Animal Welfare Fund: Payout recommendations from April to June 2025

By KarolinaSarek🔸, Neil_Dullaghan🔹 , Zoë Sigle 🔹, Ula Zarosa @ 2025-07-21T15:52 (+78)

Introduction

This payout report covers the Animal Welfare Fund's (AWF) grantmaking from April 1, 2025 to June 30, 2025 (3 months). It follows the previous January-March 2025 payout report.
 

Organizational updates

• In May, the AWF welcomed two full-time fund managers: Neil Dullaghan, who joined as a Senior Fund Manager, and Renata Scarellis, who joined as a Fund Manager. They bring experience in animal welfare grantmaking, research, and advocacy:

  • Dr. Neil Dullaghan is a full-time senior fund manager with the AWF, where he has worked part-time since 2022. Previously, he worked at Rethink Priorities as a Senior Research Manager on their farmed animal welfare team and led a regranting fund focused on EU farmed animal welfare policy. He holds a PhD in Political & Social Science from the European University Institute, an MPhil in European Politics & Society from the University of Oxford, and a BA in International Relations from Dublin City University. He has volunteered for Charity Entrepreneurship and Animal Charity Evaluators.
  • Renata Scarellis is a full-time Fund Manager at EA AWF. Previously, she served as a program manager at Effective Ventures, supporting the spinout of multiple projects into independent entities. Before that, she spent nearly eight years at Mercy For Animals, where she led efforts to advance corporate animal welfare policies and promote plant-based options in public and private institutions. She also serves on the board of the Welfare Footprint Institute.

  They join our existing fund management team of Zoë Sigle and Urszula Zarosa, alongside Karolina Sarek, the fund's Chair, bringing our total grantmaking capacity to 3.5 FTE. You can learn more about the team behind the AWF on our website. With our expanded team in place, we're entering an exciting new phase of growth—this increased capacity will allow us to set ambitious grantmaking strategy, increase the impact of our grants, and provide deeper support to our grantees and the effective giving ecosystem. 

• Grantmaking will resume in August 2025: As a result of EA Funds’ merger with CEA, Effective Ventures and the Centre for Effective Altruism has instituted a two-month pause on processing new EA Funds grant recommendations from 1 June - 31 July for operational reasons related to the spinout process. For this reason, the AWF has not approved any new grants since 1 June but has continued rejecting grants. Additionally, two grants recommended by AWF in Q2 haven’t yet been paid out, but we included them in this report as “approved.”

Overview of Q2, 2025 grants

• Total funding approved: $1,351,867
• Total funding paid out: $1,267,611
• Number of grants approved: 13
• Number of grants paid out: 11
• Acceptance rate (excluding desk rejections): 13/26 = 46.1%
• Acceptance rate (including desk rejections): 13/117 = 10.3%

Highlighted Grants

Highlighted grants correspond to grants that the AWF team rated highly, usually because they thought the grant was very likely to be very cost-effective or the potential upside was likely very high.

People for Animals Uttarakhand and Cage Free Free Range Poultry Producers Association ($58,650): 5-day training for trainers in India to equip key stakeholders with best practices in cage-free egg farming

In May 2025, AWF recommended a grant to support a program that will train 20 leaders to educate hundreds of farmers in India on science-based best practices for cage-free egg production. Hosted on a demonstration farm, the five-day program will offer hands-on instruction, distribute locally tailored training materials, and establish a peer-learning network to foster ongoing mentorship and knowledge sharing.

India produces nearly as many eggs annually as all Southeast Asian countries combined. Virtually all Indian egg production is caged, yet cage-free advocacy efforts in the country are minimal. According to a 2022 evaluation of cage-free adoption in several Asian countries, nearly three-quarters of egg producers cited a lack of support–particularly technical advice, training, and resources–as a barrier to establishing cage-free farms. Given  the limited traction of corporate campaigns in India so far, the scale of Indian egg production, and the claimed importance of technical support, AWF is interested in supporting a trial of hands-on farmer training’s effectiveness. If this program is successful, it could be scaled to improve the welfare of millions of hens in the country. This project will also occur at a critical time because there are just months remaining until deadlines for fulfilling corporate welfare commitments in India; this training will increase the chance that those commitments are met.

Wild Animal Initiative ($300,000): General support for our activities in 2024 and 2025 to continue accelerating the field of wild animal welfare science

The AWF provided a grant to the Wild Animal Initiative (WAI) to continue their efforts to accelerate the field of wild animal welfare (WAW) science through grantmaking, research, and outreach, including training new scientists and retaining scientists in the WAW field. Because WAW is still a nascent scientific field, the WAI aims to accelerate the establishment and growth of the field; while most scientific fields take 25 to 50 years to develop, the WAI aims to develop the field of WAW science in the next decade.

