How would your project use extra funding? (Marginal Funding Week)

How The Centre for Enabling EA Learning and Research would use additional funding

The Centre for Enabling EA Learning and Research (CEEALAR) is a space for promising EAs to rapidly upskill, perform research, and work on charitable and entrepreneurial projects. We provide assistance at low cost to those seeking to do the most good through subsidising accommodation, organising a productive atmosphere, and fostering a strong EA community. We recently published a post announcing that we are funding constrained and looking to attract new donors over this giving season.

How we would use extra funding

It costs us £12,500 ($15,500) to run CEEALAR for 1 month. We host an average of 20 grantees at a time – making the cost of supporting 1 grantee for 1 month £625 ($750). Unfortunately, we only have ~3 months runway remaining: a donation from you would extend our runway and enable us to support more promising EAs.

We do not know all of the applicants we will be supporting 3 months from now; however, we recently updated our application criteria to be increasingly selective, and are seeing the results of assisting such high-quality applicants. To give a sense of how much can happen in 1 month alone, we have included examples of outputs solely from October. We are confident that we would accept applicants of similar quality and see similar outputs in the spring months if we are able to extend our runway.

Donations extending our runway will:

• Enable more talented individuals to upskill into impactful work
  • This October, a recent alumnus now working as a researcher in the MIT Fraenkel Lab (where they are building an LLM for metabolomics research using retrieval-augmented generation) was accepted to the AI Futures Fellowship Program. They used their time at CEEALAR to transition from a career in data science to AI safety research.
• Enable more EA organisations to launch
  • This October, two current guests received funding from an EA grantmaking org to launch ML4Good UK. ML4Good is a project that runs intensive AI safety bootcamps in the UK, Germany, France, and Switzerland. Before coming to CEEALAR, they worked in banking and tech respectively and were only involved in EA in a voluntary capacity.
• Enable more EA research to be done
  • This October, a current guest had their research paper accepted to the Socially Responsible Language Modelling Research (SoLaR) conference. They are using their time at CEEALAR to transition from an academic career in physics to AI safety research.

How you can donate

You can donate here – all donations are greatly appreciated and will help us stay alive! We support PayPal, Ko-Fi, PPF Fiscal Sponsorship, and bank transfer donations.

You can find out more about CEEALAR here! Please feel free to ask us questions at contact@ceealar.org.

Hii!  Thank you so much for this question!  :-)

Legal Impact for Chickens would use additional funding by hiring our first administrative employee, so the three lawyers on staff can dedicate our time more fully to litigation!

Legal Impact for Chickens is a litigation nonprofit dedicated to making factory-farm  cruelty a liability: http://legalimpactforchickens.org/.  We sue companies that abuse animals on factory farms and in slaughterhouses.

We are hoping to raise $204,000 by the end of the year, to allow us to expand our capacity.

And we just got recommended by Animal Charity Evaluators!!

If you're interested in donating, please speak to me (Alene), or go to https://www.legalimpactforchickens.org/donate.

Thank you to the EA Community for all your support! 🐥⚖️

Giving guesses about the Long-Term Future Fund. I did not check with anybody else from LTFF before posting.

We're in the process of writing a more detailed post, but I'm sharing notes here for now since Lizka wanted someone to break the ice on this question.

It's pretty hard for us to know the exact activities or value of marginal donations to the Long-Term Future Fund, as this depends greatly on a) the distribution of grant applications we receive, and b) our other donations, which unfortunately is fairly correlated with each other. That said, I think a reasonable guess is that it'd be similar to grants we've narrowly rejected in the last few months (changing small details and merging grants for anonymity):

• ($45k)~ nine months of independent research to research LLM epistemology and build lie detectors for LLMs. The applicant had 2 workshop papers and one paper came in the top three in a competition at top tier ml conference. The applicant has gotten a smaller research grant from us before, which was fairly successful but not stellar.
• ($50k) ~six months of independent research to convert some theoretical notions of agency to existing ML models. The applicant has had a fairly impressive theoretical track record and came with a very strong recommendation by an expert who we respect in this area, but we narrowly voted to reject.
• ($5k) ~ three months for a masters graduate in mathematical physics to continue independent research on interpretable value learning and apply for CS PhDs. We thought their track record was very strong (high grades, strong reference) and of course the price tag is quite low, but we decided to narrowly reject due in part to tractability.
• ($25k) ~ four months for a former academic to tackle some unusually tractable research problems in disaster resilience after large-scale GCRs. We thought their track record was quite strong and their past experiences and networks made them well-positioned for further work in this area, but the ultimately decided to triage our resources.^[1]

I think under many worldviews these grants are quite promising and it's a loss that our community wasn't able to fund them, but of course rational distribution of limited resources is always hard, and I don't have a great view of what projects the more established organizations are narrowly cutting due to funding constraints.

