Upcoming changes to Open Philanthropy's university group funding

By Eli Rose @ 2024-12-10T18:21 (+73)

Open Philanthropy’s GCR Capacity Building team is planning two substantial changes to our funding for university groups at the end of this year.

• After December 31, 2024, we will no longer be accepting applications for funding for effective altruism-focused groups through our University Group Organizer Fellowship program.
  • This applies to both stipends for organizer time, and for other types of group expense funding (e.g. funding for posters, food for events, and group retreats).
  • The Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) will be taking on these applications instead, as they did before 2022; we encourage relevant groups to apply to their group support funding program (and to consider CEA’s other group support programs).
  • We will continue to accept applications for other types of university groups, such as groups focused on AI safety.
• After December 31, 2024, we will no longer offer stipends to new applications for student organizers through our University Group Organizer Fellowship program. We’ll continue offering stipends as normal for applications received before that date, which we generally expect to have a grant duration through the end of this academic year.^[1]
  • This change applies to all types of university groups supported through our program, not just effective altruism-focused groups.
  • We’ll continue funding for non-students working full-time on organizing (non-EA-focused) groups for students at universities.

So, in summary: all EA group funding is moving to CEA. AI safety group funding is staying at Open Phil, but we're dropping stipends for part-time student organizers (though still providing group expenses funding, and funding for people working on programming for university students full-time).

Why are we making these changes?

Passing EA group funding to CEA

The GCR Capacity Building (GCRCB) team at Open Philanthropy currently provides funding for a large number of EA student groups through its University Group Organizer Fellowship program.

As the GCRCB team’s portfolio grows (we’re now giving and plan to give in more areas than in mid-2022, when we first started this program^[2]), and as Open Philanthropy’s portfolio grows in general, we’re often interested in moving our small-grants programs elsewhere, when appropriate. This move reflects that university group funding is an especially energy-intensive area to do well, and aligns with Good Ventures’s general interest in focusing on a smaller set of strategies that consume a smaller amount of energy, as described in this post. (Though the relationship is indirect and reflective of a high-level shift towards consolidating our grantmaking, not reflective of a decision by Good Ventures. EA university group support is not an area Good Ventures is exiting.^[3])

As a result, we’re now passing this program back to the Centre for Effective Altruism (who had also owned it pre-2022). This means that most forms of EA university group support are again consolidated in one place. CEA has been our grantee for many years and is a natural home for the EA university group portfolio, given its mission. CEA’s university groups team currently provides mentorship and resources for university groups through its Organiser Support Programme; it also hosts retreats for organizers. There’s strong synergy between this existing work and the work of providing financial support. Since OP’s GCRCB team doesn’t get these other touch points with group organizers, and in general we don’t spend all our time thinking about university groups, we don’t get these synergies — we have access to less textured info, are less “on the ground,” and don’t devote as much energy to this as CEA. 

Overall, I think that while Open Philanthropy was an okay home for this program, I don’t think it’s set up to be an excellent home. I think CEA’s Groups team — headed by Jessica McCurdy (Head of Groups) and Joris Pijpers (University Groups Team Lead) have done great work on university group support in the past year, and I’m excited to see them take over this program.

Funding for AI safety groups remains at Open Phil

The vast majority of funding provided through our University Group Organizer Fellowship program, besides funding for EA groups, is for groups focused on AI safety. We are continuing this funding, except that as described above, we’re no longer providing stipends for student organizers of AI safety (or other) groups.

Why end stipend funding for student organizers?

We’ve been thinking for a while about what changes (if any) to make to our stipend funding for student organizers, and overall felt like the decision was a tough and non-obvious call.

• In survey work we’ve done of organizers we’ve funded, we’ve found that on average, stipend funding substantively increased organizers’ motivation, self-reported effectiveness, and hours spent on organizing work (and for some, made the difference between being able to organize and not organizing at all). The effect was not enormous, but it was substantive.
• On those same surveys, however, organizers have also indicated that stipends for students were frequently perceived mildly to moderately negatively on campuses (or that they were reluctant to discuss stipends with other students because of concerns about perception).
• Overall, attitudes towards stipend funding among student organizers we’ve surveyed have been mixed.

We also noted that, among university groups in other fields, receiving stipends for part-time organizing work was fairly unusual.

Overall, after weighing all of this evidence, we thought that the right move was to stick to funding group expenses and drop the stipends for individual organizers. One frame I used to think about this was that of “spending weirdness points wisely.” That is, it would be nice for student organizers, who are discussing often-unconventional ideas within effective altruism or AI safety, to not also have to discuss (or feel that they need to defend) stipends. See the relevant section of this post^[4], which talks about defending spending decisions becoming a large part of initial conversations the author had about EA. This post was written in an era where there was much more EA-associated “free spending” than there is now, but I think some of the same basic dynamics apply to this case. Note that arguments change depending on the type of spending: we’re happy to continue providing funding for group expenses (retreats, food for events, sometimes office/event spaces, etc.) even though this is unusual at some universities, because I think the cost/benefit looks better for those types of spending.

As I previously noted, however, this was a difficult decision — since we do think the stipends provide meaningful value — and we didn’t think the correct answer was obvious. Other funders may see things differently.

The impact of university organizing

To be clear, neither of these changes reflect any change in our thinking on the value of student groups.

Data we’ve collected historically, as well as more recent impact evaluation work, suggests to us that student groups are often very impactful ways for students who are excited about effective altruism and altruistically impactful careers to create energy about those things on campus. This organizing really moves the needle in terms of graduates moving into jobs with altruistic impact.

I think everyone involved has something to feel proud of — the students doing this work (often fitting it into a very busy schedule), and the professionals (e.g. CEA Groups Team, Kairos) supporting them.

1. ^{^}

    In particular, we’re unlikely to make grants funding EA groups or stipends for students past the summer of 2025.

2. ^{^}

    Replacing a similar program that had previously been housed at CEA.

3. ^{^}

    An example of such an area is research on the moral patienthood of digital minds, as described in Alexander’s post.

4. ^{^}

    By George Rosenfeld, now my colleague at Open Philanthropy.