EA Animal Welfare Fund: 2024 Review, Changes, and Plans

By KarolinaSarek🔸 @ 2024-11-11T16:23 (+160)

Overview 

With Marginal Funding Week, we want to share key updates on the EA Animal Welfare Fund (AWF). We'll cover what we've accomplished so far in 2024, our impact this year, recent changes, and where we're headed next - including current constraints to our impact. We think this info will be helpful for anyone considering year-end donations.

Since its founding in 2017, AWF has distributed $23.3M across 347 grants. This year, we’ve distributed $3.7M across 51 grants. We made grants across multiple intervention categories and aimed to impact a variety of species. Our most frequently funded strategic area was welfare campaigns, policy advocacy and research. The most frequently targeted species were egg-laying hens followed by multiple farmed animals, wild animals, and shrimps. 

While the impact of many of our 2024 grants is still unclear, our previous grants have made significant progress, reflecting our ability to identify opportunities with great potential for impact. In 2024, AWF implemented organizational improvements, such as increased staffing, communications, evaluation, and fundraising efforts, enabling us to expand the scope and sustainability of our impact. In the future, we plan to further improve our capacity and efficiency in order to further maximize our support for non-human animals.

We will update this post in January 2025 to include progress made in the two remaining months of 2024. 

I. Background

The AWF’s mission is to alleviate the suffering of non-human animals globally through effective grantmaking.

Our grants portfolio prioritizes interventions that can collectively have the highest impact and help the greatest number of animals. Thus, we support projects focused on:

• Reducing suffering and improving the lives of animals in factory farms
• Bringing factory farming to an end
• Positively affecting other groups of animals on a large scale
• Supporting these goals by researching and piloting novel approaches and interventions

Since its founding in 2017, AWF has emerged as a major funder in effective animal advocacy (EAA), distributing $23.3M across 347 grants. We also contributed to building a more robust and diverse funding ecosystem by:

• Maintaining an accessible, always-open grant application process that  democratized access to funding—connecting high-impact projects with resources, regardless of the projects’ existing networks,
• Building a diverse team of expert fund managers through regular recruitment, rather than relying on decisions by a single grantmaker,
• Serving as either the primary or secondary funding source for many effective animal welfare projects that are or have become neglected by other donors,
• Supporting organizations at all stages, including new initiatives that often fall outside traditional funding criteria. 

II. A year in review

Key Numbers and Reach

Our work this year is reflected in several key metrics: 

• Total funding distributed: $3.7M
• Number of grants made: 51
• Acceptance rate (excluding desk rejections): 26%
• Acceptance rate (including desk rejections): 13%

Grant Distribution

In the interest of transparency, we want to share how our grants are distributed across intervention types, species, and geographies.

Important note:

While the empirical distribution below should hopefully be useful to readers, it shouldn't be viewed as prescriptive or fully representative. The data is affected by application timing. For example, since there are very few large insect-focused projects, whether they applied right before or right after the January 2024 cutoff will affect how they’re presented here greatly. The data below also excludes grants kept private for strategic reasons. Please reach out to me if you’re a donor who’s interested in learning more.

The distribution reflects available opportunities rather than our ideal allocation. So if your project matches our criteria but falls into a category that received less funding, we still strongly encourage you to apply! We're working to align our portfolio more closely with optimal distribution over the next year through active grantmaking. Despite these limitations, we believe this 2024 overview is valuable for donors to consider.

By intervention type

We  are committed to creating a cost-effective and balanced portfolio that includes:

• grants that are evidence-based and offer a high probability of achieving significant impact as well as
• opportunities that have an exceptionally high expected value, even if a lower chance of success.

Thus we distributed our grants across several key strategic areas and theories of change: 

Note on categorization: “Welfare Campaigns” include all activities with the aim of reducing farm animal suffering or increasing welfare, such as corporate outreach, producer outreach, accountability work on prior commitments, work with certifiers, etc. “Policy Advocacy” is a broad term that includes policy work, legislative advocacy, and litigation. 