See also an earlier post analyzing our marginal grants in more detail here (which I believe Lizka has also linked above).

Another potential donor crux for donating to us is the Open Phil matching. Donors who value us having money much more than OP having money should in theory be more excited to give to us. Right now we have 1.28m/1.75m of the matching filled. I think it's more likely than not (~60%?) that we'll be able to fill the matching, but donors may wish to take into account worlds where we don't get the matching as well.

You can donate to us either via Giving What We Can or every.org.

I'll write (and link) a more detailed post on this subject soon.

1. ^{^}

   We internally disagreed enough about cause prioritization that it was relevant for this grant, but our votes ultimately were very close.

TL;DR: MATS could support another 10-15 scholars at $21k/scholar with seven more high-impact mentors (Anthropic, DeepMind, Apollo, CHAI, CAIS)

The ML Alignment & Theory Scholars (MATS) Program is twice-yearly educational seminar and independent research program that aims to provide talented scholars with talks, workshops, and research mentorship in the field of AI alignment and connect them with the Berkeley AI safety research community.

MATS helps expand the talent pipeline for AI safety research by empowering scholars to work on AI safety at existing research teams, found new research teams, and pursue independent research. To this end, MATS connects scholars with research mentorship and funding, and provides a seminar program, office space, housing, research coaching, networking opportunities, community support, and logistical support to scholars. MATS supports mentors with logistics, advertising, applicant selection, and complementary scholar support and research management systems, greatly reducing the barriers to research mentorship.

The Winter 2023-24 Program will run Jan 8-Mar 15 in Berkeley, California and feature seminar talks from leading AI safety researchers, workshops on research strategy, and networking events with the Bay Area AI safety community. We currently have funding for ~50 scholars and 23 mentors, but could easily use more.

We are currently funding constrained and accepting donations. We would love to include up to seven additional interested mentors from Anthropic, Apollo Research, CAIS, Google DeepMind, UC Berkeley CHAI, and more, with up to 10-15 additional scholars at $21k/scholar.

Marginal funding estimates for the Maternal Health Initiative, a global health organisation working in Ghana founded through Charity Entrepreneurship. We've written up a more extensive discussion of our funding and our work in a separate post. These are my personal thoughts with a particular focus on marginal donation value.

Estimating what our marginal funding is likely to look like is challenging as an early-stage organisation. The range of possible total fundraising scenarios over the next few months appears quite large. 
 

While we’re looking to raise $300k, there are plausible scenarios where we raise under $100,000 at the low end and over $400k at the high end. $250,000 is the budget we estimate needed to deliver the programming we would like to through 2024, building off our existing partnerships and aggressively pursuing the possibility of government adoption of our changes to care.

For a rough model of the relative marginal value of different total fundraised amounts, see below (we are not expecting to raise all this money from the EA community):

• <$100k: MHI downsizes, running as a skeleton organisation applying for larger grants that would allow us to implement new projects, using our current programming results as evidence for this. Credibility with partners and the government is affected as we have to delay work and walk back loose commitments made to 2024 programming.
   
• $100-250k: MHI neither contracts nor expands, likely running a smaller version of our planned 2024 programming to adjust to our lower budget. This would likely reach around 50% fewer facilities and consequently roughly 50,000 fewer women. The likelihood of government adoption of our programming is uncertain in all scenarios, but is likely significantly reduced if we struggle to deliver results with sufficient statistical power or geographic coverage.
   
• $250-400k: MHI is able to deliver the best version of our 2024 programming, focusing more of our co-founder time towards programming rather than fundraising work. Towards the upper end of this bound, we may be able to fund additional stakeholder engagement and contractor/consultant support to maximise our government engagement and the likelihood of program adoption.
   
• >$400k: Funding over this threshold likely would primarily be directed towards additional runway and 2025 programming, possibly allowing us to expand in Ghana earlier than projected in anticipation of delivering programming on a national level.

