Good Ventures awarded a grant of $50,000 to WaitList Zero, via the Save Lives Now New York Foundation, to support the development of a plan for an organization to promote ethical and effective ways to encourage kidney donation.
Although it is not currently one of our main focus areas, we have identified advocacy around increasing organ donation as an area with potentially outstanding “room for more philanthropy.” In particular, we see no substantial organizational capacity devoted to finding and promoting ethical, safe, and politically plausible ways to provide benefits for kidney donors, which could have sizable positive health impacts while saving the healthcare system money.
GiveWell staff have been informally advising Thomas Kelly and Josh Morrison, who are considering starting such an organization, and Messrs. Kelly and Morrison asked us to consider funding their work for a planning period of four months. We see this as a project worth funding because it should yield additional information about the prospects for such an organization and because early funding often seems to carry disproportionate impact.
Save Lives Now New York Foundation is acting as fiscal sponsor while WaitList Zero’s application for 501(c)3 status is pending.