Sjir Hoeijmakers on a small commitment that will help millions of animals

Oct 14, 2025

Sjir Hoeijmakers, CEO of Giving What We Can, passionately discusses the importance of donating and the 10% pledge, a commitment that can make a huge difference for animals. He shares insights on the impact of pledgers, revealing that 10,000 of them can collectively give $50M a year. Sjir also emphasizes why effective giving matters, how personal networks can amplify pledging, and the role of evaluation in optimizing donations. He encourages listeners to consider taking a trial pledge as a stepping stone to impactful giving.

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INSIGHT

Small Donations Yield Massive Impact

Effective animal advocacy is extremely underfunded, so small donations can have outsized impact.
Sjir Hoeijmakers stresses that an extra dollar can meaningfully free animals from severe suffering.

ADVICE

Start With A Trial Pledge

Try the 1% trial pledge to test effective giving before committing to 10% for life.
Use the trial pledge to build the habit and decide whether to increase your commitment later.

ADVICE

Make A Personal Giving Commitment

Take a personal pledge to increase and focus your giving; it works.
GiveWhatWeCan provides recommendations, tools, and community to make giving easier and more effective.

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Today we're talking about a topic that's really important to me personally: donating and effective giving. Specifically, why donating 10% of your income to the most effective animal charities might be one of the most important things you can do to improve the world.

To dive deep into this topic, I’m so excited to have Sjir Hoeijmakers on the show today. Sjir is the CEO of Giving What We Can (GWWC), the global organisation promoting effective giving and the 10% pledge. Even more impressive than this, he donates around 50% of his income to effective charities, so he really puts his money where his mouth is!

In our conversation, we talk about the impact your donation can have, why it also makes sense for people who work full-time in the movement and why the act of pledging really matters. We also talk about another important part of Giving What We Can’s work: Their evaluation of regrantors and evaluators, including the Effective Altruism Animal Welfare Fund and Animal Charity Evaluators.

If anything we talk about today sparks your interest, I really encourage you to consider taking the trial pledge, where you can pledge to give just 1% of your income to effective charities. It's a great way to test it out and see if it works for you. Personally, taking the pledge is one of the things I’m proudest of. Because of this, I’ll be donating £50 to Giving What We Can’s effective animal advocacy fund for each person who takes the trial pledge or full 10% pledge, up to a total of £1000. So, if you sign up via the links below, there is a special tracker that will let me know how many people take it, and I’ll donate accordingly.

Chapters:

What is the 10% Pledge? (00:08:00)
Why pledge vs just donate? (00:10:56)
Should full-time advocates also give? (00:15:15)
When shouldn't you pledge? & the Trial peldge (00:24:18)
Should you give to funds or charities directly? (00:30:10)
Why is GWWC evaluating Animal Charity Evaluators and the EA Animal Welfare Fund? (00:45:04)
How did ACE change with GWWC's feedback? (00:55:09)
GWWC moved $6M to animals in 2024! (01:06:30)

Resources:

Sjir's Recommendations:

Moral Ambition - Book by Rutger Bregman
Kurzgesagt - Youtube Channel
One Helpful Idea Newsletter by Spencer Greenberg

With thanks to Tom Felbar (Ambedo Media) for amazing video and audio editing!

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