TLDR: Vida Plena, which provides WHO-endorsed group therapy for depression in Ecuador, seeks $200,000 for behavioral science research, $50,000 for expansion to new regions, $9,600 annually to hire an additional Group Facilitator or $120 to provide treatment to one person.

See our full marginal funding forum post here.

I'm the co-founder of Vida Plena, a nonprofit organization tackling Ecuador's mental health crisis through cost-effective, proven group therapy led by local leaders from vulnerable communities.  We do this through the direct implementation of Group Interpersonal Therapy, which is the WHO's recommended intervention for depression. We are the first to implement it in Latin America.

We launched in early 2022 (see our introductory EA forum post) and participated in the Charity Entrepreneurship Incubator program that same year. In the fall of 2022, we carried out a proof concept alongside Columbia University, which found positive results (see our internal report, and the report from the Columbia University Global Mental Health Lab). 

So far this year, we've made a positive impact on the lives of 500 individuals, consistently showing significant improvements in both depression and anxiety. Our strategic partnerships with local institutions are flourishing, laying the groundwork for our ambitious goal of scaling our reach to treat 2,000 people in 2024. 

For this marginal funding proposal, we seek $200,000 to expand our work and research to apply behavioral science insights to further depression treatment in Latin America.  This enhanced therapy model will be evaluated through rapid impact assessments, deepening the evidence base for our work, and culminating in a white paper and a RCT in 2025.  

In addition to the "Enhancing g-IPT via Behavioral Science"  proposal described above, there are several other ways that Vida Plena could benefit from additional, marginal funding:

• $120 - Individual Support: 
  • Provide comprehensive treatment for one person, covering 9 sessions and ongoing follow-ups.
• $800 Monthly / $9,600 Annually - Community Facilitator: 
  • Hiring an additional Community Facilitator will extend care to approximately 400 more individuals, ensuring continued support.
• $50,000 - Expansion to New Region: 
  • Facilitate our expansion into a new region in Ecuador. This includes the establishment of training and outreach teams, bringing vital mental health care to areas currently underserved and neglected, beyond our current operations in Quito.

In THL’s 2023 review, ACE estimated that THL had a 2024-2025 funding gap of $10.5M. Additional marginal funding will be used to support our 2024 - 2026 strategic plan, including continuing our work to secure new cage-free commitments in key areas of the world, as well as holding US and global companies accountable for their cage-free commitments. In particular, more funding is needed for travel to effectively conduct our global work, as well as digital advertising to pressure companies and recruit new supporters to power our campaign. In 2023, both these areas were significantly resource-constrained, and created bottlenecks that prevented us from achieving additional impact. THL could use up to $400k in marginal funding.

If THL were to receive more significant additional funding, we have developed a robust expansion plan for the OWA through 2030. The goal of this expansion is to free one billion hens from cages by 2030 and achieve a critical tipping point in the OWA’s mission to eliminate battery cages from the planet. Campaigns against global companies have worked well, but to phase out battery cages across the globe, we must have a robust and high-functioning alliance in every major country. 

Our success in building an effective global alliance is outpacing the operational support THL is able to provide, given our own resource constraints. Our current model of having a single regional OWA coordinator to support upwards of 20 member groups with differing needs across an entire continent is no longer sustainable. As the OWA is one of the only international movement building resources available, our constraints mean that groups are unable to get the training and support that they need, alongside the strategic guidance and leadership development. We also see a huge appetite from groups to expand what the OWA is offering so that we can be an even more effective global coalition. 

To achieve the current need and anticipated growth, we need to create small teams in key regions around the world that can then support the differing needs of groups in their respective regions. To scale this up, we estimate this will cost an additional $2.5M in 2024, with capacity to increase our OWA grants by an additional $1M. 

Another program that is primed for expansion is the Animal Policy Alliance—already 14 member groups strong, and we have a goal to reach at least 30 active alliance members by 2025. THL launched the APA in 2022 to organize, unite, and empower local and state-level animal advocacy groups that are involved in issue-based advocacy and implementing legislative strategies for animals with policy agendas that include animals raised for food. These groups harness and channel the grassroots power of a significant base of animal protection advocates in the United States that they then use to create relationships with legislators at the city, state and federal level, and advocate for policies that benefit animals. Over time, through its leadership role in this alliance and through its grant-making capacity, THL will also influence local groups to focus more on farmed animal and food system issues. 

