Applications Now Open for AIM’s 2025 Programs

By CE, Ben Williamson, Emma Stoks, Jacintha Baas @ 2024-07-25T13:16 (+92)

In short: Applications for AIM’s two upcoming programs—the Charity Entrepreneurship Incubation Program and AIM’s new Founding to Give Program—are now open. You can apply to multiple programs with one joint application form. The deadline to apply for all programs is September 15th. 

Over the past five years, AIM has incubated 40 highly effective nonprofits and secured over $3.9 million in seed grants. These organizations now reach over 35 million people and have the potential to improve the lives of more than 1 billion animals through their interventions. We are incredibly proud of the success achieved by these organizations and their dedicated founders.

We believe founding an organization is the most impactful career path for fast-moving, entrepreneurial individuals. In our search for more impact-driven individuals to found field-leading organizations, we are excited to announce that our applications are now open.

Dates: 

• Charity Entrepreneurship Incubation Program: 
  • February-March 2025 (8 weeks)
  • July - August 2025 (8 weeks) 
• AIM Founding to Give: 6th of January - 28th of March 2025 (12 weeks)
• AIM Research Fellowship - Expression of Interest (dates TBD, likely early 2025)

About the Charity Entrepreneurship Incubation Program 

Why apply?

Put simply, we believe that founding a charity is likely one of the most impactful and exciting career options for people who are a good fit. In just a few years of operation, our best charities have gone from an idea to organizations with dozens of staff improving the lives of millions of people and animals every year. We provide the training, funding, research, and mentorship to ensure that people with the right aptitudes and a relentless drive to improve the world can start a charity, no matter their background or prior experience. This could be you! Our initial application form takes as little as 30 minutes - take a look at our applicant resources and apply now.

Who is this program for?

Individuals who want to make a huge impact with their careers. Charity entrepreneurs are ambitious, fast-moving, and prioritize impact above all. They are focused on cost-effectiveness and are motivated to pilot and scale an evidence-backed intervention. We have found that those from consulting backgrounds, for-profit entrepreneurship, effective NGOs, or recent graduates perform well in this program.

What we offer:

• 2-month full-time training with two weeks in-person in London.
• Stipend of £1900/month during (and potentially up to 2 months after) the program.
• Incredibly talented individuals to co-found your new project with.
• Possibility to apply for $100,000 - $200,000 seed funding (~80% of projects get funded).
• Membership of the AIM alumni network, connecting you to mentorship, funders, and a community of other founders.

The ideas: 

We are excited to announce our top charity ideas for the upcoming CE incubator. These ideas are the results of a seven-stage research process. To be brief, we have sacrificed nuance. In the upcoming weeks, full reports will be announced in our newsletter, published on our website, and posted on the EA Forum. 

• Cage-free in the Middle East: An organization focused on good-cop cage-free corporate campaigning in neglected countries in the Middle East (United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt).
• Keel Bone Fractures: A charity working on how farmers can reduce the prevalence of keel bone fractures (KBF) in cage-free layer hens, ideally through outreach to certifiers to update their certification standards to include an outcome-based limit on KBF. 
• Fish Welfare East Asia –  We continue to recommend an organization that works with farmers in neglected, high-priority countries in East Asia (Philippines, Taiwan, and Indonesia) to improve fish welfare on their farms.
• Digital Pulmonary Rehabilitation: An organization that provides digital pulmonary rehabilitation to COPD patients in LMICs.
• CBT to prevent crime: An organization providing group CBT for high-risk young men to prevent criminal behavior in urban environments.
• Closing Knowledge Gaps about Lead Exposure in LMICs: A new organization dedicated to closing the knowledge gaps on where and how people get exposed to lead in LMICs, thus enabling effective mitigation activities. This idea is a new recommendation of AIM but is likely to be founded in the current (Aug-Sept 2024) round of our incubation program.

In addition to these newly recommended ideas, we will offer 1-2 further ideas for founders in this round. At least one of these extra ideas will be a direct-delivery global health and development intervention, and at least one will be an idea from the current program that is carried over. 

Success stories:
We are immensely proud of the incredible work of all of our founders. Below are two of many success stories picked for their relevance to the ideas recommended above.

Lead Exposure Elimination Project - founded in 2021 by Lucia Coulter and Jack Rafferty. Now operating in more than 20 countries, LEEP is projected to save 46 million children from lead paint exposure, increasing their IQ, school performance, and later-life earnings.

Fish Welfare Initiative - founded in 2019 by Haven King-Nobles and Tom Billington. More fish are farmed each year than cows, pigs, and sheep combined. FWI works with farmers and corporations in India, improving conditions for more than 1 million fish.

