Giving What We Can

Summary:

The Risks and Resilience Fund directs funding to highly effective organisations working to reduce global catastrophic risks. When you donate to this fund, the Giving What We Can research team will pool your money with other donors’ contributions and allocate quarterly, working with the evaluators and grantmakers they think are best suited to maximise impact. Currently, the research team plans to allocate half of the fund's budget to the Long-Term Future Fund (EA Funds) and half to the Emerging Challenges Fund (Longview Philanthropy).

You might want to donate to this fund if:

• You care about safeguarding current and future generations from risks and making the future more resilient.
• You want to make a potentially enormous difference by focusing on problems that could change the trajectory of history (like nuclear security, preventing natural and engineered pandemics, and promoting safe AI development and effective AI governance).
• You want to be confident your money will go to highly effective funding opportunities, based on the latest research of the Giving What We Can research team, in consultation with evaluators and grantmakers they’ve vetted.

Learn more about the types of problems donors help solve when they donate to this fund.

General information about the Risks and Resilience Fund

What is the Risks and Resilience Fund and how does it work?

The Risks and Resilience Fund is one of three funds managed by Giving What We Can. Each of these funds directs donations based on our research team’s latest research on charity evaluators and their recommendations, with the aim to help donors with a variety of worldviews maximise their impact. All of these Giving What We Can managed funds work the same way: Giving What We Can collects your donation, pools it with the donations of other donors, and then disburses the funds to highly effective projects working within the fund’s cause area.

What types of projects does the Risks and Resilience Fund support?

The Risks and Resilience Fund supports projects that aim to positively influence people living today as well as the long-term future of humanity by addressing some of the largest and likeliest threats to both the way that we live, and in some cases, our very existence. Because the impact of interventions in this area is harder to measure than in other areas, this fund takes a more hits-based approach to giving.

Some examples of the kinds of projects the fund might support include organisations working to ensure that AI technology is aligned with human interests, pandemic prevention and response initiatives, and policy research into interventions that could mitigate the risk of nuclear war/escalation.

Can you provide more details about where my money will go?

Grants from the Risks and Resilience Fund may take a variety of forms, based on the funding opportunities our research team believes to be exceptionally impactful given their latest research. These opportunities will be determined in consultation with evaluators and grantmakers identified — through the research team’s evaluator investigations —to be particularly well-suited to helping donors maximise their impact. More specifically, this may include allocations to:

• A fund run by an evaluator the research team has evaluated (such as a grant to Longview's Emerging Challenges Fund or EA Funds’ Long-Term Future Fund).
• Charities or projects recommended by an evaluator/grantmaker the research team has evaluated (such as a grant to ARC Evals, based on a recommendation of Longview).
• Charities or projects the research team has reason to believe are highly impactful, including cases where this reasoning isn’t the result of deferring to a vetted evaluator (though we expect this to be rare, as the research team generally evaluates evaluators rather than individual charities or projects).

Where has the Risks and Resilience Fund granted to in the past?

This is a new fund as of November 2023; it made its first round of quarterly grants in Q1 of 2024, reflective of the balance received in Q4 2023. The full Q4 balance was £15,807.14 GBP along with $111,248.24 USD. As expected, 50% of donations to this fund were granted to Longview’s Emerging Challenges Fund and 50% to EA Funds’ Long-Term Future Fund, based on our recent evaluations of their work. The grant recipients shared the following:

• Longview's Emerging Challenges Fund
  The Emerging Challenges Fund directs funding to highly effective organisations working to safeguard the long-term future of humanity. We typically make grants twice a year, and our next grant round is likely to be between June and August of 2024. The funds received from the GWWC Risks & Resilience Fund will be used to support work that reduces existential and catastrophic risks, such as those coming from misaligned artificial intelligence, pandemics, and nuclear war. Generally, we focus on organisations that:
  • Have a compelling and transparent case in favour of their cost effectiveness that most donors will understand; and/or
  • May benefit from being funded by a large number of donors (rather than one specific organisation or donor).
    You can see the Emerging Challenges Fund's previous grant recipients here.
    
