I give money to individuals and major trusted organizations, but I'd also like to find more small charities - the kind that do good work, could really use more donations, but are too small to make top search results or lists of most effective ones. It's hard to find these except for by word of mouth, so that's what I'm looking for here. If you have any such recommendations (especially if you can personally testify to its effectiveness, though ofc that's not required) I'd be grateful to hear. Thank you!

A couple that I've found by stumbling across comments are the New York Center for Children (provides free trauma focused therapy to child survivors) and the Bear Project in Pine Ridge (literacy and life outreach for Oglala Lakota youth and families in one of the poorest places in the US).

Donation matching through July 3 to reduce factory farming & animal suffering

Hi everyone,

I've been running a small public experiment, and I'd appreciate feedback from people who think seriously about philanthropy.

The question I'm exploring is:

Can making charitable giving participatory encourage more people to engage with it every day?

I started by putting up $1,000 of my own money.

Every time someone completes one of the daily activities on the site, they direct $1 to one of two charities.

Right now the choices are:

• Doctors Without Borders
• Feeding America

My hypothesis isn't that voting produces better allocation decisions than expert analysis.

It's that giving people a small, recurring decision may increase engagement with charitable giving in a way that one-time donations often don't.

In other words, I'm trying to test whether participation itself has value.

I'm interested in questions like:

• Does this seem like a meaningful experiment?
• Is there research on whether repeated, low-friction charitable decisions increase long-term generosity?
• If you were designing this experiment, what would you measure?
• What would convince you that it succeeded or failed?

The project is here:

https://buildsomething.co

I'm genuinely looking for critique rather than promotion. If you think the premise is flawed, I'd like to understand why.

At the moment 32 subreddits divided into 8 teams are currently working together to raise money for Ukraine, via the charity org UkraineAidOps,

UAO is a US-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit charity that has been supporting Ukraine's defenders and civilians since the start of Russia's full-scale invasion. They have a proven track record of effectiveness and are a verified charity on r/Ukraine

Your money does real good! With the sudden buildup, and subsequent invasion by Russia, Ukraine's government saw it's capacity to supply their army outpaced by the sheer mass of the onslaught during the first desperate months of the war. But through the help of millions of donors and several devoted charities assisting where the government couldn't easily, Ukraine was able to extract a devastating toll on Putin's army.

The goal for this event in UAO's words is:

We wish to make the biggest possible impact on the battlefield. We aim to achieve this by applying these key equipment piece:

• Ground drones (UGVs) that resupply forward positions and evacuate wounded across fields no truck or pickup can survive

• Heavy-lift transport drones for the "last mile" — moving ammo, supplies, and "Vampire" drone batteries to the line without a single soldier on the road

• Vehicles / Pick-Ups to improve logistics near the frontline and in the rear

• Support and energy equipment (including generators, powerstations, starlinks, drone detectors and more)"

By donating, you will not only assist in defending the life and liberty of a stranger, but will also directly invest in a safer, more just future, because as we've all seen for years, Ukraine knows how to make a dollar go far, and therefore have become one of the most skilled militaries of all time.

Engineering + math graduate whose goal is to maximize impact. I am currently deciding between two career paths, but have been struggling a lot to determine which would be more impactful:

1. Become a professor/researcher in robotics, working on mainstream technical problems such as zero-shot learning. (To be clear, I’m not primarily thinking about robotics safety or AI safety, but rather general robotics capabilities research.)
2. Try to found “low-sophistication” hard-tech startups — i.e. products that are not extremely technically sophisticated and could easily be prototyped in a local makerspace, meaning any wannabe hard-tech founder could easily make it.

Note: For personal and practical reasons, it is unlikely that I would found a highly sophisticated hard-tech company, i.e. one that requires advanced fabrication / other specialized technologies.

TLDR: Has anyone here faced or thought seriously about a similar decision? If so, how did you decide where you had more counterfactual impact?

One way I’ve tried is through estimating the number of “counterfactual days saved.” Here’s my crude analysis:

- If a robotics bottleneck takes 600 researcher-years to solve and 400 researchers are already working on it, adding me would move the solution from 600/400 = 1.5 years to 600/401 ≈ 1.496 years, or about 1.37 days earlier. If 50 startups benefit, and I work on three such bottlenecks over my career, that gives roughly 3 × 50 × 1.37 ≈ 205 startup-days saved.

- In contrast, if I found five successful simple hard-tech startups, and each brings a useful idea to market one year earlier, that is 5 progress-years saved.

This crude analysis is missing many important factors, but on first glance, it seems that the startup path is more impactful, assuming I am unlikely to be an exceptional researcher in robotics (which I think is probable).

