Open Philanthropy

Open Philanthropy is a philanthropic advisor and funder. Since our founding, we’ve directed over $4 billion in grants as part of our mission to help others as much as we can with the resources available to us. 

We launched in 2011 as a partnership between GiveWell and Good Ventures to answer a fundamental question: how can philanthropic giving achieve the greatest impact? In 2017, we became an independent organization, continuing to use this question to guide our research and grantmaking. (Read more about our governance here.) We work with donors who share our commitment to cost-effective, high-impact giving. 

We believe that cause selection is the most crucial decision a philanthropist makes. This drives us to invest an unusual amount of effort in identifying areas where philanthropic capital can have outsized leverage. We select causes using three key criteria: 

• Importance: The scale and severity of the problem
• Neglectedness: Whether the cause receives adequate attention and resources
• Tractability: The likelihood that additional resources can create meaningful progress

As part of our commitment to worldview diversification, we work across a wide range of focus areas where we believe we can have the greatest impact. Within each focus area, our program officers have the expertise and autonomy to identify and support the most promising projects. 

We balance evidence-based giving with ambitious bets on transformative opportunities. Historically, we’ve been the largest funder of GiveWell‘s recommended organizations, backing proven interventions like malaria-preventing bednets. Simultaneously, we pursue hits-based giving — investing in ambitious projects with uncertain but potentially extraordinary impact, such as our early funding for computational protein design research that later contributed to a Nobel Prize-winning breakthrough. Throughout our decade of grantmaking, we’ve collected notable lessons from philanthropy’s historical successes and our evolving grantmaking strategies. 

Our founding and most significant ongoing partnership is with Good Ventures, for whom we serve as outsourced foundation staff. We also collaborate with other philanthropists to support their giving. If you’re interested in exploring how we can help maximize the impact of your philanthropy, we invite you to connect with us.

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