By species

Our grantmaking across species balances several factors: the number of animals affected, severity of suffering, tractability of interventions, current state of advocacy, and strategic timing opportunities. We also consider AWF's comparative advantage as a funder in different areas.

Egg-laying hens received the largest share of funding, driven by their numbers in industrial farming, proven intervention effectiveness, and the strategic importance of securing cage-free commitments before 2025 deadlines, as well as multiple opportunities for impactful grants.  The second-largest category is "Multiple farmed animals," capturing grants that affect several species simultaneously through policy, movement-building, and other meta work. Wild animals represent our third-largest funding area, reflecting both the potential scale of impact and the importance of research and field building. Shrimp welfare interventions were the fourth most-funded species, chosen for their exceptional scale, growing evidence of sentience, and surprising tractability. The focus on the two latest categories also reflects AWF's unique position as the primary remaining large-scale funder after Good Ventures (GV) exited those and other areas.

By continent

Our commitment to finding the highest-impact opportunities leads us to fund work across the globe. In 2024, our grants supported initiatives in multiple regions:

While this categorization is not perfect since it doesn’t capture projects based in one region that affect another region (for example, corporate outreach in Europe that affects supply from Asia), we still think it is a useful approximation. Some of those grants are captured under “Global” if we funded an organization working across many regions, but some of them are categorized under specific continents if the work clearly prioritizes that region, even if it affects other regions. In general, this distribution reflects our strategic focus on regions where animal farming is most extensive and neglected, as well as regions where actions are most tractable. By supporting work in these areas, we can often achieve greater marginal impact per dollar spent while helping build global movements for animal welfare. 

Highlighted Grants

 Several grants made in 2024 exemplify our approach:

• $108,000 for “Creation of local bad-cop ‘groups’ in Asia to drive corporate compliance of 2025 cage-free commitments”
• $10,000 for “Animal Friends Jogja (Perkumpulan Sahabat Satwa Jogja) - A 12 month stipend and expenses for a staff member to continue government advocacy on cage-free / farm animal welfare legislative change” in Indonesia
• $50,000 for “Planet for All Hong Kong - One-year salary to continue driving changes in government’s aquaculture standards”
• $100,000 for “Fórum Nacional de Proteção e Defesa Animal - Project and staff expenses to work on corporate welfare washing in cage-free accountability in Brazil”
• $30,000 for “10 months of funding to launch a farmed fish welfare charity to implement pre-slaughter electrical stunning in Greece”

Since the outcomes of many grants we funded in 2024 are still unknown, we want to also showcase some of our earlier grants and their impact:

• Shrimp Welfare Project (SWP)

AWF granted to them in Q1 2022, Q4 2022, and Q3 2023,amounting to $385,000 total. In that period, we were their largest and among their first donors. During that time, they managed to grow from a start-up to a Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE) recommended charity and secured corporate and producer commitments. As a result,1.2B shrimp per year will be stunned before slaughter, reducing extreme pain. SWP had many other achievements that are difficult to quantify, such as gaining influence in the shrimp industry and scaling to organizations with multinational reach spanning from Ecuador, to the United Kingdom to India. Their work also provided proof that interventions affecting even the most neglected species can be tractable if leveraged correctly. And most importantly, SWP provided countless opportunities for high-quality memes ;) . 

• Çiftlik Hayvanlarını Koruma Derneği (Farm Animals Protection Association) / Kafessiz Türkiye

This group, founded in 2020, received grants from AWF in Q3 2021, Q1 2022, Q3 2022, Q2 2023, Q3 2024, amounting to $250,000 total. They work to improve the welfare standards of hens and fish by securing corporate cage-free commitments in Turkey, while also strengthening the movement. The group consistently exceeded their goals for each grant and delivered significant impact during the grant period. They are the only cage-free group working in Turkey, which is in the top 10 egg-producing countries. Yet, they were able to secure dozens of cage-free commitments from companies, some of which have already transitioned to cage-free production, affecting hundreds of thousands of hens. Moreover, with grants provided by AWF, they increased their capacity and began campaigning for fish welfare, resulting in their first fish producer commitment, which, if implemented, will result in 30M fish having lower stocking density and increased welfare standards. The grants from AWF enabled them to scale their impact, and they were recognized by ACE as a top charity in 2022.  

