Hello, thanks for coming to the talk.
So we are going to talk about charity entrepreneurship.
But first I'm going to take you to a slum
of Lucknow.
So Lucknow is a city in India, and this picture
is fairly representative of the state of affairs.
You can tell from it that there are giant
health concerns, global poverty concerns,
it really is a place where charitable intervention
can make a huge difference.
One thing you can't tell from this picture
though is the sheer size of this slum.
Me and a team of SMS Vaccine reminding staff
went from building to building trying to find
pregnant mothers, and it took hours to cover
even a small section of this slum.
But of course that is just one slum in a much
larger city.
Lucknow city has several hundred slums, 200
to 300 slums by the record right now.
Each of them has a unique set of problems,
some commonalities in terms of global health
economic difficulties, there's a huge volume
of good that can be done in a city like Lucknow.
But of course we can zoom out further, and
look at Uttar Pradesh.
This is a state in India, but it is such a
big state that if it was a country it'd be
the sixth largest country in the world.
It truly is massive.
You could have a giant organization spend
their entire budgetary and staff and constraints
all working in UP, and not even going to make
a dent in the massive scale problems that
they have, both from poverty and other sorts
of issues.
But of course, we can zoom out even further
and look at India.
A country with over a billion people, problems
to match, and although there are incredible
charities working there, there's still a huge
need for more organizations working intelligent,
systematically and with evidence.
Of course, India is not the only country with
problems, and of course, global poverty isn't
the only problem.
There's tons of different issues that one
can work on whether it's animal welfare, mental
health challenges, economic development, migration.
There are a lot of gaps in the world where
new and effective organizations could be founded.
Why I'm talking about these gaps is because
I think that a lot of people are under the
impression that there's already a ton of charities
out there.
Maybe all the best opportunities have been
filled by organizations, and that's really
not the case.
There really is room for fantastic new charities
to be founded and be fantastically high impact.
I'm going to talk about why charity entrepreneurship
is important.
What its importance is to the world and to
the EA movement specifically, who charity
entrepreneurship might be a good fit for.
It really is not a good fit for everybody.
Some people will be fantastically well aligned
and will do a really good job, other people
won't be a good career fit and shouldn't enter
the space.
Finally, how Charity Science, my organization
is aiming to help new charities get founded
and started off on the right foot.
I'm going to make this argument in more of
a cluster thinking perspective than a sequence
thinking perspective, which means coming at
it from a bunch of different angles and showing
that charity entrepreneurship looks very good
and very high impact from different perspectives.
The first thing that comes to almost everyone's
mind when they think about the potential impact
of charity entrepreneurship, is the sheer
size of good that you can do when you found
a successful charity.
These are some of the money moved from some
of the top GiveWell recommended charities,
you can see it's often in the 10s of millions.
These are just the numbers from GiveWell itself,
as opposed to all the budgetary money that's
going towards a charity.
Suffice to say that starting a high-impact
charity can redirect millions of dollars in
a positive direction.
So, even if your charity is 1% more effective
than the charity that a donor would have given
to otherwise, it can have a really massive
scale impact just because of the sheer volume
of money.
There's also a force multiplication argument
about this.
You're not just directing money, when you're
founding a new charity.
You're directing talent, you're directing
interest, you're directing passion towards
this issue.
There are a lot of people who will work for
a high impact charity, but wouldn't ever found
one themselves.
By creating this opportunity, you're creating
an opportunity for high talent individuals
to get invested in that field and to make
a difference.
Finally, there's hits.
So, everyone wants their charity to be successful,
and charity entrepreneurship is inherently,
like normal entrepreneurship, a risky business.
A lot of charities will be started and the
impact analysis will come back bad, or the
charity won't have a valid way of scaling.
There's a lot of ways to fail, but there's
also a lot of ways to have massive success.
Success that is incomparable to many other
jobs.
For example, a minor hit, although it feels
funny to call it a minor hit, would be becoming
a GiveWell recommended charity.
