Effective Giving
Carefully choosing where to donate and doing so generously is one of the most impactful decisions you can make. Simply putting in a bit more research, focus, and money toward effective giving can save a life. We recommend Giving What We Can’s Effective Giving 101 Guide to learn more.
Where you donate will depend on which cause areas and interventions you believe have the greatest opportunity for impact. Members of EA DC differ radically in where they believe the most potential for good is, and we, as organizers, don’t claim to have the answers. But we want members to take the question and debate about where to donate extremely seriously.
Note: Out of deference to the broader EA community, our recommendations below are limited to managed funds and charity evaluator recommendations. This is our way to avoid presenting the individual views of EA DC organizers as authoritative.
If you would like to learn more about specific high-impact charities, we’d recommend consulting Giving What We Can, discussions on the Effective Altruism Forum, and talking with others in the community.
Sign a Giving Pledge
If you want to step up your giving and publicly commit to regular donations, we encourage you to check out Giving What We Can’s giving pledges. Pledging can significantly increase your lifetime impact and contribute to a social norm of giving generously and effectively.
The most common GWWC pledge is the 🔸 10% Pledge, where you commit to donating 10% of your lifetime income to effective charities. The 🔹 Trial Pledge is also available, where you commit to give a chosen fraction of your income (≥ 1%) for 6 months – 5 years.
If you are ready to take either pledge and feel that our community has strongly influenced your decision, we’d encourage you to pledge through our official EA DC Pledge Partnership.
Recommendations on where to donate by cause area
AI
Animal Welfare
Animal Charity Evaluators has a list of recommended charities
Biosecurity
Climate Change
Giving Green has great advice on where to donate for effective climate change mitigation.
The Effective Environmentalism website also has a great list of resources on effective climate charities.
Global Health & Development
GiveWell is still considered the gold-standard to a lot of EAs for finding and giving to the most effective global health and development charities, but there is a lot of debate and disagreement!
Nuclear Risk
Get advice from EA DC members
If you’d like to talk to an EA DC member about how they think about donations or giving pledges, please fill out this form and select “Advice on donations” in the section “What are you hoping to get out of the connection?”
Our members will be happy to talk to you about how they think about effective giving. We have a lot of different thinking and approaches to effective giving represented in the group, so please share any relevant info about who you’d like to be connected to and what you’d like to talk about with them.
To learn more about EA DC members who give significantly, see the page Members Who Give.