My Giving
Personal Giving Mission Statement: I believe giving should be done openly to encourage others to identify good charities and take on the positive habit of giving. My personal work and giving closely align. I’m interested in neglected causes (often technical) that offer ultra-high impact. I significantly favor charities that benefit the long-term future. The bulk of my giving uses an effective altruism lens that looks at whether a cause is important, tractable, and neglected. I am less risk-averse with my giving. I lean utilitarian in my overall philosophy.
Budgeting and Future Expectations: Between 2016 and 2019, inclusive, I budgeted to give at least 1% or more each year of my gross income. I do this to frontload personal retirement savings while setting the habit of giving. I follow the path I outlined in my practical philanthropic giving article. Starting in 2020, I’ve adjusted my giving percentage floor slightly upward according to The Life You Can Save (TLYCS) calculator. I tend to donate well above that in practice.
Planned Giving: For my planned giving, I have my Fidelity donor-advised fund as the sole beneficiary for all my financial accounts. The beneficiaries within my donor-advised fund change from time to time but fit with my current personal giving mission statement. I have a life insurance policy for cryonic preservation (not giving since it provides a service). But should that go south, that policy also has a backup charitable beneficiary. I still need to set up a will for any remainder or unexpected assets that don’t allow me to easily set a charitable beneficiary. My planned giving will by far be my largest charitable gift.
Giving By Year
( $21,165 given since 2016. Gifts $100 and under mostly not recorded; true matches and quasi-gift assignments included in the total.)
Other Recommended Charities
Long-Term/Systemic Problem Charities
Near-Term/Immediate Impact Charities
Meta-Charities
Fundraising Charities
Giving By Year
2023
Nutritionfacts is a c3 nonprofit that provides science-based evidence on nutrition and advocates a vegan diet. I also used this resource to meaningfully improve my personal diet. This donation was given via a DAF which was funded through appreciated stock, transferred to Every.org and then recommended on that platform. I used leftover credits from a previous transfer.
2022
Seattle Approves aimed to bring approval voting to Seattle via ballot initiative. Since it was a c4, I gave in cash. You can give stock for a c4, but it was more advantageous for me to save stock donations for c3 charities. Cash was also simpler for the charity in this situation as well.
The Center for Election Science | $250
This was my last donation to CES before they changed their organizational strategy. I no longer recommend this organization. This donation was given via a DAF which was funded through appreciated stock.
Nutritionfacts is a c3 nonprofit that provides science-based evidence on nutrition and advocates a vegan diet. This donation was given via a DAF which was funded through appreciated stock.
2021
For all my gifts in 2021, I gave through Every.org (with an exception being an additional small donation to The Center for Election Science through Tisbest). Every.org had limited-time matching for all gifts using their service. I gave via cash initially because I was afraid the window would close quickly, and matching opportunities are extremely efficient and rare. After it became apparent that I had more time, I gave via my Fidelity donor-advised fund. I used appreciated stock to fund the donor-advised fund. I then used my Fidelity account to gift to Every.org (a nonprofit itself) to credit my Every.org account. I then used the credits to gift to the nonprofits. While I won’t be able to itemize my taxes in 2021 to get the deduction, this approach allowed me to not realize capital gains from stock for my taxable income, and it allowed me to take advantage of true matching. True matching is when if not for your gift, the third party’s contribution to your charity would not have happened. Matching for all charities were $100 and sometimes slightly more, making a typical total gift of at least $200.
The maximum efficient contribution per charity to leverage the matching was $100, which I did for each charity, all 37. Some charities used the same fiscal sponsor, so this meant only having the effect of a $100 gift. This duplicate matching was difficult to track at the time, so I gave anyway even though I couldn’t get the match for nonprofits that used the same fiscal sponsor. [A fiscal sponsor is an intermediary nonprofit that uses its existing 501(c)3 recognition from the IRS to accept donations on behalf of another charity that is still in the process of getting its status.] Interestingly, Every.org allowed organizations that used charitable indexes (a gift that went to multiple different charities within a category) to get matching even when you also gave to the same umbrella organization directly or through a separate index, but it did not allow repeated matching for charities that used the same fiscal sponsor.
Lead Exposure Elimination Project (LEEP) | $200
Lead Exposure Elimination Project (LEEP) works to prevent lead poisoning worldwide. This is troublingly pervasive and preventable. Imagine being able to explicitly be able to retroactively make sure individuals were more intelligent and didn’t suffer from preventable physical and mental challenges. I was also persuaded by my friend Dan Whal who is on their board of directors.
High Impact Professionals | $100
High Impact Professionals works within professional communities helping to connect and guide them. This focus uses an effective altruism lens. I personally see a lot of opportunities here. I also have a lot of faith in their co-founder, Devon Fitz.
Happier Lives Institute | $100
Happier Lives Institute focuses on research dealing with happiness. Happiness is—arguably—what the good life is all about. So it makes sense that we should understand it well when thinking about how to allocate resources.
Lifespan.io focuses on research dealing with aging. They also have had some pretty cool collaborators where they’ve created educational videos on aging.
Sightsavers focuses on curing preventable blindness in a cost-effective way. Some of these conditions can be solved for startlingly little money.