Just a small percentage difference between
you and the other GiveWell recommended charities
in terms of being better, or even simply giving
more options that GiveWell can recommend to
attract donors from different spaces and different
interests, passions, can make a huge difference.
But that's not even taking to count the major
hits.
Every giant organization and charity that's
around today started off as a small group,
or at least in many cases, started off as
a small group.
The benefits of an EA group being the next
group to start the next Oxfam or some other
very large scale charity, and shaping the
entire area, shaping an entire cause area,
is truly massive.
The next thing I want to talk about is neglectedness.
Charity Entrepreneurship isn't a salient career
path for a lot of people.
Many people will have considered entrepreneurship,
potentially, as a career path, and many, many
people will consider working for a charity.
Founding a charity is off the beaten radar,
even in EA.
So this is kind of the percent of people working
in different jobs from the EA survey that
was most recently conducted.
Several thousand people, and an incredibly
small number of people have seriously considered
founding high impact charities.
Of those who have, almost all of them have
been in global poverty.
New Incentives, Charity Science Health, Fortify
Health.
So there's really a truly large opportunity
for more people to get involved in the space,
more people to work in the space, and eventually
start high impact orgs.
The next thing we'll talk about is tractability
and track record.
Founding a charity is a difficult job.
It certainly is, and especially founding a
charity with the bar to beat one of the GiveWell
charities or become an ACE recommended charity,
but it's not impossible.
Some of the track record shows this.
A lot of the charities we view as strongest
and most impactful in the EA movement, weren't
started by someone with 55 years of experience
in the area.
They were started by someone who came into
it with more of an analytical mind set, more
of an EA mindset, someone looking for cost
effectiveness or evidence base.
A lot of the recent charities that have been
started and become GiveWell incubated, were
coming with the same mindset.
That's a huge competitive advantage to other
charities that became effective more due to
incidental cost effectiveness, as opposed
to explicitly seeking it out or trying to
maximize it.
No good EA presentation would be complete
without an expected value calculation.
So what's the numerical worth of Charity Entrepreneurship?
Well, there's a couple different calculations.
Peter Hurford's calculation assumes an 85%
chance that the charity has zero impact, so
fails completely, and assumes a 15% chance
of becoming GiveWell recommended.
These numbers were based off Charity Science
Health, the charity that we founded, after
doing a similar round of analytical research
to the rounds that we now do for all sorts
of charities.
He resulted with the average staff member
being worth $400,000 of equivalent donations
to high impact charity.
That's just the average staff member, that
wasn't for co-founders or the founding team
in particular.
This is an incredibly high impact thing.
This is $400,000 donated.
So, even if you earned $400,000 you'd have
to donate 100% of it to kind of match this
level of impact.
We did an internal model that was a bit more
pessimistic, assuming that there's only a
certain chance that someone would get to the
point where Charity Science Health has got,
and get GiveWell incubated, and ended up at
a similar figure of $200,000 of expected value
of donations.
This sort of impact is really, really high,
and these calculations are quite conservative
relative to a lot of the other impact estimates
going around the EA movement.
There's a whole bunch of other benefits that
I'd love to spend a bunch of time on.
But I'm going to go through really quickly
because we only have so much time.
First one is skill building.
So, entrepreneurship gives you an opportunity
to try on a lot of different hats.
That's part of why it's hard and intimidating,
but it also gives you a chance to build a
lot of different skills.
If you try to found a charity and even if
you fail, going into the next job having basic
budgeting skills, fundraising skills, management
skills, hiring skills, it gives you a huge
advantage and will stick with you longer.
Similarly, career capital.
If someone sees someone took a good attempt
at a project, even if it's a failed project,
but especially if it's successful project,
that does wonders for your CV and career capital
in general.
You can use a successful charity as a stepping
stone towards getting into a high impact position
with the WHO, or any sort of other organization
that would look at that sort of thing.
The next thing is attributable impact.
So, calculating your impact that you're going
to have is really, really difficult, and there's
one less step you have to calculate with charity
entrepreneurship.
