EA Funds and CEA are merging

By calebp, Zachary Robinson🔸, Oscar Howie @ 2025-04-30T17:03 (+99)

Caleb is Project Lead of EA Funds. Zach is CEO of the Centre for Effective Altruism, and Oscar is CEA’s Chief of Staff.

EA Funds and CEA are currently separate projects within Effective Ventures. EV is winding down, and so EA Funds and CEA will spin out. We have decided to spin out as one organization rather than two, and that organization will be called CEA. Our target date for spinning out and merging is 1 July 2025.

Why we’re merging

We believe this is the best way to achieve our common goal of contributing to a radically better world. While the merger process is not straightforward, making and implementing this decision has been made easier by both having impact as our north star and operating according to shared EA principles.

EA Funds is a natural fit for CEA’s stewardship strategy and our focus on building sustainable momentum for EA. Adding fundraising and grantmaking capacity will increase our ability to coordinate, steer and strengthen the ecosystem, which are key aspects of our conception of stewardship, and will contribute to each of three main pillars of this strategy during 2025 and 2026:

• Growing the EA community, by raising more money, making more grants to object-level and community- or field-building projects, and providing an engagement pathway for people looking to use EA principles to guide their donation decisions.
• Improving the EA brand, by serving as a legible example of how EA principles can contribute to the success of the organizations and causes we support, and making grants to projects engaged in communications efforts.
• Diversifying EA funding, by reaching more donors directly, and making grants to projects engaged in fundraising and donor diversification efforts.

We expect EA Funds to become more robust, reliable and impactful by being integrated into CEA, relative to the status quo (EA Funds as it exists within Effective Ventures) and the counterfactual (EA Funds as an independent organization), by benefitting from the substantial investments CEA is already making in building strong institutional foundations and scalable systems. Establishing, governing, managing and operating non-profits engaged in activities like fundraising and grantmaking across multiple jurisdictions is devilishly difficult, and we predict the likelihood of EA Funds surviving and thriving post-spinout is maximized within CEA.^[1]

Closer integration with CEA’s existing programs will enable us to use our network and platforms to raise both funding for and awareness of EA Funds, our grantees, and their impact. We want to make EA Funds widely-recommendable by CEA programs and others in the community looking for an exemplar of EA-in-action. We want it to be a reliable go-to option for anyone trying to donate to effective charities, and for anyone recommending an immediately-available action to those who don’t know where to begin putting EA principles into practice.

What EA Funds will look like post-merger

From the outside, at least in the near-term, EA Funds will look much the same. (Note that until our spinout and merger on 1 July, EA Funds’ non-spinout related activities are continuing independently of CEA.)

After the merger, we will continue to operate, raise funds for, and make grants from the four existing Funds within EA Funds: the Global Development Fund, the Animal Welfare Fund, the Long-Term Future Fund, and the EA Infrastructure Fund.

Grant recommendations will continue to be made by each Fund’s fund managers. Those recommendations will be subject to an internal CEA review process, including due diligence and legal compliance, similar to the existing EV review process. Personnel and processes may change over time, and like other teams those decisions will be made collaboratively by the leadership of CEA and the EA Funds team. Edit: Please note that if in future a Fund has a significant discontinuity in staff or how it operates, we will consider renaming the Fund to make the change clearer to donors.^[2]

All funding raised by each Fund is and will remain restricted for exclusive grantmaking use by that Fund.^[3] Donations made to any of the Funds pre- or post-merger will not be eligible for reallocation to other Funds or projects within CEA.^[4] Funders of EA Funds’ grantmaking should not be considered to be supporting CEA’s operations: EA Funds will not make grants to cover CEA’s operational costs, but might make grants that correspond to or overlap with grantmaking by other CEA programs (e.g. Community Building Grants).

Similarly, funders of CEA’s operations should not be considered to be supporting or restricting EA Funds’ grantmaking. EA Funds currently receives operational funding from Open Philanthropy, and we expect Open Phil will continue to support EA Funds’ operations via their funding of CEA. Open Phil does not fund EA Funds’ grantmaking, which we don’t expect to change in the foreseeable future, and we don’t intend to repurpose any of CEA’s operational funds for grantmaking by EA Funds (with one possible exception related to consolidating our approach to funding EA groups^[5]). Open Phil is aware of the merger, and we don’t expect any restrictions on our operations or grantmaking as a result of the merger or as a condition of Open Phil’s continued support. Over time, and in accordance with our strategic goals of diversifying EA funding and CEA funding, we are aiming to increase the proportion of our operational costs covered by funding from non-Open Phil sources, and have already had some success here, most notably with the Animal Welfare Fund. If you are interested in supporting EA Funds’ operational costs, please contact Oscar.

Looking ahead, there is much that we need to work out about EA Funds’ operations and strategic direction within CEA. We don’t expect changes to be one and done as part of the merger process, or to change the scope of the Funds’ grantmaking overnight, but rather intend to take a collaborative and iterative approach to increase the impact of EA Funds over the months and years to come. As an example of some things we are excited about exploring (some of which are already in progress, but not all of which may come to pass):

• Hiring more full-time grantmakers to develop Fund-level strategies and increase the quantity and quality of our grant evaluations.
  • If you think you may be interested in a role at CEA, you can fill out our expression of interest form, and watch our website for open roles.
• Refining our grantmaking process to improve efficiency and the experience of grantees.
• Communicating more proactively with the community and the wider world about the grants we make and the impact of our grantees.
• Updating the branding of each Fund
• Hiring dedicated fundraising personnel and developing a fundraising strategy.
• Collaborating with grantees and other funders to understand how best to build sustainable momentum for EA and support the ongoing sustainability of the ecosystem.