THL could effectively use up to $2M to expand the APA team and provide grants to member organizations in 2024. We distributed $500K in grants in 2022 and were unable to continue the grants program in 2023 due to funding constraints. But through this process, we know the need for funding policy work in the US is strong, and that there are dozens of groups eager to expand their advocacy for farmed animals.

For full details of THL’s room for more funding, check out this post!

How The Humane League UK would use additional funding

We are The Humane League UK (THL UK), an EA-aligned animal protection organisation working to end the abuse of animals raised for food. We have recently been endorsed by  Animal Charity Evaluators as a recommended charity for the tenth consecutive year. With our research-backed strategy of combining corporate campaigns, grassroots legislative advocacy, and movement building, we are mending our broken food system.

Our campaign:
Between 22nd November and 28th November, all one-off donations made to THL UK will be doubled by two generous match funders, Charlotte and James Monico, who are part of the Founders Pledge community. That’s why, during the week of the appeal, giving to The Humane League UK is particularly impactful for farmed animals. The appeal will support our corporate campaigning work, the focus of which is currently on securing Better Chicken Commitments from leading UK supermarkets Lidl and the Co-op which would result in significantly less suffering for 327 million chickens in their supply chains combined.

Supermarkets are responsible for roughly 65% of the UK’s meat chicken flock, and so they have disproportionate power to raise the bar for chicken welfare and make BCC chicken the norm in the UK. Our previous successes indicate that commitments from one or two of the leading brands will encourage others to follow suit. 
 

How we would use extra funding:
We have already strategically planned our activities for this financial year (2023-24) which we are confident will bring about significant change for farmed animals. However, we currently have a shortfall of approximately £280k. This year, as well as our corporate campaigning work, we are working with businesses to report on their BCC progress, and, as part of the Open Wing Alliance, aiming to continue to make significant progress globally for egg-laying hens, as well as continuing to push for fishes to finally be given increased protection in UK law. 

Beyond this, extra funding would be used to fund our legal case against the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra). In May 2023 we had a High Court hearing where we challenged the legality of fast-growing breeds of chicken. Although we did not win the initial case, our appeal has been granted and we will have a further hearing in spring 2024. This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to force the Government, with one decision from an appeals court judge, to transform one billion innocent lives per year. However, to proceed, we will need to meet the £56k of anticipated costs, £26k in our own legal fees, and up to £30k for Defra’s fees should we lose the case.  

If you have any questions, you can ask them via the Ask Me Anything (AMA) we are currently hosting (we’ll start answering questions on Friday 17th November 2023, and will continue to answer them on Monday 20th and Tuesday 21st November).
 

How to donate:
During the week of the campaign, you will be directed to the match funding campaign when you visit our website. If you wish to make a significant donation and would like to discuss different ways to pay, please reach out to Gavin, Head of Development: gcbates@thehumaneleague.org.uk

TLDR: PIBBSS has room for funding for additional research affiliates! We can support additional affiliates at 35k USD per individual for 6 months.

PIBBSS is a research initiative aiming to leverage insights on the parallels between intelligent behaviour in natural and artificial systems towards progress on making AI systems safe and aligned. We run a number of programs (e.g. summer fellowship, affiliate program, reading group, speaker series) aimed at facilitating this type of research, identifying and leveraging high caliber talent, and building a strong epistemic community around this epistemic approach to AI alignment. 

Since our inception ~2 years ago, we have been able to produce results supporting the impact potential of PIBBSS’ core epistemic bet and to build traction. Encouraged by these results, we recently launched our affiliate program with the goal of providing long-term, tailored support to excellent researchers pursuing “PIBBSS-style” AI alignment research.

We are currently in the process of selecting our first batch of research affiliates (likely ~4-6). We would be able to support more affiliates (in terms of operational and research facilitation capacity) but are constrained by funding (mainly for salaries and travel expenses). We have been very impressed by the applicant pool, and would have been excited to make at least 2 additional offers during this round. 

At the current margins, any additional affiliate costs us 35k USD for 6 months. 

Depending on the speed of when the funding would some through, the funding would either go towards hiring more affiliates at the this or the next (~spring 2024) round of applications, or extending our support to existing affiliates beyond the initial 6-months commitment

If you wish to know more, feel free to reach out to us via contact@pibbss.ai.