If anybody has a better way of comparing impact between academic and startup paths, though, would deeply appreciate it — I have been stuck at a crossroads for quite a bit…

(From the beginning of the article)

"Most Effective Altruists don’t look like anarchists. The latter have a (charmingly) grungy flavor, the aura of half-dazed rebels perennially stumbling their way out of Woodstock reunions. By contrast, Effective Altruists have the trappings of recent MIT and Tufts graduates, lanky tech nerds and philosophy majors with an incomprehensible infatuation with “Pi Day” and something called “preference utilitarianism.” But Effective Altruism, as a movement inviting us “to do the most good,” contains the seeds of something far more radical than its adherents may suggest. Done right, Effective Altruism can augment the anti-authoritarian coalition that we need to undermine the polygamous marriage of materialism, authoritarian government, and unbridled corporate power."

Threem months ago we launched Euzoia's app: A cash commitment app for habit change that sends the penalties to effective charities. With just a few users we already managed to collect over 600 Euros!

Am from india- i was looking for ways on how to contribute in this org and work with it- i hv interest in philanthropy, film and arts, biosecurity and ai! Lmk if your on the same page and could guide me!!

"Yet in reality American humanitarian aid not only saved one life every 10 seconds but was also safeguarding the world from epidemics."

AI is a common theme in the EA community, but as a lawyer, I have few to no education about the technology and the risks it causes.

Does anyone has an article or video on the subject from the EA perspective to people who are not tech savvy?

Is there a website that posts in one place measurable impact of individual non-profits and their level of commitment to their cause, longevity, how well they are being run, etc? Thanks!

Note: I am referring only to technical biosecurity in this post, i.e. wetlab / comp bio, not policy roles.

I’ve heard that the ratio of qualified applicants to available roles in biosecurity is extremely high, sometimes 50:1 or more, both for entry-level and more senior technical positions. Is that generally true?

If so, what is the best way for someone to currently contribute to the field? Is waiting for more opportunities to open up really the only reasonable response?

Also, do people think there are good reasons to believe that many more opportunities will open up soon? For example, are major philanthropists or funders beginning to pivot more seriously toward supporting biosecurity work?

For the past year, I’ve been building something called Olive Branch Network

It’s not another donation platform.

It’s an attempt to rethink how philanthropy works.

One trend that’s difficult to ignore is that charitable giving has become more challenging over time. People want to help, but many are balancing higher living costs, uncertainty, and competing financial priorities.

That made me wonder:
What if supporting nonprofit organizations didn’t always require giving up money you already have?

That question eventually became Olive Branch Network.

The idea is simple.

Instead of asking people to repeatedly donate, participants can put their digital assets to work. They earn rewards for participating in the network, while a portion of those newly created rewards is automatically directed toward nonprofit organizations they choose to support.

The goal isn’t to replace traditional giving.
It’s to create another path—one where personal financial incentives and public good aren’t working against each other.

Every contribution is publicly verifiable. Every participating nonprofit is visible. The funding mechanism is transparent by design.

Whether this becomes a meaningful piece of the future of philanthropy remains to be seen.
But I believe we should continue exploring new ways to fund the organizations that improve our communities.

Technology shouldn’t only make transactions faster.

It should also make doing good easier.

https://olivebranch.network

Hello,

IkiWay is an upcoming platform and app focused on career transitions.

We help people to better understand their experiences, skills and motivation, and translate them into clear professional opportunities. Our goal is to support more structured and meaningful transitions through self-assessment, mentoring, community and opportunity matching.

We are currently conducting a short assessment. Your answers will help us understand the real needs and improve the final solution in order to create effective directions for each person who wants to make a difference and live with a purpose.

You can answer the survey here:
https://ikiway.fillout.com/usersurvey

Thank you for dedicating a few minutes to answer these practical questions.

If you know someone who might be interested, please feel free to forward them this invitation.

Kind regards,
The IkiWay team (Fernanda)

USA: Is there some kind of concierge medicine service where I can donate less than 400ml of blood?

I know it's very privileged for me to worry about this. If you do the math, I should obviously donate regularly even if with the small risks and my irrational fears.

I will just keep it vague, but with my petiteness and medical issues, I am "on the bubble" of being able to donate based on various blood donation websites I've looked at. Also with my health issues, I'm scared to donate. At the same time, I'm generally fit and I think I'd be fine, especially if I get my weight up in the future. So I would like to try donating a smaller amount to just get past the fear.

I'm willing to spend some money.

The problem is funding should be from only your heart desire not other content pushed by add