If you do, in fact, set a charity that no
one else would have founded, that wouldn't
have gotten started without your time and
energy put into it, what you're most looking
at is that charity's impact as a whole.
Instead of having to calculate both the organization's
impact, and then your specific impact within
the organization.
Maybe the organization is great, but your
staff impact is very minor.
Or maybe your staff impact is big, but the
organization sucks.
With charity entrepreneurship, you only have
to calculate one of those.
Job satisfaction is the next one.
As I said, it's really not the perfect fit
for everybody, and we'll go a little bit more
into who it might be a good fit for and who
it might not be.
But for the right personality type, it's incredibly
enjoyable.
Being able to look at your charity and know
that you built it from scratch, being able
to work with flexible hours, with a bunch
of different staff, there's a lot of benefits
to it.
There's an unparalleled amount of job diversity.
But there's also cons.
Ambiguity is tough, that's the thing you're
going to have to deal with as a charity entrepreneur.
To get to some of the benefits to the EA movement:
it allows movement growth, by expanding the
EA movement outside of its traditional sphere.
By getting involved in a charity level and
hiring people in that field, working with
people who say, work in vaccinations, you
expand EA in a very concrete way to an audience
that's sympathetic or close by.
There's also a much clearer case for impact
of some of these charities.
It's fine to go and tell someone that you're
doing a philosophy think tank that will eventually
save humanity, but it sure is nice to also
be able to say we started a vaccine charity
that people think is highly cost effective.
That sort of concrete case for impact can
benefit the whole EA movement, in terms of
showing that we are in fact doing what we
say we're doing and having success doing that.
The next thing is stability.
Organizations tend to outlive movements.
The EA movement is social movement, and it
is fragile in many ways.
It gets stronger the more organizations that
can anchor it, and tie it to reality in a
long lasting structure.
Finally, opportunities.
Lots of EAs want to work for EA organizations.
Lots of EAs wants to work for high impact
jobs.
As I mentioned with the force multiplier before,
by creating this opportunity, you create space
for people to grow, develop their capacities
and expand the EA movement.
It gives a space for people to go once they
get involved.
Next up, community learning value.
Even a failed project can be massively impactful
if you get a lot of learning value from it.
One of our early projects didn't work at all,
but we were able to publish a giant report
explaining why it didn't work and tens of
other organizations in the EA movement were
able to learn from that mistake and not repeat
the same thing.
If your charity does fail, and you are able
to be transparent about why it failed, learn
from it, you can benefit not only the Charity
Entrepreneurship community within EA, but
the broader EA movement as a whole, as a lot
of these lessons are generalizable.
Finally, sorry, inspiration.
If you can inspire someone to found a charity
that can be massively high impact and people
can see other people doing successful, ambitious
projects, and it can lead to precedence.
So for instance, we saw New Incentives do
a really great job founding the charity, and
that gave us confidence to do Charity Science
Health.
Charity Science Health gave Fortify Health
confidence to do that, and now Fortify Health,
New Incentives and Charity Science Health
can give other EAs a chance to look at charities
that have been successful and it gives them
a chance to feel inspired by the possibility.
The next thing is passive impact.
So, people who have heard of passive income,
and passive impacts is a very similar concept.
Basically, if you set up a charity to run
independently without you, and continue to
do good in the world, you continue to get
some sort of counterfactual responsibility
for that impact.
The last thing that I'll talk about briefly
is just the room for more funding.
Room for more funding isn't a huge impact
if it's filled by someone who's otherwise
going to donate to a fantastic charity, but
by creating a new charity, you can leave a
lot of room for new donors to get involved,
and donate to maybe something particular to
their interest, while still making a really
high impact.
So why now?
There's a lot of reasons why founding a charity
now in particular is maybe a lot better than
historically.
Hopefully, it will continue to be this good
in the future.
There's a lot of funder support and funder
interest in this sort of thing.
The GiveWell incubation program has been trying
to fund programs that might eventually become
GiveWell top charities.
Animal Charity Evaluators has money for this,
Open Philanthropy is very interested in new
charities and of course, Charity Science,
my organization, provides seed funding to
new projects starting up.
