EA Meta Fund and Long-Term Future Fund are looking for applications again until October 11th

By Denise_Melchin @ 2019-09-13T19:34 (+35)

Both the Long Term Future Fund and the EA Meta Fund are looking for applications again. The deadline to be considered for the distribution cycle is coming up. You can apply here:

• Apply to the Long Term Future Fund
• Apply to the EA Meta Fund

Both of these funds have rolling applications, with a window of about 3-4 months between responses. The application window for the coming round will end on the 11th of October 2019. Any application received after that will receive a response around four months later during the next evaluation period (unless it indicates that it is urgent, though we are less likely to fund out-of-cycle applications).

The Long Term Future Fund

We continue to be particularly interested in small teams and individuals that are trying to get projects off the ground, or that need less money than existing grant-making institutions are likely to give out (i.e. less than ~$100k, but more than $10k, since we can’t give grants below $10k). Here are some concrete examples:

• To spend a few months researching an open problem in AI alignment or AI strategy and produce a few blog posts or videos on their ideas
• To spend a few months building a web app with the potential to solve an operations bottleneck at x-risk organisations
• To spend a few months up-skilling in a field to prepare for future work (e.g. microeconomics, functional programming, etc)
• To spend a year testing an idea that has the potential to be built into an org

You are also likely to find reading the writeups of our past grant decisions valuable to help you decide whether your project is a good fit:

• November 2018 writeup
• April 2019 writeup

Apply Here

The EA Meta Fund

The EA Meta Fund aims to write grants to groups that drive more high-quality talent, information and capital towards tackling the world’s biggest problems. We are interested in applications from organisations and individuals working on long-established as well as completely new projects. While the smallest possible grant we can make is $10k, we are very much interested in small projects requiring only small grants.

To get a better idea of what kind of projects we might be interested in funding, you can review our grant writeups for July 2019, March 2019 and November 2018. Note that the projects we have funded so far do not present an exhaustive list of types of projects we might be interested in funding. Some other examples of projects we might be interested in funding:

• Projects experimenting with novel fundraising strategies or target groups
• Projects building and supporting profession-specific networks in EA
• Initiatives to target specific community problems
• Research projects related to cause prioritisation

Please note that projects related to community building for local groups should apply to CEA’s Community Building Grants (CBG) programme. However, the EA Meta 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 Meta Fund or CBG, please contact us.

Our application process consists of submitting the application form, where you only need to answer two questions about your project, in less than 300 words each.

If we have further questions, we will either ask them via email or arrange a phone call, and potentially both. This will be decided on a case by case basis for each potential grantee. We will follow up on all applications within a week of the application deadline.

We will inform you of our final decisions by late November.

Apply here

What kind of applications can we fund?

CEA has clarified what kinds of grants we are likely able to make, which includes the vast majority of applications we have received in past rounds. In general you should err on the side of applying, since I think it is very likely we will be able to make something work. However, because of organizational overhead we are more likely to fund applications to registered charities and less likely to fund projects that require complicated arrangements to be compliant with charity law.

For grants to individuals, we can definitely fund the following types of grants:

• Events/workshops
• Scholarships
• Self-study
• Research project
• Content creation
• Product creation (eg: tool/resource that can be used by community)

We will likely not be able to make the following types of grants:

• Grantees 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 reach out to confirm a specific project.
• Self-development that is not directly related to community benefit
• 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 isn’t directly connected to public benefit.

If you have any questions about the application process or other questions related to the funds, feel free to submit them in the comments. You can also contact Oliver Habryka directly under ealongtermfuture@gmail.com if you have questions about the Long Term Future Fund, as well as Denise Melchin at denisemelchin@gmail.com if you have questions about the EA Meta Fund.