Tradeoffs we’re making by merging

We set out the benefits of the merger above. However, all big decisions require hard tradeoffs, and there are two sets of tradeoffs in particular we want to recognize and try to mitigate. (Note that EA Funds and CEA were previously one project within EV between 2017-2020.^[6])

1. Centralization vs decentralization. Whether centralization or decentralization is the right answer depends a lot on the specific context: history is littered with people who felt strongly one way or the other was always right. In this instance, we believe the benefits of strategic alignment and organizational stability outweigh downside risks associated with consolidating institutional decision-making. We recognize there is some tension between prioritizing funding diversification and a merger that could make it harder for projects that “compete” with CEA to gain access to funding, but we believe merging will strengthen the EA ecosystem by increasing the impact of EA Funds as a grantmaker and fundraiser.

While it’s possible that EA Funds grantmakers operating within CEA will be biased towards CEA’s interests in a way we cannot entirely eliminate or correct for, our common goal is contributing to a radically better world, not protecting CEA programs from competition or criticism. As we wrote in our recent strategy post, input from and collaboration with the EA community is critical for us to do our jobs well: we don’t want to act alone and we do want to use our resources to empower others. That includes grantmaking itself: we welcome thoughtful feedback on how we can improve, and we will welcome the emergence of other funders and grantmakers that are well run and highly impactful!

2. Focus vs range. Adding a major new project to CEA’s current portfolio will come at a cost to our focus. This is especially acute at the moment, with many of the same people working on critically important aspects of both our spinout and merger processes.^[7] Post-merger, running EA Funds will cost CEA staff time and effort, in terms of governance, management and operational support. But we believe the strategy-and-stability case for merging and extending the range of CEA activities in service of our ambitious stewardship strategy is sufficiently strong that we are willing to pay that price.

What the merger mechanics mean for you if you’re a donor or grantee

For donors

Nothing will change for donors donating via Giving What We Can. Donors can expect to hear from EA Funds with more details about the spinout process by early June.

You can donate to EA Funds here.

For grantees

EA Funds will be accepting and evaluating grant applications throughout the merger and spinout process, so you can continue to submit applications. But EV/CEA will be instituting a two-month pause on processing new grant recommendations from 1 June - 31 July for operational reasons related to the spinout process, so successful applications will not be paid out until after 1 August.

Grant requests submitted to EA Funds after 9 May will not be processed until at least 1 August. Applications submitted by 5 May or sooner are more likely to be evaluated and processed prior to the pause.

You can find out more about applying for funding and submit grant applications here.

1. ^{^}

    Among EV projects, EA Funds has historically been disproportionately dependent on EV, because it is both unusually operationally complex and has unusually little operational expertise: it operates internationally, makes grants subject to complex regulatory requirements, and has an eight-figure turnover, but it only has two full-time employees (most grantmakers are part-time contractors). CEA is already (and now further) investing in building an Operations team with relevant expertise, including Anna Weldon, who previously worked as Director of Internal Operations at Open Philanthropy and now serves as CEA’s COO. EA Funds will be supported by the CEA Operations team, including shared infrastructure and in-house finance and legal functions, to process grant recommendations compliantly and as efficiently as possible.

2. ^{^}

   We expect this is most likely to apply to the LTFF, but may also apply to other Funds as well.

3. ^{^}

    Funding currently restricted to each Fund within EV will be transferred to and subject to the same restriction within CEA.

4. ^{^}

    Donations made specifically to support EA Funds’ operational costs, as opposed to being made for the purposes of regranting, will de facto be used to cover the portion of CEA’s operational costs responsible for running EA Funds once EA Funds is a merged part of CEA.

5. ^{^}

    Both the CEA Groups team and the EA Infrastructure Fund have historically made grants to support EA groups, and we are still in the process of deciding how to allocate responsibility for groups-related grantmaking within the merged organization.

6. ^{^}

    EA Funds and CEA consciously uncoupled once before, with CEA founding EA Funds in 2017 and operating it as part of one project within EV until 2020. (And until 2022, EV was also called CEA, which meant EA Funds was still technically part of “CEA”. Confusing, we know.) This pre-dates our involvement, but we understand the motivation for uncoupling then was to facilitate both projects having a narrower focus. One of the motivations for narrowing focus was wanting to avoid repeating some operational and communications mistakes related to EA Funds. The CEA which EA Funds rejoins in 2025 is very different than the one EA Funds left in 2020: CEA has invested and continues to invest heavily in building strong institutional foundations, including more robust internal infrastructure and a higher headcount, which we expect to make EA Funds more reliable along ops and comms axes (relative to its historical form within CEA, the status quo within EV, and the counterfactual of an independent EA Funds).

7. ^{^}

    There are also some operational efficiencies we can realize by coinciding our merger with our spinout. Most notably, we only need to establish one set of legal entities.