Just an unparalleled time where funding probably
won't be the major bottleneck for a lot of
charities being founded, if they are founded
in an evidence-based way in an evidence-based
cause.
There's also mentorship support.
You're not the first charity working on this
anymore.
So you are able to kind of connect with an
alumni community.
Charities that we've talked to have shared
hiring pools and strategies for management
and all sorts of different things.
The EA community really is starting to build
up a network of people you could talk to about
issues, whether it's communications or research,
and really get an informed perspective of
someone who's done something quite similar,
quite recently.
Finally, there's still gaps.
That's why I talked about it at the beginning.
It's really, really easy to forget just how
big the world is, and just how large-scale
our problems are.
There's a ton of malaria charities, and yet,
there's still malaria, killing hundreds of
thousands of people every year.
There's still a lot of work to be done, and
the EA movement can contribute a lot more
to that.
Specifically, there's even ideas that people
would like to see more of.
So, GiveWell has a list of priority programs
that has 25 ideas.
ACE has a list of charities, it would like
to see 17 ideas.
Charity Science Entrepreneurship, we want
to do a research program that recommends two
to five ideas every single year, that'll be
particularly promising to found, in the GiveWell
priority program ballpark, or even more high
impact: something that could compete with
AMF.
So I want to talk a little bit about who Charity
Entrepreneurship is a good fit for.
As I mentioned, it really is not a great fit
for everybody, but people are often surprised
at what they need going in, what would make
them a good fit or would not.
So I'll talk about personality, what it helps
to have, what you don't really need or what
people tend to overvalue, and how you might
further test this in case a 30-minute presentation
can't convince you one way or the other to
radically change your career.
Okay, so first up, personality.
This is an example of a fantastic charity
entrepreneur.
I'm not talking about Prince William; I don't
really have an opinion on whether he can make
a good charity entrepreneur or not.
I haven't spoken to him personally.
But I have spoken to Rob Mather.
He really embodies what a fantastic charity
entrepreneur might look like.
One of the things I want to highlight about
him, is his personality.
Personality is so key, when it comes to charity
entrepreneurship.
It's one of the first things we look for in
our vetting process, and one of the things
that I think determines eventually whether
your charity ends up being massively high
impact or not.
You need a lot of different things.
You need to be resilient.
There's going to be bad days, there's going
to be bad weeks, there might even be bad months
where you think your charity is low impact,
not worth founding, it's hard to get yourself
motivated.
And as the founder, you have to motivate not
only yourself, your co-founder, your employees,
you have to be ready to take those shocks
and keep moving on, keep moving through them
even when it's tough.
The next thing is being ambitiously altruistic.
So a lot of entrepreneurs love ambition.
It's a very common thing, but it's really
easy to be ambitious about the wrong thing.
If you're ambitious about how big our charity
is, your charity might get really big, but
won't necessarily do any good.
What you need to be ambitious about is how
many lives you save, or whatever your end
line metric is for doing good.
That's the thing you have to be laser focused
and truly ambitious about.
The next thing is results orientated.
Numerical quantification measurement, it's
one of the things that makes EAs different
from other organizations, or other movements.
We really want to see the concrete specific
results, and have data to back it up.
Staying focused to this will stop your charity
from diverging into 100 other projects that
might not be as high impact, and it really
can make a difference in the long term.
Next thing is being open-minded.
You won't have all the skills you need.
Nobody does, when they first found a charity.
You have to be able to update based on the
world changing, based on testing out one thing
and it not working, based on advice from people
in the field, people who have worked in specific
areas that you don't have knowledge in.
You have to be ready to amalgamate all these
different views, and come up with a coherent
answer, and update as new data comes in.
Next one.
Similarly, not afraid to make mistakes.
You will make mistakes.
Every charity entrepreneur does, and will.
Being able to admit these mistakes transparently,
learn from these mistakes and update them
can be the difference between your charity
eventually succeeding, and you continuing
to make the same mistake again and again.