• EA Funds' Long-Term Future Fund
  The Long-Term Future Fund will allocate the money received from the GWWC Risks and Resilience Fund to support projects focused on reducing global catastrophic risks, especially potential risks from advanced artificial intelligence. This may include grants for technical AI safety research, policy analysis and advocacy related to AI governance, projects aimed at improving pandemic preparedness and biosecurity, and efforts to build the longtermist community and promote concern for safeguarding humanity's long-term potential. A few grants taken from our public database we have made in the last six months include:
  • Alfie Lamerton ($6,000) - 1 month long literature review on in-context learning and its relevance to AI safety.
  • Yoav Tzfati ($62,150) - Meta level adversarial evaluation of debate (scalable oversight technique) on simple math problems.
  • Ex-CTO of a biosecurity startup ($27,450) - three months of research in nascent areas of EA/longtermism (e.g. digital sentience) with the aim of founding a new org or company.

You can see more of the Long-Term Future Fund’s previous grant recipients here and here.

Please note that the Giving What We Can research team may or may not identify new funding opportunities (outside of those recommended by the Emerging Challenges Fund and the Long-Term Future Fund) in future grantmaking rounds.

Donating to the Risks and Resilience Fund

Why you might donate to this fund

Previously, we recommended several different top-rated funds for each of the cause areas we believe to be particularly impactful. However, donors often weren’t sure how to choose between these top-rated funds working in the same area. The goal of this fund (and the other two funds managed by Giving What We Can) is to provide a single high-impact default fund option for each cause area. We think these funds are a great choice for most donors, as our research team makes allocation decisions in consultation with the evaluators and grantmakers they believe to be best suited for maximising impact in each particular cause area.

Why you might not donate to this fund

Our funds are currently only advised by the grantmakers and evaluators our research team has already looked into as part of their 2023 evaluations of evaluators and deemed to be the best candidates for informing our grantmaking. This means there may be other impact-focused evaluators our research team has not yet looked into but that you believe to be better matched to your personal values and worldview.

If you prefer to look into impact-focused charity evaluators on your own and follow the recommendations of the one(s) you believe best suit you, or do your own research into individual funds and charities, we recommend you read our research team’s evaluator reports, as they provide information that most donors could not access on their own.

How does donating to this fund compare to similar giving opportunities?

Donating to this fund vs donating to the Long-Term Future Fund (EA Funds) or the Emerging Challenges Fund (Longview Philanthropy)

Currently, we plan to allocate half of this fund to EA Funds’ Long-Term Future Fund and half to Emerging Challenges Fund. You can read more about both of these funds in our reports to better understand how they differ from each other.

One other notable difference is that the Giving What We Can research team may consult with other expert evaluators (who can recommend grants in areas that might not be covered by either fund’s work) in the future, based on the outcomes of their ongoing research. Thus, donating to this fund allows you to set up a single recurring donation and know that your money will be allocated based on the most up-to-date evaluator research from the Giving What We Can research team.

Donating to this fund vs. donating to a different fund working to reduce global catastrophic risks

We currently only recommend the Long-Term Future Fund (EA Funds) and the Emerging Challenges Fund (Longview Philanthropy) as top-rated fund options working to reduce global catastrophic risks. (See above for how donating to either of those options differs from this fund.) However, we may add additional top-rated funds in the future. In other words, the fact that another fund focusing on global catastrophic risk reduction doesn’t appear on our list of recommendations does not necessarily mean it’s not an impactful giving opportunity, but may mean that our research team hasn’t yet looked into it as part of their recent evaluations. As such, we can’t (yet) be sure how these opportunities differ from donating to the Risks and Resilience Fund managed by our research team, except to say that we are confident the allocations our Risks and Resilience Fund makes will always reflect our research team’s latest research into which evaluators and grantmakers they think are best suited to help donors maximise their impact. As the research team looks into additional evaluators, we will revisit both our list of recommendations and who we consult with to allocate the donations collected via our funds.

Donating to this fund vs. donating directly to organisations working to reduce global catastrophic risks

We typically recommend donating to funds over charities as a general rule of thumb; this option capitalises on the free expertise of fund managers and advisors, whose job it is to direct the money received as effectively as possible given the most up-to-date information available to them. Since the field of global catastrophic risk reduction is developing so rapidly and the impact of interventions is harder to measure than in other areas, the added expertise and context of specialised grantmakers is even more valuable in this case. As such, we don’t currently include any charities or organisations on our list of recommendations for supporting the reduction of global catastrophic risks, but rather recommend that donors give via one of our three recommended funds (including this one).

Still, if a donor has time or expertise available and/or wants to donate to a specific organisation, they can choose from a selection of promising programs on our donation platform.

Learn more about the advantages of donating through a fund.