The Nonlinear Library EA - The EA Animal Welfare Fund (Once Again) Has Significant Room For More Funding by kierangreig
Nov 20, 2023
07:37
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: The EA Animal Welfare Fund (Once Again) Has Significant Room For More Funding, published by kierangreig on November 20, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.
Just as
~2 years ago, the EA Animal Welfare Fund has significant room for more funding. This could be a pretty important point that informs end of year giving for a number of donors who are looking to make donations within the animal sector.
Briefly, here's why the Animal Welfare Fund has some pretty significant room for more funding at this point:
Right now, there's currently
~$1M in the Animal Welfare Fund.
We also now have 50 grants, summing to ~$4.5M in grants under evaluation.
Between mid-last year and mid-this year, the EA AWF received ~350 applications over the past year of which ~150 were desk rejects and ~200 were graded by fund managers. Of these ~200, ~60 received funding, and ~30 received the grant amount they applied for or more.
Assuming that the general shape of the pipeline remains similar, that could imply we may now have more grants than we can fund. Potentially even if we were to have an influx of several hundred thousand dollars.
In general, the AWF is navigating a difficult period funding-wise: last year, we had ~$7M to allocate, whereas
our projection for this year - extrapolating from donations received so far - is only ~$5M.
We also have some plans for significant growth next year through some internal expansion plans in the works (e.g., possibly adding further fund managers, hopefully at least one who is full-time, and doing more active grantmaking).
Also, a lot of our grantees have grown, so they'll have more room for funding. As a lot of the groups we give to are relatively small, they can grow at such a rate that they'd often be looking to absorb twice as much funding in the next year. If we zoom in on just say Fórum Nacional de Proteção e Defesa Animal-a promising Brazilian group. In 2021 we granted $30k to them and this year $80k. Which comfortably corresponds to a greater than 100% growth in grant amount over a two-year period. Generally, it seems that if we have more money in the fund, it encourages some good organizations to request more funding for some quality projects.
Relatedly, some of the areas we grant in just tend to be pretty high growth and grow at comfortably >20% year on year. For instance, years ago there was basically very little that could be granted to invertebrate welfare, but this year we made several hundred thousand dollars in grants within that area.
So next year, we think that we could fairly comfortably and productively absorb and grant out in the realm of $6M-$10M (that's a ~20%-100% increase on this year) without any significant decreases to the quality of our grants.
Note too, that in previous years we have been able to do such jumps in grantmaking volume. In 2020 we granted out ~$2M in total, in 2021 more than doubled that to ~$4.5M, and in 2022 went up to $7M, before now likely decreasing to ~$5M this year. We think we're again on track to handle 2020-2022 levels of either absolute growth or percentage growth in grants for next year, which will put us in that $6M-$10M range.
So one way to look at this is that we now have ~$1M in the fund but next year we could do something like at least ~$7.5M in grants. So in that sense, we have several million dollars in room for more funding.
It could be worth thinking about how much we'll likely raise for grants for next year too though. This year,
we typically raised ~$100k per month. Historically, we have seen about a ~2x-8x increase on that monthly total for the month of December and January (some end-of-year donations come in on the books in January).
Another way to look at this then, is based on the current trends and growth in them year to year, we would now be looking at raising something like ~$1.7M (~$100k...
Just as
~2 years ago, the EA Animal Welfare Fund has significant room for more funding. This could be a pretty important point that informs end of year giving for a number of donors who are looking to make donations within the animal sector.
Briefly, here's why the Animal Welfare Fund has some pretty significant room for more funding at this point:
Right now, there's currently
~$1M in the Animal Welfare Fund.
We also now have 50 grants, summing to ~$4.5M in grants under evaluation.
Between mid-last year and mid-this year, the EA AWF received ~350 applications over the past year of which ~150 were desk rejects and ~200 were graded by fund managers. Of these ~200, ~60 received funding, and ~30 received the grant amount they applied for or more.
Assuming that the general shape of the pipeline remains similar, that could imply we may now have more grants than we can fund. Potentially even if we were to have an influx of several hundred thousand dollars.
In general, the AWF is navigating a difficult period funding-wise: last year, we had ~$7M to allocate, whereas
our projection for this year - extrapolating from donations received so far - is only ~$5M.
We also have some plans for significant growth next year through some internal expansion plans in the works (e.g., possibly adding further fund managers, hopefully at least one who is full-time, and doing more active grantmaking).
Also, a lot of our grantees have grown, so they'll have more room for funding. As a lot of the groups we give to are relatively small, they can grow at such a rate that they'd often be looking to absorb twice as much funding in the next year. If we zoom in on just say Fórum Nacional de Proteção e Defesa Animal-a promising Brazilian group. In 2021 we granted $30k to them and this year $80k. Which comfortably corresponds to a greater than 100% growth in grant amount over a two-year period. Generally, it seems that if we have more money in the fund, it encourages some good organizations to request more funding for some quality projects.
Relatedly, some of the areas we grant in just tend to be pretty high growth and grow at comfortably >20% year on year. For instance, years ago there was basically very little that could be granted to invertebrate welfare, but this year we made several hundred thousand dollars in grants within that area.
So next year, we think that we could fairly comfortably and productively absorb and grant out in the realm of $6M-$10M (that's a ~20%-100% increase on this year) without any significant decreases to the quality of our grants.
Note too, that in previous years we have been able to do such jumps in grantmaking volume. In 2020 we granted out ~$2M in total, in 2021 more than doubled that to ~$4.5M, and in 2022 went up to $7M, before now likely decreasing to ~$5M this year. We think we're again on track to handle 2020-2022 levels of either absolute growth or percentage growth in grants for next year, which will put us in that $6M-$10M range.
So one way to look at this is that we now have ~$1M in the fund but next year we could do something like at least ~$7.5M in grants. So in that sense, we have several million dollars in room for more funding.
It could be worth thinking about how much we'll likely raise for grants for next year too though. This year,
we typically raised ~$100k per month. Historically, we have seen about a ~2x-8x increase on that monthly total for the month of December and January (some end-of-year donations come in on the books in January).
Another way to look at this then, is based on the current trends and growth in them year to year, we would now be looking at raising something like ~$1.7M (~$100k...