Next, self-motivated.
This might be the most important criterion.
You really have no boss, no person whipping
you at the end of the day to get the work
done.
You have to really care about the charity
and be able to put in the hours, to be able
to work yourself through the project.
One of the easiest kind of litmus tests I
have for; would you be a good fit for charity
entrepreneurship is, can you get yourself
through a self-directed project?
Can you complete an online course without
anyone needing you to?
Can you start something where only you're
responsible if it succeeds or fails.
That sort of thing is really challenging for
a lot of people, and it's really, really challenging
to do a charity like this.
You will have your co-founder, you will have
your mentors, you will even have funders you
have to report to, but not at the same level
of regularity that any other job will make
you.
You have to be self-motivated.
Next is creative.
There will be a blank slate.
You won't necessarily know what the next steps
are, and you have to come up with ideas.
How to test one thing, how to test another
thing.
If you come up with five ideas, five ways
to test a given concept, that's the limit
of how good you can get the best of five.
If you come up with 30 ideas, you can test
them all, you can evaluate them all, and come
to the best of 30.
Makes a huge difference to your charity's
impact.
Next, doing it for the right reasons.
This is a bit different than being ambitiously
altruistic.
You really, really have to be focused on doing
good for the world.
If your goals are different, if your goals
are divergent and you want to do a charity
to look good, or to impress a partner, or
something like that, your charity won't end
up being high impact.
You really have to be laser focused on that,
doing it for the right reasons, altruistic
mentality.
So there's some things it helps to have.
It's nice to be highly competent, whatever
that means, kind of general ability, conscientiousness,
IQ, that sort of thing.
The EA community is a huge asset, a bunch
of skill sets that you can tap to, a bunch
of people who really want to help you start
a charity.
Social skills or research skills, it's really
great to have one of those, your co-founder
can balance you out and have the other one.
And experience working in a small organization
charity can give you a sense of what it looks
like from the inside.
You tend to think that every organization
is perfect, and when you get on the inside,
you tend to see how held together with glue
and tape it really is.
What's less important than people generally
think?
Well, one is a degree, A lot of people think
that if they want to start a global health
charity that's fantastic, they need to get
a global health PhD.
Unfortunately, it ends up being too unspecific
a lot of the time.
For my charity, SMS Vaccine Reminders, you
might have only read a page or paragraph in
a global health program, about this sort of
intervention.
It's just very, very specific, not to mention
the country context.
What you need to be able to do is become an
expert, it's not necessarily through a degree;
it's through reading the studies, reading
the research, getting very, very expertised
in that very narrow domain that you want to
start a charity in.
You want to be able to talk to experts and
engage with them at the highest possible level,
but you won't get there from doing a PhD program.
You'll have to do the independent learning
on top of that, in either case.
Also, targeted experience.
Similarly, at a health nonprofit, you might
be able to pick up some good habits, but often
your role will be very specific.
If you're working for a large, even a well
run health organization, often you'll be running
one very small component of it, whether that's
a comms job or a research role.
That will give you some skills in that area,
but as a charity entrepreneur, you really
will to learn a little bit how to do everything.
Some people might come into charity entrepreneurship
with five out of 100 skills that they need,
and other people might come in with nine out
of 100 skills that they need.
Either way, you still need to be able to develop
91 skills.
A lot of it comes down to being able to learn
things on the fly, try things out, pivot and
update based off evidence, talk to mentors,
and utilize their skills.
That sort of thing is going to be far more
important than coming in with a few extra
skills.
Next thing is, connections in the field.
Connections in the field are super important,
and you do need it to have a successful charity.
But you'd be amazed how willing these people
are to talk to you.
If you come in informed and keen, and with
some expertise or some funding, a lot of these
organizations are extremely excited to talk
to a young person who's getting involved,
or experienced person getting involved.
They want to see other charities.
They care about this stuff a lot.
And they're not getting a thousand emails
a day, if they're running some small program
out of India.
In general, it's a very, very easy to kind
of build the network, and that is how you
build the network, by working in the field.
