility.
8. Postpartum family planning – Providing family planning guidance to women at pivotal moments for their health and fertility, such as after giving birth.The above reports are time-capped at eighty hours and follow the chronology of our research process. The reports begin with preliminary research and identifying crucial considerations. Next, we consult with experts. We then create a weighted factor model and a cost-effectiveness analysis. These two methodologies allow us to numerically quantify an intervention; by including both, we balance out their different strengths and weaknesses. Our final section brings together information gained throughout the research process.
We have chosen to organize our reports in this way to increase transparency. Readers are able to follow the research as it unfolds and develops, and can see how an idea performs from multiple perspectives.
For specific questions on the research process, reach out to Karolina Sarek at karolina@charityscience.com.
MENTAL HEALTH
Lead researcher: George Bridgwater george@charityscience.com
Our four cause areas achieve impact in different ways, so we tailor our metrics accordingly. In this cause area, our cost-effectiveness analyses quantify impact using two metrics: the satisfaction with life scale (SWLS), and quality-adjusted life years (QALYs). We measure the expected number of incremental increases on the SWLS, and of QALYs per dollar spent. We use two metrics because of how difficult it is to capture subjective well-b...
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