EA - Foundation Entrepreneurship - How the first training program went by Aidan Alexander

Link to original articleWelcome 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: Foundation Entrepreneurship - How the first training program went, published by Aidan Alexander on January 6, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.TLDR:Charity Entrepreneurship (CE) has run our first foundation training program. This program looked less like traditional philanthropic advising, and more like our classic charity incubation program. Instead of recommending specific charities, we aimed to teach skills that would allow foundation leaders to work as informed, independent, full-time grantmakers, equipped with a suite of decision-making tools. Despite seeing many areas where we could improve the program, we consider the pilot to have been very successful. We are excited to run this program again and believe it could provide impact comparable to that of our charity incubation program.BackgroundAt the beginning of 2022 we announced that CE would be running a pilot training program for grantmaking foundations. The pilot program finished several months ago, and so we wanted to follow up on how it went and what we learned.WhyStarting an impactful foundation and being a strong grantmaker is hard. Few high-quality resources exist (at least in a publicly available form) that teach how to run an evidence-based and highly effective foundation.Over the past four years, CE has helped launch 23 new nonprofits, several of which are on track to becoming field leaders in their respective areas (e.g., recommended by GiveWell). An unpredicted learning from this work is that our content, approach, and handbook have been useful to a number of foundations and grantmakers. They have improved their prioritization, decision-making, their clarity of mission and, ultimately, their impact (particularly in the early stages of setting up a foundation or granting department).With this in mind, we incubated one grantmaking foundation in 2021, which proved successful. This, combined with the number of interested foundations, led us to pilot a program focused on grantmaking foundations in 2022.WhatThe pilot program ran for four weeks (three remote and one in person in London) and required participants’ full-time commitment. It was high intensity relative to other programs typically aimed at philanthropists.During the remote weeks there were readings from a 300+ page handbook written for the purpose, ~3x daily video lectures, 2x daily projects and 1x daily group discussion.During the in-person week, in addition to group discussions, we ran mock grantmaking and donor coordination exercises. We supported participants to work towards a concrete final deliverable that they could use to better their grantmaking going forward.The content of the program was focused on (a) equipping the foundations with decision-making tools, e.g., cost-effectiveness analyses, (b) making key decisions regarding their scope, structure and strategy, and (c) sharing best practices on vetting processes in the contexts of hiring and grantmaking.WhoFive foundations (represented by six people) participated in the pilot. Once these foundations have launched and scaled, their combined annual donations are expected to be approximately $60M/yr. Participants had a wide range of grantmaking experience (from none to many years), foundation maturity (from yet-to-exist to fairly established), EA knowledge (from novice to expert) and expected annual dollars granted (from $100k to >$10M).How it wentWhat went wellThe program was a pilot, and as a result it was quite rough around the edges. Despite this, we think the program was very successful! From our perspective, the aspects of the program that went particularly well were the group discussions, the mock grantmaking exercises and the final project at the end.Feedback has suggested that the group discussion sessions were extremely valuable. These sessions gave part...