GWWC's new recommendations and cause area funds

Thank you! Great question. I can't speak on behalf of EA Funds and their plans going forward, but I can say our new GWWC cause area funds are meaningfully different from their funds (at least as they've been operating so far).

The biggest differences IMO are

• The EA Funds generally (with the exception of the GHD Fund) only make grants to organisations that apply for funding with them.
• The EA Funds are managed by a limited set of expert grantmakers.

Our GWWC cause area funds, on the other hand, ultimately aim to cover recommendations and grantmaking by nearly all impact-focused evaluators and grantmakers, based on our evaluations of these evaluators, but we don't accept any grant applications ourselves.

For instance, EA Funds currently doesn't consider any of Founders Pledge's or Longview's evaluations or active search for high-impact opportunities to inform their grantmaking, whereas our GWWC Funds do (or will do in the case of Founders Pledge) and additionally consider EA Funds as a grantmaker/evaluator.

For the EA GHD Fund and the GWWC GH&W Fund in particular, the difference is currently less pronounced. This is because we ended up working with GiveWell based on our initial evaluations, and EA Funds has historically asked them to advise their fund as well. However, this could easily change in the short- to medium-term, e.g. we hope to evaluate both Happier Lives Institute and Founders Pledge next year as candidates for evaluators informing our GH&W Fund grantmaking in addition to GiveWell.

Hope that clarifies a bit! Happy to elaborate further on the differences if helpful.

I’m also confused about this.

As I understand things there are now two different global health funds under the Effective Ventures umbrella, both of which currently amount to deferring to GiveWell (which, to be clear, I think makes a lot of sense!) with extra steps.

First there’s the EA Funds Global Health and Development Fund, which really seems to be equivalent to the GiveWell All Grants fund but with EA Funds branding. The fund managers are listed as Elie Hassenfeld (co-founder and CEO of GiveWell) and GiveWell Staff, and the GiveWell UK FAQ says:

GiveWell acts as the manager of the Fund and directs EA Funds on where to grant it. Giving to the GH&D Fund is analogous to giving to GiveWell's All Grants Fund in that we may allocate the Fund to less certain but still high-expected-value opportunities outside of our top charities. You might choose to give to the GH&D Fund instead of our All Grants Fund via GiveWell UK if you would also like to support other cause areas through EA Funds (such as its Animal Welfare Fund, Long-Term Future Fund, or EA Infrastructure Fund).

That last sentence is the only publicly stated justification I’ve found for why the EA Funds GH&D Fund exists. It doesn’t seem very compelling to me. I guess it would have been awkward to create EA Funds for the other cause areas but not for global health?

And now there’s the GWWC Global Health and Wellbeing Fund, whose webpage says:

[Grants from the fund] may include allocations to:

• Charities or projects recommended by an evaluator/grantmaker the research team has evaluated (such as a grant to Against Malaria Foundation, which is recommended by GiveWell).
• A fund run by an evaluator the research team has evaluated (such as a grant to whichever GiveWell funds can best use it).
• Charities or projects the research team has reason to believe are highly impactful, including cases where this reasoning isn’t the result of deferring to a vetted evaluator (though we expect this to be rare, as the research team generally evaluates evaluators rather than individual charities or projects).

…

For this first round, we expect to allocate donations to this fund in consultation with GiveWell, based on our recent evaluation of its work. In practice, this will likely closely resemble the grantmaking of GiveWell’s All Grants Fund… Our research team may identify new funding opportunities (outside of those recommended by GiveWell) in future grantmaking rounds.

Here there’s potential at least for future divergence from GiveWell’s recommendations. But it seems this will really only come into its own if GWWC finds another global health evaluator it endorses, or develops substantial global health expertise of its own.

More broadly, now that GWWC has launched its own funds, how does Effective Ventures expect the relationship between GWWC and other grantmakers under the EV fiscal sponsorship umbrella to evolve? What would the internal governance and external communications look like if, hypothetically, the GWWC research team concluded that one of the other EV-sponsored grantmakers was allocating funds poorly?