We've just published a post giving an organisational update on High Impact Medicine's work, describing which projects marginal funding is likely to be spent on. High Impact Medicine (Hi-Med) is a non-profit organisation dedicated to inspiring and empowering medical students and doctors to make impact-driven decisions in their careers and giving.

Rethink Priorities needs your support. Here's what we'd do with it.

We have made a post for the project: Solar pumps in Malawi: Creating ~$20 of income per $1 of donation for ~$1/capita/year beneficiaries where:

"Every $100 of marginal donation will add one brushless DC pump and 100m of irrigation hose to a container shipment of solar equipment that we will purchase in February to be delivered to low-income rural women's groups and farmers in rural Malawi starting in June 2024. "

Beneficiaries pay for the solar panels to power the pumps, and we estimate that each pumping system will generate roughly between $2000 and $5000 of new income for $1/capita/day beneficiaries in total over the next 3 to 10 years. 

The Good Food Institute (GFI) has just answered this question in a detailed post here, using GFI Europe - a priority region for urgent growth - to illustrate how we would use additional funding. Each marginal increase in funding for GFI has the potential to leverage much greater sums in R&D funding for alternative proteins. 

As I explain in more detail over on the main post, GFI Europe would use marginal increases in funding on two main categories - additional staffing capacity, and research projects that respond to specific gaps and needs of stakeholders on the critical path for alternative protein adoption. Each additional role or research project meets an important, neglected and tractable need on the path to our overall mission to make alternative proteins the default choice. Therefore, every marginal increase in funding represents further advancement of plant-based and cultivated meat and reduced farmed animal suffering and mitigating climate change, pandemic risk, antibiotic resistance. 

The next few years are likely to set the course for decades to come for alternative proteins in Europe. (For an interesting read about the stubbornness of policy changes see here) In such a neglected space, GFI Europe’s ability to track and respond adequately to existential hurdles for alternative proteins is crucial to their success.

If you're interested in supporting GFI, click here or get in touch with me. 

Marginal funding estimates for doebem, a nonprofit that does Local Priority Research (LPR) and Charity Evaluation in Brazil. We've recently published this post on EA Forum and will soon publish our local cause priority research.

____________________________________

Hi everyone!

doebem was founded in 2017 and managed entirely by volunteers until 2022, when a new board led an effort to professionalize the organization to unlock doebem’s full potential. We are just getting started as an organization with a full-time team!

We are raising US$200k to cover our costs for c. 18 months, which would support a team of 5FTE: 

• 1 Director or Research + 2 Researchers: c. US$100k
• 1 Institutional Manager: c US$40k
• 1 Marketing Analyst: c. US$35k

Other costs we are expecting to incur are:

• Travel to do in-place evaluation of organizations: c. US$10k
• Travel to participate in International Forums (such as EA London): c. US$10k
• Website maintenance and SEO: c. US$5k

We are finalizing our cause priority research, to be shared in this forum before the end of 2023. Our commitment is to evaluate at least 12 organizations and recommend the most effective per cause. We will also share our methodology for analyzing organizations here in the near future. 

Our next step is to map and evaluate the most promising organizations within each prioritized cause to be soon revealed. We are hoping to find effective interventions considering criteria such as cost-effectiveness, room for more funding, institutional capacity and transparency, among others.

You can donate to our Effective Fund (Fundo Eficaz) through our website checkout. We are happy to answer any questions through here. 

Big thanks to our EA Global Community for considering supporting us 🌻

We are also fundraising for https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ECiLcmozJHRk2ifAN/portable-mri

to support the rescue of wounded Ukrainian soldiers, aiding them in their challenging fight for survival and freedom

and other similar applications.

How the centre for Phage biology and therapeutics would use more funding.

At Centre for Phage Biology and Therapeutics, our purpose is to maximise positive impact and make a real difference in world health. We are currently leading the effort to establish a large phage biobank in Nigeria, which is a vital step in pandemic preparedness. Phages have enormous promise, from vaccine manufacture to fighting drug-resistant bacteria, and our programme is set to make important contributions in these areas.

To further our effect, we need 20,000 USD to install a solar energy system that will provide sustainable and efficient power to our -80 Freezers. This not only secures the viability of our phage preservation efforts but also aligns with the ethos of effective altruism by optimizing resource allocation for maximum positive outcomes.

Your support will not only advance phage technology but also contribute to a safer, healthier world.  

If you wish to know more, feel free to reach out to us via eennadi@plasu.edu.ng