Giving What We Can
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| Founded | 14 November 2009 |
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| Founder | Toby Ord |
| Focus | Effective altruism, charity evaluation, pledges, poverty relief |
| Location |
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| Origins | Oxford, England |
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Area served
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Worldwide |
| Method | Members donate 10% of income to effective charities |
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Members
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2359 |
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Key people
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Toby Ord (founder and president) William MacAskill (co-founder) Michelle Hutchinson (executive director) Sam Deere (president) |
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Employees
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8 |
| Website | www |
Giving What We Can (GWWC) is a charity evaluator that advocates for people to make significant donations (typically 10% of income) to the most cost-effective causes and charities. It is a project of the Centre for Effective Altruism.
Founded by moral philosopher Toby Ord in November 2009, Giving What We Can aims to encourage people to commit to long-term donation to the organisations that will do the most good. Giving What We Can conducts extensive research into the effectiveness of various charities, and provides a list of those it most highly recommends. Currently this includes charities that work to treat neglected tropical diseases (NTDs), Micronutrient deficiency, and malaria, although the Giving What We Can Pledge is cause-neutral, and members can donate to other charities provided they have good reason to think they are more effective.
Giving What We Can was founded as a giving society in 2009 by Toby Ord (an ethics researcher at Oxford University) and his wife Bernadette Young (a physician) with the goal of encouraging people to give a larger fraction of their income on a regular basis to alleviate world poverty. Ord cited Peter Singer's essay Famine, Affluence, and Morality about one's moral duty to give to the poor as inspiration for starting Giving What We Can. In the beginning, Giving What We Can members pledged to give at least 10% of their lifetime income to poverty alleviation. Ord himself plans to donate 10% of his earnings for life and everything above about $28,000 a year, the median after-tax salary in the U.K.
Giving What We Can claims that there is a huge variance between the effectiveness of charities in helping the poor, and they recommend donating only to the very best charities that they recommend, in order to maximise the benefit of their donations. Giving What We Can focuses on effectiveness in terms of quality-adjusted life years (QALYs).
According to the Giving What We Can website, the variance in cost-effectiveness of charities arises largely due to the variance in the nature of the causes that the charities operate in. For this reason, Giving What We Can focuses mostly on charities that work in the areas that Giving What We Can considers the most likely to have high impact. According to their website:
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