Apply to EA Funds now

By Jonas V @ 2021-02-13T13:36 (+79)

Summary

• The Animal Welfare Fund, the Long-Term Future Fund, and the EA Infrastructure Fund (formerly the EA Meta Fund) are calling for applications.
• Applying is fast and easy – it typically takes less than a few hours. If you are unsure whether to apply, simply give it a try.
• The Long-Term Future Fund and EA Infrastructure Fund now support anonymized grants: if you prefer not having your name listed in the public payout report, we are still interested in funding you.
• If you have a project you think will improve the world, and it seems like a good fit for one of our funds, we encourage you to apply by 7 March (11:59pm PST). Apply here. We’d be excited to hear from you!

Recent updates

• The Long-Term Future Fund and EA Infrastructure Fund now officially support anonymized grants. To be transparent towards donors and the effective altruism community, we generally prefer to publish a report about your grant, with your name attached to it. But if you prefer we do not disclose any of your personal information, you can now choose one of the following options: 1) Requesting that the public grant report be anonymized. In this case, we will consider your request, but in some cases, we may end up asking you to choose between a public grant or none at all. 2) Requesting we do not publish a public grant report of any kind. In this case, if we think the grant is above our threshold for funding, we will refer it to private funders.
• We are currently appointing new fund management teams. We have introduced a process by which fund managers are evaluated and (re-)appointed every two years and expect some changes to the fund management teams for the upcoming funding round. We plan to announce the new teams on the EA Forum in a few weeks.
• The upcoming application deadlines and funding decision dates are:
  • 7 Mar 2021, decision by 2 Apr 2021
  • 13 Jun 2021, decision by 9 Jul 2021
  • 3 Oct 2021, decision by 29 Oct 2021
  • 6 Feb 2022, decision by 4 Mar 2022
  • 5 Jun 2022, decision by 1 Jul 2022
  • 2 Oct 2022, decision by 28 Oct 2022
  • All dates are at 11:59pm, Pacific Time. Please note that these dates are subject to change up to a month before the application deadline.
  • In addition, the Long-Term Future Fund and EA Infrastructure Fund can evaluate time-sensitive applications more quickly. Just let us know in the application form.
  • This is now out of date, you can now apply anytime. Please refer to our website for up-to-date information.
• As a reminder, the minimum grant size at EA Funds has been reduced from $10,000 to $1,000.

Long-Term Future Fund

The Long-Term Future Fund aims to positively influence the long-term trajectory of civilization, primarily via making grants that contribute to the mitigation of global catastrophic risks. Historically, we’ve funded a variety of longtermist projects, including:

• Scholarships, academic teaching buy-outs, and additional funding for academics to free up their time
• Funding to make existing researchers more effective
• Direct work in AI, biosecurity, forecasting, and philanthropic timing
• Up-skilling in a field to prepare for future work
• Seed money for new organizations
• Movement-building programs

See our previous grants here. Most of our grants are reported publicly, but we also give applicants the option to receive an anonymous grant, or to be referred to a private donor.

The fund has an intentionally broad remit that encompasses a wide range of potential projects. We strongly encourage anyone who thinks they could use money to benefit the long-term future to apply.

Animal Welfare Fund

The Animal Welfare Fund aims to effectively improve the well-being of nonhuman animals, by making grants that focus on one or more of the following:

• Relatively neglected geographic regions or groups of animals
• Promising research into animal advocacy or animal well-being
• Activities that could make it easier to help animals in the future
• Otherwise best-in-class opportunities

For more information about the fund’s focus, see its request for proposal and past grants.

EA Infrastructure Fund

The EA Infrastructure Fund recommends grants that aim to improve the work of projects that use the principles of effective altruism, by increasing their access to talent, capital, and knowledge. We are interested in applications from organizations and individuals working on new or established projects.

Please note that if your project relates to community building for local, regional, or national groups, you should apply to CEA’s Community Building Grants (CBG) programme. However, the EA Infrastructure Fund is still keen to fund projects initiated by local groups which are unrelated to community building. If you are uncertain whether you should apply to the EA Infrastructure Fund or the CBG programme, please contact us.

To get a better idea of what kinds of projects we might be interested in funding, you can review our past payout reports.

What types of grants can we fund?

For grants to individuals, all of our funds can likely make the following types of grants: 

• Events/workshops
• Scholarships
• Self-study
• Research projects
• Content creation
• Product creation (e.g., a tool/resource that can be used by the community)

We can refer applications for for-profit projects (e.g., seed funding for start-ups) to EA-aligned investors. If you are a for-profit, simply apply through the standard application form and indicate your for-profit status in the application.

For legal reasons, we will likely not be able to make the following types of grants: 

• Grantseekers requesting funding for a list of possible projects
  • In this case, we would fund only a single project of the proposed ones. Feel free to apply with multiple projects, but we will have to confirm a specific project before we issue funding.
• Self-development that is not directly related to the common good
  • In order to make grants, the public benefit needs to be greater than the private benefit to any individual. So we cannot make grants that focus on helping a single individual in a way that is not directly connected to public benefit.

Please err on the side of applying, as it is likely we will be able to make something work if the fund managers are excited about the project. We look forward to hearing from you.

Apply here.

alexrjl @ 2021-02-13T18:39 (+5)

If someone has a project which potentially spans multiple funds, should they apply to both noting that they have done so, or apply to one noting that they are happy for their application to be passed on to the other?

Habryka @ 2021-02-14T01:59 (+15)

The new funds UI actually has this specific point covered. At least for the (at least historically) larger overlap for the EAIF and the LTFF. See this section: 

alexrjl @ 2021-02-14T07:09 (+2)

Thanks! This seems like a good system for it.