It's helpful to reach out these people and
have a quick Skype with them, tell them what
you're doing, tell them what you're considering,
ask them for advice.
Everyone's been very happy to help when we've
done this on multiple different projects,
across multiple different cause areas.
The one exception to this is government connections.
It's hard to build government connections,
they're not willing to talk to you.
If you're doing a job where you need government
connections, hire someone who has the government
connections, that's the advice there.
So a little bit about further testing.
The best way to test if you're a great fit
for charity entrepreneurship in the way I'm
talking about it, might be applying for our
incubation program.
I'll talk a little bit more about what that
kind of offers and why you might consider
it, but we do have a process that we've used
before, on entrepreneurs, that has been fairly
successful at selecting the kind of people
who might start a GiveWell incubated charity.
We have a quiz on our website.
It's a lot less intensive than doing the full
incubation program process.
It's pretty quick, it's about three minutes,
and it will give you a bit of a sense from
a personal perspective if you might be a decent
fit or not for charity entrepreneurship.
Finally, generally our website we're trying
to put out as much information as possible.
So people can self-select, people can consider
whether they're going to be a good fit for
charity entrepreneurship or not.
Our mail list, we send out of all of our relevant
research as well as like, helpful things like
Facebook group links, to ways that you can
ask people questions, and all that sort of
thing.
So that also can help to give you a sense
slowly of whether this might be a good fit
as a career path or a bad fit.
In general, though, don't be too discouraged.
A lot of the strongest charity entrepreneurs
I've talked to are scared, they're nervous,
they're not the kind of archetype of a gung
ho, confident entrepreneur.
Some of them are cautious.
Some of them are detail-oriented, some of
them are not kind of gregarious.
Don't let those superficial entrepreneurship
associated traits fool you.
Instead, try to get as good as sense as you
can from external people who have looked at
it before, or by talking about it, or by reading
the content on that from people who have started
successful charities.
So now I want to talk a little bit about how
Charity Entrepreneurship as an organization
is aiming to help charity founders.
The first thing is, with research coming up
with a really fantastic idea to run a charity
on is hard, especially if you're trying to
become a top GiveWell charity or top Animal
Charity Evaluators charity, this is not an
easy bar to beat.
Thankfully, we've been able to do a lot of
research to narrow down the space a little
bit into some ideas that are extremely promising.
This is a spreadsheet we did on different
global health ideas, narrowing down to what
ideas might feasibly be competitive with the
top GiveWell charities might be evidence based
and cost effective enough to do a really good
thing.
Here's some of them.
Tobacco taxation looks fantastically cost
effective if you can get the right country.
Conditional cash transfers has a case for
very strong impact, and is being done almost
nowhere by NGOs.
This year, we're going to be focusing on animal
interventions, and researching that, and coming
to kind of the highest possible impact interventions
that one could start in the field.
We're doing research a bit different than
say, GiveWell, Animal Charity Evaluators.
We're looking for gaps, areas that could be
really promising, could be really effective,
but don't have anyone working in them necessarily.
Malaria is a fantastic place to work, but
AMF is doing a really good job, I wouldn't
want someone to start another bed net charity.
But there are areas that are both fantastically
high impact and neglected, as in no one's
working in the kind of way that we as effective
altruists, or we as people who want help the
world, would like to see it done.
So the incubation program that we're running
is taking place from June 15th to August 15th,
and we'll be hoping to run it every year.
We really want to make kind of the process
of founding a charity as easy as possible.
So we're giving structured support that slowly
withdraws, until people are fully independent
standing on their own two feet.
The first month will be something akin to
a university class.
There'll be activities, there'll be pairing
with different co-founders to test out your
abilities in different ways, there'll be explicit
teaching about cost effectiveness, or fundraising
plans, all the kind of hard skills that you
might need to run a really good charity.
The second month, you'll be paired with co-founders
on an idea and start working on the project,
but with a lot of support from teams of people
who have already successfully founded a charity.