Alcor focuses on cryonics with human preservation. Additionally, much of their research carries over to medical areas such as organ preservation.
Brain Preservation Foundation | $210
Brain Preservation Foundation studies the meaningful preservation of the brain. This is also an area that could have carry-over discoveries to other aspects of medicine.
Legal Priorities Project | $210
Legal Priorities Project does legal research to help address pressing problems. I see this as addressing a technical barrier that would otherwise be in the way for other charitable causes.
Nuclear Threat Initiative | $210
Nuclear Threat Initiative shows governments how not to blow us all up. I don’t want any of us to be blown up.
The Humane League focuses on abuse aimed at animals raised for food. There’s a bunch of those animals and that adds up to a lot of suffering. I’d rather that suffering not be there.
Fish Welfare Initiative | $210
Fish Welfare Initiative focuses on the suffering associated with harvesting fish. While fish may not be able to give salient signals that they’re suffering in the ways other animals can, there’s plenty of evidence that they suffer. This suffering happens on an enormous scale.
Animal Welfare Index [Founder’s Pledge Charity Index Fund] | $210
This is an index fund from Founder’s Pledge that sends money to a bunch of charities already on this list focusing on animal welfare issues.
Cellular Agricultural Society | $210
Cellular Agricultural Society works to bring clean meat closer to market. This is a way to bring the large portion of the population not interested in veganism away from a manufacturing process that involves suffering animals.
This is an index fund from Founder’s Pledge that sends money to a bunch of charities already on this list focusing on climate and environmental issues.
National Association of City Transportation Officials | $210
NACTO does a wonderful job creating best practice guides for street design. Many of people are killed due to being run down by cars. Better design is a way to significantly reduce that while allowing us all to move around our cities without fear and (if we wish) not in a car.
Charity Entrepreneurship | $210
Charity Entrepreneurship is an accelerator of sorts of nonprofits. It gives new ED’s the training and resources they need to be successful in their nonprofit startup.
Animal Charity Evaluators| $210
Animal Charity Evaluators looks at all the animal charities to do the research to see which ones have the greatest impact.
Less pollution = better lives.
Rethink Charity provides technical often not-so-sexy support for high-impact nonprofits. Never forget that logistics is how change really happens!
Future of Life Institute| $210
Helping to keep humanity on track for the long haul.
TLYCS focuses on getting people to give to immediate interventions to make others’ lives better, particularly folks in poorer countries where interventions are cheaper.
Founder’s Pledge takes folks who have started tech businesses before they’ve done well. They pledge that if they do well that they’ll give a significant portion to charity (like the ones on this list). There’s also a lot of peer networking that they provide as well during this process. I like the model a lot.
Givewell identifies more immediate impact charities and simplifies the process for donors by sending their donations to those charities.
GiveDirectly provides cash transfers to folks in poorer countries as an intervention rather than assuming that they know what folks need. Part of the premise is that if lack of money makes folks poor and unable to move out of poverty, then perhaps giving them money will address the core issue. So far their research looks good.
Verified Voting looks at voting integrity issues, particularly issue like paper trail and auditing. Elections are important, and I think election integrity is a part of us having faith in our outcomes.
Like the name implies, Fistula Foundation focuses on fistula repair surgery, a terrible and easily corrected condition that mothers can face. This surgery helps these women go back to living normal lives.
Electronic Frontier Foundation | $210
The work of people like Aaron Scwartz has made an impact on me. I find myself frustrated with terrible intellectual property laws that hinder our progress as well as the way that our digital privacy has been violated. EFF addresses these issues better than any organization I know.
One for the Wolrd gets people to start by donating at least 1% of their income to effective charities. You gotta get folks in the door.
Read/Write Library is a nonprofit that my partner runs in Chicago. It focuses on recording the stories from communities in Chicago that would otherwise be lost or distorted.
Rethink Charity does a lot of research helping to guide us as we try to solve the problems in the world.
Male Contraceptive Initiative | $210
MCI is an organization that I started in 2015 to bring new male contraceptives to market. They now provide more funding to non-hormonal male contraceptive research than any NGO in the world.
North Korea is a terrible place to live. And if you’re there, you can’t get out. You just lost a birth lottery. Liberty In North Korea helps folks escape.
Good Food Institute is another organization that works to get non-animal-based proteins to take up as large of the market share as possible. That means better environmental outcomes and less animal suffering.
Generation Pledge is an organization that identifies those from wealthy families that stand to gain a substantial inheritance. They work with those prospective heirs so that they pledge to give a portion of their inheritance to effective charities.
The Center for Election Science | $260
I started CES in law school in 2011 with some other advocates, got funding starting for the 2018 year, and am now ED. We basically work to make sure our government can function properly by giving us a tool to make sure their interests align with the interest of the voters.
2020
The SENS Foundation provides funding for aging research, which will affect millions of future people if it speeds up aging research by even ten years. To my knowledge, this is still the best effort to address aging and underfunded. I was worried about stocks going down throughout the rest of the year, so I gave early.
I gave this gift using appreciated stock through my donor-advised fund. I gave this gift earlier in the year.
