Marginal Funding at EAIF

By hbesceli @ 2025-11-24T01:54 (+20)

Summary

• So far in 2025, EAIF has made 34 grants for a total of $2.4M and we expect to grant a total of $2.8M by the end of the year.
• For EAIF to continue at the same level of grantmaking in 2026, we need to raise $1.9M in funding. 

EAIF’s Grantmaking

The Effective Altruism Infrastructure Fund (EAIF) aims to increase the impact of projects that use the principles of effective altruism, by increasing their access to talent, capital, and knowledge. 

EAIF is part of EA Funds, which has recently merged with the Centre for Effective Altruism. The current Fund Managers at EAIF are Harri Besceli (author of this post) and Jamie Harris. 

EAIF makes grants across a range of different areas, though typically these are aimed at the following:

• Awareness: Increasing awareness of the ideas of effective altruism (eg. EA related content and EA Groups).
• Careers: Increasing the number of people who are making career decisions based on the ideas and recommendations of effective altruism (eg.  EA Groups and Cause/ Path specific community building).
• Donations: Increasing the amount of money donated to causes and areas recommended by effective altruism (eg. effective giving projects).
• Community Support: Supporting members of the effective altruism community (eg. other EA services and infrastructure, such as EA coworking spaces, hubs, and support programmes). 

In 2024, EAIF made 40 grants for a total of $1.4M. This table gives a breakdown of our 2024 grants by project area. 

Previous grants that EAIF has made include:

• Hear This Idea, $6,196.87. Ongoing support for Hear This Idea, a podcast about ideas for solving important problems
• Effective Altruism Australia, $93,000. Stipend support for the first paid CEO at Effective Altruism Australia (EAA) to further grow the EA movement in Australia
• Rethink Wellbeing, $50,000. Funding to run a proven, cost-effective mental health program for ~175 EAs: well-being & productivity gains worth ~30 FTEs/yr
• Alfredo Parra, $59,000. Stipend for Alfredo to do prioritization research and community building focused on reducing extreme pain in humans
• EA Poland, $5,000. A 12-month budget to grow and promote an effective fundraising platform in Poland, similar to effektiv-spenden.de

You can find more information about each of these grants on the Effective Altruism Infrastructure Fund’s page of the EA Funds’ website. 

Marginal Funding

So far in 2025, EAIF has made 34 grants for a total of $2.4M and our current fund balance is $1.3M. We expect to make another $0.4M in grants by the end of the year. This would mean a total of $2.8M in grants over 2025, and without receiving any additional funding this would bring our fund balance to $0.9M.

If EAIF were to continue its grantmaking at the same level as this year and make grants of $2.8M in 2026, it would need to raise $1.9M in funding. 

How marginal funding would be used depends a lot on the applications that we receive, though I expect this to follow a similar breakdown to our current grantmaking (the breakdown by project area is similar in 2024 and 2025). I expect the breakdown to remain roughly constant at different funding levels, and would expect a similar split if EAIF made eg. $1M in grants over 2026 or eg. $4M in grants over 2026. 

Additional funding at the moment would make a meaningful difference to EAIF’s ability to grow and support the effective altruism community. If you’re excited about this aim and would like to donate, you can do so via Giving What We Can’s website. Thank you for your support!

We’re planning on publishing further EAIF updates over the next few months^[1], including a general update and a payout report detailing our previous grantmaking.

1. ^{^}

   This previously said 'over the next few weeks', though I think this too optimistic.