Wild animals comprise a great majority of all animals, but so far, finding cost-effective interventions has proven to be challenging. While WAI’s Theory of Change occurs over a long timeline, it has the potential to establish a self-sustaining, aligned research field that may uncover promising interventions in the future, which could improve the welfare of millions or trillions of animals. However, the field of WAW work is still relatively small and receives little support from major funders, especially after Open Philanthropy had to exit this area, giving the AWF unique opportunity to create counterfactual impact. The WAI has recently received a significant amount of partnership inquiries, giving them the potential to engage in fieldbuilding for WAW science. The WAI also has a strong track record of successful outreach and grantmaking, making them especially well-positioned to expand the field of wild animal welfare.

The Mission Motor ($84,487): 3-month budget to increase the adoption of Monitoring & Evaluation practices within the animal advocacy community

In June 2025, the AWF recommended a grant to the Mission Motor, the only major Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning (MEL) resource for effective animal advocacy organizations. The Mission Motor equips charities with the tools, training, and support needed to build effective MEL systems, enabling charities to collect credible data, generate actionable insights, and make evidence-informed decisions. By enabling organizations, including other AWF grantees, to evaluate and improve their work, MEL supports charities in adopting more effective interventions, significantly enhancing the impact of animal welfare efforts.

While we don’t have data specific to the animal advocacy movement, an article by the Center for Global Development on a study of World Bank programs demonstrated that monitoring and evaluation quality strongly correlates with project success—programs rated "substantial" for their monitoring and evaluation quality were 38% more likely to achieve better results compared to those with "modest" monitoring and evaluation quality ratings. Though many animal advocacy organizations agree that MEL is crucial, few organizations have complete MEL systems or the relevant expertise to conduct full MEL processes, creating a significant gap for the Mission Motor to fill. However, meta-work, such as MEL, is often overlooked by major funders, making AWF support particularly valuable. Moreover, the Mission Motor has well-articulated goals and competent leadership with demonstrated experience in MEL. The organization is aiming to provide long-term MEL support to 4-6 groups and short-term or ad hoc support to 50-100 organizations. 

Grants Funded with AWF’s Partners

As described in the previous payout report, AWF has increased collaboration with other funders, either through recommending particular funding opportunities that meet partners' criteria or through co-funding. In some of those cases, the partner organization completes due diligence, issues a grant agreement, and pays out the grant, but the AWF still receives progress reports from the organization to track the grant’s success, but they are not included in the “total funding paid out” since the AWF does not provide the funding. This quarter, we recommended the following grants:

• Recommendation to a partner organization:
  • Animal Welfare Observatory ($100,000)
    • Support for AWO to advance broiler chicken welfare via corporate advocacy
• Recommendation to an individual donor:
  • Animal & Vegan Advocacy (AVA) International ($42,000)
    • Providing travel stipends for impactful advocates to attend the only farmed animal advocacy conference in Africa

All Grants We Approved During This Time Period

Below is a full list of all 11 grants, totaling $1,267,611, that the Animal Welfare Fund disbursed during this period, and 3 grants, totaling to $95,730, that were approved but not yet paid out. 

Vasco Grilo🔸 @ 2025-07-22T16:53 (+4)

Thanks for the update!

Wild animals comprise a great majority of all animals, but so far, finding cost-effective interventions has proven to be challenging. While WAI’s Theory of Change occurs over a long timeline, it has the potential to establish a self-sustaining, aligned research field that may uncover promising interventions in the future, which could improve the welfare of millions or trillions of animals.

It would be great if you could clarify how you are thinking about effects on soil nematodes, mites, and springtails. I would say there are already interventions increasing "the welfare of millions or trillions of animals". I estimate donating 100 k$ to GiveWell's top charities would decrease the living time of those animals by 23.7 trillion animal-years (= 100*10^3*237*10^6), which is beneficial for my best guess that those animals have negative lives. Relatedly, "wild bugs" also have a negative welfare in Ambitious Impact's (AIM's) deprecated welfare points system, whose development I believe was led by Karolina^[1]. My understanding is that fully happy animals would have a welfare of 100.

1. ^{^}

   Karolina is the 1st author listed in AIM's post. "Authors of the research: Karolina Sarek, Joey Savoie, David Moss".

KarolinaSarek🔸 @ 2025-07-24T08:47 (+4)

Hi Vasco! I'm out of the office, but I will address your comment upon my return. 

Vasco Grilo🔸 @ 2025-08-08T09:02 (+2)

Thanks, Karolina! Here is my updated thinking on effects on soil animals.