Updates on Open Philanthropy’s Effective Giving and Careers program

By Melanie Basnak🔸, James Snowden🔸 @ 2025-03-14T18:22 (+56)

This is a linkpost to https://www.openphilanthropy.org/research/updates-on-open-philanthropys-effective-giving-and-careers-program/

The Effective Giving and Careers program[1] was launched in July 2022 to fund high-impact meta opportunities that help people use their donations and careers to improve human and animal lives. We’re excited to give an update on our progress so far and discuss our priorities for the coming year.

 

Executive summary

Since its inception, the program has recommended 37 grants, committing $28 million across four sub-strategies:

  1. Effective Giving (~71% of funding) – Raising funds for highly effective charities.
  2. Talent Development (~13%) – Helping individuals maximize career impact.
  3. Incubation (~10%) – Seeding and supporting new effective charities.
  4. Research (~6%) – Informing better philanthropic and career decisions.

 

Key Achievements:

Strategic Priorities for 2025:

Challenges & Funding Gaps:

 

Introduction

The Effective Giving and Careers program launched in July 2022 as a counterpart to the Global Catastrophic Risks Capacity Building program, with an annual budget of $10 million.[2]

Since May 2024, the program has been led day-to-day by myself, Melanie Basnak, with oversight from James Snowden.[3]

We support high-impact meta opportunities in the global health and wellbeing (GHW) space. That is, we support projects that enable people to use their resources (e.g., careers, donations) to improve the lives of humans and animals. As of March 2025, the program has recommended 37 grants, committing $28 million across four sub-strategies.

 

Sub-strategyTheory of changeExample GranteeAmount spent
Effective givingRaise funds for effective charitiesGiving What We Can~$20M (71%)
TalentEnable people to have a greater impact with their careerHigh Impact Professionals~$3.5M (13%)
IncubationCreate new effective charitiesAmbitious Impact[4]~$3M (10%)
ResearchResearch on how to have more impact with careers and/or donations.Rethink Priorities~$1.5M (6%)

 

Our grantmaking and impact to date

Effective giving

Other theories of change

 

Priorities for 2025

Some areas we’re excited to explore this year are:

  1. Improving our effective giving portfolio. We have been positively surprised by the growth of the effective giving ecosystem: new initiatives have launched worldwide, and existing efforts have successfully channeled substantial funds to promising opportunities. We believe that effective giving will continue to be a key strategic area in our portfolio. We recently launched a request for proposals for effective giving initiatives to gather information on opportunities we might be overlooking.
  2. Considering spending more of our budget on talent. Currently, we’re relatively more focused on effective giving (71%) than talent (13%) in contrast to the GCR:CB team, which primarily focuses on talent. This is mostly because funding is a bigger bottleneck than talent in the GHW ecosystem relative to the GCR ecosystem.
    • However, when we assessed the three talent initiatives we now support, we were impressed with their track record and potential.
    • We think that helping people access high-leverage positions (such as in policy) could be a particularly promising niche, so we are keen to explore more targeted talent initiatives.
  3. Exploring opportunities to actively seed promising efforts. Even though many great organizations already exist in the GHW meta space, we think some gaps remain.

 

Challenges

If you are another funder interested in supporting the GHW meta space and would like help deciding which efforts to support, feel free to reach out to me at melanie.basnak@openphilanthropy.org.

  1. ^

    Formerly called Effective Altruism (Global Health and Wellbeing).

  2. ^

    At the end of last year we received additional funds for 2025 through an internal top-up process, so our budget exceeds $10 million this year, but it’s unclear if that will be true in the future.

  3. ^

    James was originally the Program Officer for this program and now oversees this program, Global Public Health Policy, Global Aid Policy, and LMIC growth.

  4. ^

    Previously known as Charity Entrepreneurship.

  5. ^

    We recognize that there is some subjectivity in the determination of which charities are effective and that different actors use different methods to determine this, and come up with the different recommendations as a result. An example of a charity we would consider effective in the global health and development space is a GiveWell Top Charity.

  6. ^

    The different effective giving organizations we support recommend different charities, and direct different percentages to charities in various cause areas. That being said, ~60% of the money funneled by our grantees goes to global health and development organizations, with GiveWell Top Charities receiving most of that.

  7. ^

    We apply adjustments for (1) quality of recipient: we benchmark 100% to a GiveWell Top Charity and adjust downwards from there based on where donations are directed and (2) counterfactuality: we attribute credit to fundraising organizations based on how likely their donors would otherwise have been to donate to high-impact charities. This assessment is based on (i) surveys of donors, (ii) case studies of large donations, and (iii) an assessment of whether the organization is reaching populations who would otherwise have been unaware of effective giving.