Finally, over the next six months, you'll
be given a seed grant, to financially support
yourself so that you can really become a true
domain expert before seeking external funding.
Seed grants are about $50,000, depending on
how many charities apply.
This sort of structure allows someone who
maybe doesn't have a ton of experience in
working for NGOs, or nonprofits, but is able
to build the experience as they go and get
really competent and capable, to start a high
impact charity.
We really don't want it to just end after
the seed grant ends, we want to continue to
support charities really as long as they need
it.
We're trying to build a community such that
people can continue to stay connected, whether
that's over Skype or Facebook, or a co-working
office that we're going to have.
We want to have joint office space so that
people can feel like they're working with
a team instead of working alone or with their
co-founder.
The seed grants I already mentioned.
We'll also connect people with long-term funders,
we don't want to see these charities just
run for six months, and then flounder.
Most of the connections will be people who
are very keen on founding new charities, and
ongoing mentorship.
So I still continue to Skype with the projects
that we've helped, and help them with the
most difficult issues, so they can have an
external set of eyes for as long as they need
it.
This is a quote from Fortify Health, and I
think it's a really important one, because
it shows that not everyone knows that they're
going to be a perfect fit for this.
Some people think it might be too hard or
impossible, but a lot of people can do it.
You can rely on the process to figure out
if you're a fantastic fit.
Just to reiterate on the goal, there are fantastic
charities in the world, but there's not enough
of them.
We need more really, really good charities,
more Humane Leagues, more Against Malaria
Foundations.
Charities that make a massive difference at
cost effectiveness far greater than a standard
charity.
There's still gaps, and room to do it.
The main thing missing is entrepreneurs, people
who will be able to step forward and take
on this risk and potentially start an incredibly
successful charity.
This is our website, you've probably talked
to me or Carolina around the conference.
We're here for the rest of the night, and
I think we have a bit of time for question
answer, if we do in fact, have time for that.
Our office hours are already passed, so you
can't come to that, but we will be kind of
outside the door after the group photo and
that sort of thing for anyone has questions,
I'm happy to answer that.
Or you can email me there, and I'm happy to
answer questions over that as well.
Thank you.
Awesome talk.
Thank you very much.
We have time... really, we're over time already,
but let's do two quick questions that already
came in, which I thought were both quite good.
What is your take on the importance of working
in an effective organization, which may not
even be a charity?
But earlier, one of our speakers, Dr. Glennerster,
had said that she really advises young people
to make sure that they spend some time in
an effective organization so they know what
an effective organization looks like, What
do you think about that?
Yeah, it helps a lot.
When people ask me specifically, what's the
kind of thing I could do to prep if I have
two years till the end of my degree, or some
time for an internship or something like that,
I always say, prioritize how good the organization
is.
It doesn't have to necessarily be in a tightly
related area, but if you work for a charity
like AMF, or pick up some of their management
practices, that's going to be one of the best
things you can do to kind of set yourself
up to run a charity really well.
Okay, last...
second and last question, since we are out
of time.
You spoke to it a little bit when you mentioned
you wouldn't want somebody to start another
bed net charity, makes sense, but so one person
in the audience is asking, in general, it
seems like the charity space has kind of a
proliferation problem, and there's lots of
kind of small charities, often kind of nipping
at different corners, or even the same portions
of the bigger problems.
So what's your take on that, and how do you
think about people joining versus starting
given that reality?
So, we're pretty pro starting versus joining.
Joining organizations, whether they're small
or big, it's incredibly hard to change them
in an effective direction.
You can ask a lot of people who have kind
of worked with these organizations to get
a sense of that.
There are lots of charities, but they're incredibly
small.
You'll see a statistic like there's a million
charities, but almost all of them have an
operating budget of under $50,000 or something
like that.
So it's not like they're taking out huge chunks
of this problem.
What we really have to look at is what's the
scale of the remaining problem, and could
I start a charity that seriously addresses
that, and seriously starts to cover some of
that problem?
Awesome.
Well, we are out of time, but Joey Savoie,
thank you very much.
Talk to this guy about starting a charity!
