CharitiesAnimal Charity Evaluators: Movement Grants Program
Animal Charity Evaluators: Movement Grants Program
Fund

Animal Charity Evaluators

Movement Grants Program

The Movement Grants Program builds and strengthens the animal advocacy movement by funding a diverse range of promising projects around the globe.

Animal welfare

What problem is the Movement Grants program working on?

Movement Grants supports initiatives that use novel interventions, target large numbers of animals, and operate in regions that are underrepresented in animal advocacy. The program presents an opportunity for emerging or smaller initiatives to receive financial support, playing a critical role in expanding animal advocacy to more regions and species.

ACE launched Movement Grants in late 2018 for three main reasons:

  • It believes that a broad, pluralistic animal advocacy movement is more likely to be resilient — and hence more impactful — than a narrow, monistic animal advocacy movement.
  • There is little available evidence to support the effectiveness of any given intervention, and ACE thinks that animal advocacy is more likely to be successful by continuing to fund a wide range of interventions.
  • Many countries do not yet have a well-established animal advocacy movement — by funding projects in those countries, donors can help build up the movement in neglected regions and address animal suffering as a global problem.

What projects does the Movement Grants program support?

Donations to ACE Movement Grants will be distributed to promising projects around the globe working to reduce animal suffering. The annual disbursement will be determined by the review committee. Recently, grants have been awarded to:

  • Animal Law Reform South Africa
  • Education for African Animal Welfare
  • Animal Alliance Asia
  • APEX Advocacy
  • Fórum Nacional de Proteção e Defesa Animal
  • Paris Animaux Zoopolis
  • Vegan Hacktivist
  • Sentient

For more information about how donations are allocated, see the list of past recipients and frequently asked questions on the ACE website.

Unsure how a fund is different from a charity? See our page about why we recommend donors give to funds.

What information does Giving What We Can have about the cost-effectiveness of ACE’s Movement Grants fund?1.

The Giving What We Can research team looked into ACE as part of our 2023 evaluator investigations, and decided to not currently rely on their recommendations. However, we still expect choosing ACE recommended programs to be significantly more impactful than choosing animal welfare programs without an impact-focused evaluation behind them, and we remain open to (some of) ACE's recommendations being among the most cost-effective donation opportunities in animal welfare.

Please note that GWWC does not evaluate individual charities. Our recommendations are based on the research of third-party, impact-focused charity evaluators our research team has found to be particularly well-suited to help donors do the most good per dollar, according to their recent evaluator investigations. Our other supported programs are those that align with our charitable purpose — they are working on a high-impact problem and take a reasonably promising approach (based on publicly-available information).

At Giving What We Can, we focus on the effectiveness of an organisation's work -- what the organisation is actually doing and whether their programs are making a big difference. Some others in the charity recommendation space focus instead on the ratio of admin costs to program spending, part of what we’ve termed the “overhead myth.” See why overhead isn’t the full story and learn more about our approach to charity evaluation.

We have varying degrees of information about the cost-effectiveness of our supported programs. We have more information about programs that impact-focused evaluators (some of which our research team expects to investigate soon as part of their evaluator investigations) have looked into, as well as programs that we’ve previously included on our list of recommended charities. We think it’s important to share the information we have with donors as we expect it will be useful in their donation decisions, but don’t want donors to mistakenly overweight the extent to which we share information about some charities and not others. Therefore, we want to clarify two things:

  • When we include information about an organisation’s cost-effectiveness, this may not be the only evidence that exists. It is simply the evidence the GWWC research team has at this time.
  • When we don’t include information about an organisation’s cost-effectiveness, this does not necessarily mean there is no such information. However, it does mean the GWWC research team isn’t privy to any more information at this time.