EA - The flow of funding in EA movement building by Vaidehi Agarwalla

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 flow of funding in EA movement building, published by Vaidehi Agarwalla on June 23, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.This post is part of EA Strategy Fortnight. You can see other Strategy Fortnight posts here.I’ve been reflecting on the role of funding in the EA movement & community over time. Specifically I wanted to improve common knowledge around funding flows in the EA movement building space. It seems that many people may not be aware of it.Funders (and the main organizations they have supported) have shaped the EA community in many ways - the rate & speed at which EA has grown (example), the people that are attracted and given access to opportunities, and the culture and norms the community embodies and the overall ecosystem.I share some preliminary results from research I’ve conducted looking at the historical flow of data to movement building sources. I wanted to share what I have so far for the strategy fortnight to get conversation started. I think there is enough information here to understand the general pattern of funding flows. If you want to play around with the data, here is my (raw, messy) spreadsheet.Key observationsOverall pictureTotal funding 2012-2023 by known sourcesAccording to known funding sources, approximately $245M have been granted to EA movement building organizations and projects since 2012. I’d estimate the real number is something like $250-280M. The Open Philanthropy EA Community Growth (Longtermism) team (OP LT) has directed ~64% ($159M) of known movement building funding (incl. ~5% or $12M to the EAIF) since 2016. Note that OP launched an EACG program for Global Health and Wellbeing in 2022, which started making grants in 2023. Their budget is significantly smaller (currently ~$10M per year) and they currently prioritize effective giving organizations.The unlabeled dark blue segment is “other donors”Funders of EA Groups from 2015-2022See discussion below for description of the "CEA - imputed" category. Note that I’ve primarily estimated paid organizer time, not general groups expenses.EA groups are an important movement building project. The Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) has had an outsized influence on EA groups for much of the history of the EA movement. Until May 2021, CEA was the primary funder of part- and full-time work on EA groups. In May 2021, CEA narrowed its scope to certain university & city/national groups, and the EA Infrastructure Fund (EAIF) started making grants to non-target groups. In 2022, OP LT took over most university groups funding from both CEA (in April) and EAIF (in August). Until 2021 most of CEA’s funding has come from OP LT, so its EA groups funding can be seen as an OP LT regrant.Breakdown of funding by source and time (known sources)2012-2016Before 2016, there was very limited funding available for meta projects and almost no support from institutional funders. Most organizations active during this period were funded by individual earning-to-givers and major donors or volunteer-run. Here’s a view of funding from 2012-2016:No donations from Jaan Tallinn during this period were via SFF as it didn’t exist yet. There is a $10K donation from OP to a UC Berkeley group in 2015 that is not visible in the main chart. “Other donors” includes mostly individual donors and some small foundationsQuick details on active funders during this period:Individual Donors: A number of (U)HNW & earning-to-give donors, many of whom are still active today, such as Jaan Tallinn, Luke Ding, Matt Wage and Jeff Kaufman & Julia Wise. I expect I’m missing somewhere between ~$100,000 to $1,000,000 of donations from individuals in this chart per year from 2012 to 2016.EA Giving Group: In 2013, Nick Beckstead and a large anonymous donor started a fund (the EA Giving Group) to which multiple individual ...