• Welfare Matters

In mid-2021, EA AWF provided seed funding of $200,000 (followed up by two more grants in Q1 2022 and Q4 2022 ) to the team at EA Singapore to run a capacity-building fellowship throughout SE Asia. They have run multiple iterations of a 14-week fellowship with tens of fellows, and partnered with tens of organizations on the fellowship. In 2023, they secured a $1M grant from Open Philanthropy (OP) to expand their operations. Due to their work, in my view, the EAA movement basically went from not having a very promising movement-building option for much of SE Asia (which is a critical area for the movement) to having one in the space of 1-2 years. On top of that, the organization is scaling up and running its regional incubation program. Given the importance of the region and its neglectedness, we see this as a very exciting development.

III. Organizational updates 

Throughout 2024, AWF has continued to evolve and strengthen our operations. The past three months brought especially significant improvement in various key areas:

• Operations:
  • Full-time Chair: Historically operated by part-time staff, the AWF has entered a new phase, with Karolina Sarek (me) stepping into the role of full-time Fund Chair this August. I bring to the fund a decade of experience in animal welfare and effective altruism, including through my previous role as an AWF fund manager and co-founder and Co-Executive Director of Ambitious Impact and Charity Entrepreneurship. My background spans nonprofit leadership, grantmaking, impact evaluation, and research.
  • Spinning out from Effective Ventures: EA Funds, including the AWF, is in the process of spinning out from Effective Ventures (EV), which is expected to be completed in 2025. Thus far, there have been no changes in AWF grantmaking and operations during this transition.
• Transparency:
  • Updated website with more information: We've updated and slightly expanded our website by, for example, including an explanation of our evaluation process. This allows potential grantees and donors to better understand our approach and decision-making.
  • Resumed publishing payout reports: After a pause caused by capacity constraints, we've resumed regular publication of detailed payout reports, providing comprehensive information about our grants, their intended impact, and outcomes. You can see the most recent payout report here, with the next one, covering April-October 2024, to be published very soon.
  • Increased active communication: We've increased our commitment to sharing regular updates on our work, with this post being one example.
• Grant investigations:
  • Updated grant evaluation framework: We've updated our systematic review process, enabling us to evaluate every application using standardized templates that vary based on the required depth of investigation. This framework ensures a thorough assessment of key factors while maintaining flexibility for grant-specific considerations. For example, for the deep evaluations (the vast majority), key evaluation areas include assessment of the project’s Theory of Change, scale of counterfactual impact, likelihood of success, back-of-the-envelope cost-effectiveness and benchmarking, and the expected value of receiving funding. It also includes forecasting grant outcomes.  You can read more about our process in the FAQ.
  • Introduced new decision procedures for marginal grants: We introduced an additional step in our evaluation that enables us to make better decisions about grants that are just below or just above our funding bar. Since AWF gives grants on a rolling basis rather  than in rounds, it is important to have a process for this to ensure decisions are consistent.
• Grantmaking:
  • Funded and began investigating new areas that GV/OP exited: AWF has been a historical funder of areas such as wild animal or invertebrate welfare.However after updates from GV and OP, we became a more significant funding body in this space, so we plan to provide more funding. We have also begun investigating new areas where we haven’t previously deployed funding to potentially take on opportunities that GV/OP can no longer fund.
• Funding
  • Began engaging with donors to further develop our support: AWF is well-suited to provide opportunities to people interested in donating to animal causes, who do not have the capacity or experience to source, vet, and select the best grantees. Funders who have contributed to AWF are mostly folks doing earning-to-give or working on other causes, who want to diversify how they impact, and therefore donate to, animals, as well as other small to medium donors. We have begun doing “user interviews” to learn how we can better serve their needs. If you are a donor or you are considering donating, feel free to reach out to me if you would like to speak with us.
  • Partnering with effective giving initiatives: We have begun partnering and coordinating with organizations working on effective giving, such as Effective Spendend. With their comparative advantage in fundraising and our comparative advantage in grant evaluation, together we can ensure that the movement has more resources and those resources are directed to causes with highest marginal cost-effectiveness.
  • Exploring co-funding: We began coordinating with other donors, for example, through the Strategic Animal Funding Circle. We found this to be a productive experience that increased the number of opportunities funders are aware of, enabling more in-depth evaluation than an individual donor would be able to conduct, while at the same time saving applicants’ time and reducing their uncertainty.  