Learn more on our website. 

About AIM Founding to Give 

Why apply? 

• We think for-profit entrepreneurship can be very high-impact, especially for people with experience building technical products, prior experience in founding for-profits, or an interest in founding companies in emerging markets.
• You’ll be joining a cohort of highly talented, value-aligned co-founders. We’ve already made the first offers and we feel very excited about the talent level.
• We will provide a stipend for up to 4 months so you can focus all your efforts on launching a new business.

Who is this program for?

Exceptionally talented founders who want to build a successful company and make an impact. We are particularly excited to receive applications from people to whom one or more of the following list applies:

• Have a technical background, especially in leveraging AI
• Would be interested in founding a company that (also) targets emerging markets, particularly if they have previous experience there
• Have prior experience founding and/or fundraising  
• Aim big - the highest counterfactual impact will come from large exits, so we are looking for founders who want to scale fast. 

What we offer:

•  A pool of exceptionally talented and value-aligned potential co-founders. 
• Access to all of our research on impactful business ideas, as well as full access to the investors, mentors & founders in our network. 
• Up to 4 months of stipend of £1900/month to cover your living and office expenses so you can work on your business plan and raise funds
• We don’t take any equity. Instead, you commit to donating at least 50% of your exit earnings above $1m to charities of your choice. 

What kind of companies would we be particularly excited about: 

Companies that can compete and scale in traditional entrepreneurship pathways (such as getting into YC) and combine this with positive flow-through effects. This includes areas such asf:

• Health Tech
• HR tech, and specifically technological solutions that aim at increasing the flow of people and money between countries (see also our report on platforms facilitating Labor Migration for inspiration)
• Fintech and Supply Chain tech in LMIC countries, see also some suggestions by Ben Kuhn here.
• Food tech or Agri Tech companies
• Biotech companies
• Companies in the areas recommended by YCombinator that could have positive flow-through effects

Learn more on our website.

About AIM Research Program - Expression of Interest

We plan to evaluate a modified version of the AIM Research Program later this year. We have not yet decided whether to continue the program in 2025. If continued, AIM Research will likely become a fellowship focused on learning on the job. Fellows would collaborate closely with our researchers in small teams to produce research for our programs. 

If you are interested in this program as well as one of our other programs, you will be asked to complete the full application process for that program (either Charity Entrepreneurship or AIM Founding to Give). Should you only be interested in this program, you will still need to complete the application form but will not be asked to complete further stages. We will then reach out to promising candidates should we confirm plans to run this program in 2025.

Who is this the AIM Research Fellowship for? 

Good candidates will have:

• organizational and quantitative skills
• an ability to think through complex topics, decide between various paths to impact based on available evidence, and present findings clearly to others. 
• a good ability to dig up and asses evidence at various levels, both where there are clear systematic reviews and where direct sources of evidence are lacking, and have some awareness of research methods.

How Does The Joint Application Work?

• You don’t need to apply to each program separately. Instead, you fill out this form once and let us know which programs interest you. 
• Throughout the different stages of the application process, we keep you informed on your progress. 
• If you get far into the application process but we decide not to extend an offer, we may offer to connect you with relevant opportunities in our network.
• Your time is valuable. We will only invite you to the next stage if you have a good chance of success. We are sadly unable to give individualized feedback to rejected candidates. However, we build our test tasks to be useful to you as a candidate as well as for us in vetting applicants. 

Learn More:

Webinars

We will be holding online Q&A sessions about our programs through August to provide an easy opportunity to learn more about our programs and ask any questions you may have. 

Charity Entrepreneurship Incubation Program 

• 6th August (4 pm GMT+1), program-focused, register here. 
• 22nd August (4 pm GMT+1), ideas-focused, register here. 

AIM Founding to Give

• 26th August (4 pm GMT+1), register here

You can register to attend the events at the links above. Each webinar has a public document for adding questions ahead of the event that you would like answered.

Charity Entrepreneurship - Webinar #1: Program Q&A

Charity Entrepreneurship - Webinar #2: Ideas Q&A

AIM Founding to Give - Webinar: Q&A

Referrals

Many of our best candidates are those recommended to us by members of the EA community. The quality of our co-founding teams is likely one of the strongest determinants of our incubated organizations’ success. Taking a few minutes to think about anyone you know who could be an excellent candidate for our programs is hugely valuable to us at AIM. Recommending someone who is accepted onto our programs could be one of the most impactful ways you can spend a few minutes of your time. 

You can submit candidate recommendations through this form.