What are your giving recommendations to non-EA friends interested in supporting Ukraine?

By Lorenzo Buonanno🔸 @ 2022-03-05T13:05 (+12)

Several friends asked me for donation advice to support Ukraine during this war.
Answers like "there are probably not many funding constrained opportunities, it's likely more efficient to give money to help Afghanistan or donate to GiveWell's Maximum Input Fund" are obviously not useful.

I've spent a couple of hours looking at forum posts tagged Ukraine, and haven't been able to come up with advice I'm happy with :/

Personally, I'm getting the impression it probably makes sense to bias donations towards:
- "experienced organizations with a pre-existing presence in the affected country", from GiveWell: 6 tips on disaster relief giving
- independent news sources or humanitarian aid, instead of military support

But don't really have any "I would donate to X" style of advice, or something like the GiveWell list of top charities.
Is anyone in the same situation? What are you currently recommending?

I'll post what I'm currently sending as an answer here

Lorenzo @ 2022-03-05T13:33 (+11)

I'm currently sending the following, interested in comments or suggestions.
I think it's probably too many links and too little analysis or actual recommendation.

Tl;dr: there are a lot of donation opportunities, a lot of people/governments donating, but I have found no clear cost-effectiveness analyses. The best article I found so far is vox.com: How you can help Ukrainians

Meta:
6 tips on disaster relief giving - The GiveWell Blog … Allow your funds to be used where most needed – even if that means they’re not used during this disaster. … The rebuilding effort can be very expensive. … It’s common for charities to use a disaster as an opportunity to raise funds for their other work. … A highly professional, experienced organization with a pre-existing presence in the affected country will likely help where it can, and stay out of the way where it can’t.
There’s already a lot of money and military support from governments and individuals, e.g. > Biden administration to push congress for $6.4 billion in aid to Ukraine - Schumer and some seem to be talking about 10 Billion.

Vox:
vox.com: How you can help Ukrainians (Also sourced from forum posts below, so beware of information cascades)

Recommended refugees orgs:

Recommended opposition press, from a comment in the EA forum:

  • Meduza (Russian online newspaper and aggregator)
  • OVD-Info (Russian human rights service)

Ukrainian military:

Medical assistance:

Polish Effective Altruism:
https://efektywnyaltruizm.org/blog/help-for-ukrainians, updated 30.03.2022, doesn’t have a lot of analysis in the post, recommends:

Military:

Humanitarian aid:

Effective Altruism Forum:
What are effective ways to help Ukrainians right now? - EA Forum

Rough attempt to profile charities which support Ukrainian war relief in terms of their cost-effectiveness. - EA Forum more Polish charities with some analysis.

Others:

https://uacrisis.org/en/help-ukraine yet another list of donation opportunities

Pomoc dla Ukrainy /  Допомога для України / Support for Ukraine big spreadsheet sourcing the blog post from Polish EA linked above


 

blonergan @ 2022-03-06T01:57 (+5)

The Center for High Impact Philanthropy at U Penn has posted a list: https://www.impact.upenn.edu/ukraine-crisis-how-can-i-help/

Lorenzo @ 2022-03-06T09:22 (+1)

Thanks! This is exactly the sort of thing I was looking for, it complements nicely the other lists

Michael_Townsend @ 2022-03-05T16:50 (+2)

I've heard of people giving money directly through services like Airbnb. There might be something especially useful about low transaction cost giving to people in a desparate situation, who may not have much liquidity. But, I'm not really sure, just leaving this comment in case someone else has more information.