IV. Future plans 

1. Operations
   1. Hiring more fund managers: We plan to expand our team further by bringing on additional fund managers. This will increase our capacity to evaluate grants, support grantees, explore promising new areas, and invest in active grantmaking. We plan to begin hiring this year, so keep an eye out for the job ad.
   2. Completing spin-out from EV: We will likely complete the process of spinning out from EV by Q3 of 2025 at the latest.
2. Transparency:
   1. More transparency and communication: We plan to further increase our transparency through regular newsletters, promptly published payout reports, and other communications.
3. Grant evaluation
   1. Further improvements: Building on our recently updated evaluation framework, we plan to update the application form to be more optimized for the key information needed for evaluation, refine our standardized templates based on early use and learning, improve our forecasting methodology for grant outcomes, and more comprehensive training for current and new fund managers.
   2. Strengthened monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL): We will enhance our MEL by implementing improved grant reporting templates that better capture key metrics and information needed to learn from both successes and failures. We will also further integrate the MEL results into our evaluation and strategy.
4. Grantmaking:
   1. More active strategy setting and active grantmaking in key focus areas: We plan to develop comprehensive strategies for each major focus area. While we will still rely on our open application form to receive proposals, we also plan to more proactively identify and fill gaps where we're not receiving enough strong applications through active grantmaking. We also plan to increase our efforts in areas where other major funders have exited, recognizing the unique advantage that AWF has as a funder.
5. Funding:
   1. Work to stabilize and increase our annual regranting: The amount of funding AWF has for regranting will be a major bottleneck for our ability to effectively deliver on our grantmaking strategy and support effective initiatives. Historically, how much funding AWF had for regranting was pretty dependent on some volatile trends (e.g. in cryptocurrency), with significant peaks and drops. We need to not only increase but also ideally stabilize the amount that is available for regranting if we want to increase the full potential of our grantmaking. This is even more true since some areas are particularly sensitive to instability and the size of funding. For example, I expect that some particularly counterfactually impactful opportunities could be created through active grantmaking (which is often too time-consuming for individual donors). However, in order to incentivize potential grantees, a more reliable funding commitment will be required, especially for more ambitious projects.  Therefore, AWF plans to invest in raising more funds. 

V. Room for more funding 

There are many more opportunities that AWF could fund at a roughly similar level of impact as this year's grants if we had more funding available. We conducted an analysis of this room for more funding and estimated that AWF could effectively regrant $6.3M ($5.3M-$7.3M) more than it did this year. Every donation—regardless of size—helps us fund more high-impact projects, and with new leadership and scaling plans, we are well-positioned to effectively deploy these additional funds for animal welfare.

You can read more about this in our next post.

If you have any questions or would like to discuss the plan, feel free to ask follow-up questions or reach out to the new Chair of the Fund, Karolina Sarek (me), at karolina@effectivealtruismfunds.org.

You can also donate directly to the AWF here.