STL Approves is working to pass Proposition D, which would bring nonpartisan open primaries using approval voting to the city of St. Louis. St. Louis has been plagued with vote splitting that has caused particularly bad representation for the Black community. This initiative addresses that while giving a platform for new voices. If it passes, St. Louis will be the second city in the country to implement approval voting.
I gave this gift via credit card through a donation portal. STL Approves is not a 501(c)3, so there was no value in a more complex gift with appreciated assets.
Rethink Priorities does research on improving the welfare and lives of nonhuman animals as well as on existential risk. I like the team at Rethink Priorities and was especially impressed with their work looking at ballot initiatives. I have years of experience with ballot initiatives at this point and recognize that, while technical, ballot initiatives are an excellent tool for change. This is my way of encouraging this focus.
I gave this gift via credit card over Facebook in an attempt to get it matched. Because of the CARES ACT, I can—for this year only—make an above-the-line deduction for up to $300 of this gift. I can do this because (1) the gift was made in cash (2) Rethink Priorities is a 501(c)3, and (3) I am not itemizing my taxes for the 2020 tax year.
The Center for Election Science | $300
The Center for Election Science empowers people with voting methods that strengthen democracy. It focuses on approval voting as a way to address vote splitting, encourage stable governments, and make sure new voices are heard.
I won 2nd place in a contest on the EA Forum with an essay on funding models in the nonprofit sector. Instead of accepting the $300 cash prize, I recommended that it go to CES. This way, I avoided realizing the income. As a technical matter, this was not an assignment of income (which has detrimental tax implications) but rather a forfeiture and recommendation of the funds.
2019
The SENS Foundation provides funding for aging research, which will affect millions of future people if it speeds up aging research by even ten years. To my knowledge, this is the best effort to address aging. This specific area is highly underfunded as well. I made this decision after seeing Aubrey de Grey’s EA Global talk, reading his book Ending Aging, listening to his other interviews, and talking with him briefly in person. Here’s another useful essay written by an effective altruism supporter.
I gave this gift using appreciated stock through my donor-advised fund. Technically, the gift went was distributed at the beginning of 2020, but the exact timing was not important to me for this year.
2018
Reform North Dakota (doing business as Reform Fargo) | $875
Reform Fargo pushed a local campaign to make Fargo the first city to use approval voting. Approval voting is a simple alternative voting method that tends towards more consensus candidates, addresses vote splitting, always lets you support your favorite, and provides a more accurate reflection of support for all candidates—including ones who lose. This was a pivotal opportunity to contribute to history and start the momentum for approval voting. I also knew the president for the organization. I partly used this as an exercise to get him comfortable with asking others for more money.
I made this gift via check. There was no tax advantage since it was a 501(c)4, which was irrelevant to me since I did not itemize this tax year. Donor advised funds are not allowed to give to a 501(c)4.
The Methuselah Foundation targets the same cause area of aging as the SENS Foundation and is also run by Aubrey de Grey. The Methuselah Foundation, however, focuses more on promotion and outreach.
I gave this gift via a donor-advised fund using cash as I had no appreciated stocks.
2017
The Center for Effective Altruism | $500
The Center for Effective Altruism is a meta-charity the works to grow the effective altruism movement. I had learned about effective altruism in 2016 following an interview between Sam Harris and Will MacAskill. I then listened to more interviews and read a number of books on effective altruism. I liked what I saw and wanted to support this community. This was also the first year I attended EA Global—both in Boston and San Francisco.
I gave this gift via a donor-advised fund using cash as I had no appreciated stocks.
Liberty In North Korea helps North Korean citizens escape North Korea. After looking at their 990’s, it looked like they were able to do this cost effectively. I found the individual suffering very persuasive, and it looked like they had a strong record of helping refugees following their escape. I also spoke with one of the local organizers.
I gave this gift via a donor-advised fund using cash as I had no appreciated stocks.
2016
The Center for Election Science | $4,400
The Center for Election Science studies and advances better voting methods. I gave this gift as a way to jumpstart grants for the organization by subscribing to a grant-related service. Unfortunately, this was unsuccessful. I underestimated the time, connections, staff capacity, and skill required to do this effectively even with the service. I was the only staff member at the time (executive director) and working half-time. (Our organization has changed dramatically since this time.)
I gave this gift via a donor-advised fund using cash as I had no appreciated stocks.
Free & Equal Elections Foundation | $600
Free & Equal Elections Foundation works on electoral reform. My main reason for giving during this year was because they were organizing a debate that included third-party candidates who were—as usual—being excluded by the Commission On Presidential Debates. I had seen Free & Equal do a good job organizing debates in a prior election and I wanted to support this kind of work—regardless of how I felt about individual candidates. I thought getting more ideas in the debate was important. I also know the executive director for this organization and was confident in her ability.
I gave this gift via a donor-advised fund using cash as I had no appreciated stocks.
Other Recommended Charities
Long-Term/Systemic Problem Charities
The Center for Election Science (No longer recommended)
Near-Term/Immediate Impact Charities
Meta-Charities
The Center for Effective Altruism (manages EA Funds)
Fundraising Charities