The Future Fund’s Regranting Program

By leopold, Nick_Beckstead @ 2022-02-28T17:28 (+120)

This is a linkpost to https://ftxfuturefund.org/announcing-our-regranting-program/

The FTX Foundation's Future Fund is a philanthropic fund making grants and investments to ambitious projects in order to improve humanity's long-term prospects.

Our regranting program will offer discretionary budgets to independent part-time grantmakers, to be spent in the next ~6 months. Budgets will typically be in the $250k-few million range. We've already invited a first cohort of 21 regrantors to test the program.

Large funders aren’t always aware of the best opportunities. We want to try a decentralized approach. We hope to empower a range of interesting, ambitious, and altruistic people to drive funding decisions through a rewarding, low-friction process. 

We are just getting started and we'd like to fund a lot of great projects. So our primary goal for 2022 is to perform bold tests of new approaches to scaling grantmaking. We very much consider this an experiment, and our goal is to decisively test whether this kind of program works. 

If successful, this program will help us identify great grants that we would have missed, help new people launch exciting projects, and find and empower people who could be strong grantmakers.

We're also aware that the program could cause various problems. We'll try to minimize these downsides by being thoughtful about who we select, providing relevant guidance, and carefully screening grant recommendations for downside risks and conflicts of interest.

We’re so excited to see what regrantors come up with!

Become a regrantor 

We’re planning to invite additional regrantors to join the program in a month or so. Some of these will come from our existing networks, but we’re also opening up a public process to be considered as a regrantor. 

• If you’d like to be considered as a regrantor, please
  • 1. Recommend at least one grant via our grant recommendation form.
  • 2. Fill out this brief regrantor expression of interest form.
• You can also recommend someone be considered as a regrantor here.

If you’re interested, please fill these out as soon as possible; we’re reviewing materials on a rolling basis. 

About the role

Regrantors will be assigned a discretionary budget, from which they can make grant recommendations. These will be screened primarily for downside risk, conflicts of interest, and consistency with our charitable mission and tax-exempt status. An exception is that we are less likely to approve funding for orgs that are already standard targets for EA funders, because we mainly want to fund new things.

The regranting pot expires after 6 months. Regrantors will be compensated for their work based on the quality and volume of their grantmaking.

The role is extremely independent. While we'll provide some documents with basic guidance, regrantors are expected to come up with all of their own ideas for the grants they recommend, do all the necessary communication with grantees, and ensure the quality of their own work. Once the grant recommendation is reviewed and approved, we'll take care of the grantee getting the money—but that's all we're planning to provide for this program.

While we will fund their grants, regrantors will not be Future Fund/FTX Foundation employees or be authorized to speak for the Future Fund/FTX Foundation.

What we’re looking for

We're looking for people who have great grant ideas that we're likely to miss. 

We’ll also lean towards giving this opportunity to people who don’t already have easy access to funds, and those for whom it might make a valuable learning experience. (The regrantors we invite won’t just be a “who’s who” of EA—we expect that many of the effective altruists we most admire will receive no regranting pot at all.)

We think excellent regrantors will:

• Have expertise related to our areas of interest and project ideas.
• Have good judgment about people and projects.
• Leverage their diverse networks.
• Be proactive and have an entrepreneurial drive. We think the best grants will require actively going out and helping things get started, or finding new people.
• Experiment with new things, to teach us about new approaches to grantmaking or areas we aren't familiar with.

In addition, we ask that regrantors:

• Communicate professionally.
• Create a good experience for grantees and potential grantees.
• Be sensitive to the effects their funding has on the ecosystems they work in.

Types of grants we’re especially interested in:

• Incubating new projects. We’d love to see regrantors help seed new projects. We’re especially interested in new projects that could eventually scale up dramatically. (Read more about our vision for massively scalable projects here.)
• Bringing in new people. We’re keen on regrantors finding talented people, who they believe have promise for making an effective contribution, and helping them get started.
• New approaches. We’re interested in getting our feet wet on new types of projects even if they haven’t received much longtermist attention so far.
• Local knowledge. Are there easy opportunities to support the work of people in the regrantor’s network? Is there a specific, tractable subproblem in the regrantor’s field, for which they could announce a big prize?

We’re happy to answer questions, though it might take us a few days to respond due to other programs and content we're launching right now.

We look forward to hearing from you!