“Funding Diversification for Mid-Large EA Organizations is Nearly Impossible in the Short-Medium Term” by MarcusAbramovitch

Summary

There's a near consensus that EA needs funding diversification but with Open Phil accounting for ~90% of EA funding, that's just not possible due to some pretty basic math. Organizations and the community would need to make large tradeoffs and this simply isn’t possible/worth it at this time.

Lots of people want funding diversification

It has been two years since the FTX collapse and one thing everyone seems to agree on is that we need more funding diversification. These takes range from off-hand wishes “it sure would be great if funding in EA were more diversified”, to organizations trying to get a certain percentage of their budgets from non-OP sources/saying they want to diversify their funding base[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8] to Open Philanthropy/Good Ventures themselves wanting to see more funding diversification[9]. Everyone seems to agree; other people should be giving more money to the EA projects.

The Math 

Of course, I [...]

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Outline:

(00:34) Lots of people want funding diversification

(01:11) The Math

(03:47) Weighted Average

(05:03) Making a lot of money to donate is difficult

(09:18) Solutions

(09:21) 1. Get more funders

(10:35) 2. Spend Less

(12:49) 3. Splitting up Open Philanthropy into Several Organizations

(13:52) 4. More For-Profit EA Work/EA Organizations Charging for Their Work

(16:23) 5. Acceptance

(16:59) My Personal Solution

(17:26) Conclusion

(17:59) Further Readings

The original text contained 10 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
December 27th, 2024

Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/x8JrwokZTNzgCgYts/funding-diversification-for-mid-large-ea-organizations-is

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.