Skip to content

In the News

Articles

  1. One of Philanthropy’s Biosecurity Leaders Steps Up Emergency Pandemic Giving

    Open Philanthropy (OP), which is largely funded by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and his wife Cari Tuna, has been one of the few grantmaking organizations in recent years with an active program in biosecurity and pandemic preparedness. That giving emerged from OP’s longstanding concern with what it terms “global catastrophic risks” that have the capacity to destabilize society to a degree sufficient to cause long-term harm to humanity, or even “lead to human extinction.” While such doomsday fears once made OP something of an odd outlier in philanthropy, they no longer seem far-fetched to anyone after the last few months of catastrophe.

    Inside Philanthropy
    A city skyline next to the water, which reflects the buildings

  3. Open Philanthropy Project’s Cari Tuna on Funding Global Health

    Cari Tuna, along with her husband Dustin Moskovitz, 35, a co-founder of Facebook and work-management firm Asana, launched the Open Philanthropy Project with charity evaluator GiveWell in 2014. Open Phil, now independent, uses grants and catalytic investments to take risky bets, such as the $17.5 million grant it made earlier this year to Sherlock Biosciences, which is creating an inexpensive viral diagnostic tool that could reduce the threat of a pandemic.

     

    Barron's Penta

  5. Can “effective altruism” maximise the bang for each charitable buck?

    Donors to charities rarely make the sort of cost-benefit calculations investors, for example, would think obligatory. So charities attract donations with pictures of smiling gap-toothed children, rather than spreadsheets showing how they actually spend their money. Tugging at the heartstrings, however, does little to allay the doubts of economists sceptical about the efficacy of charity.

    The Economist

  6. Giving in the Light of Reason

    There’s an old saying in philanthropy: If you’ve seen one foundation, you’ve seen one foundation. Each is distinctive, which makes sense: Extremely wealthy people do not get to be that way by following the crowd, so they want their foundations to stand out as well.

    Still, of the 86,000 or so grantmaking foundations in the United States, few stand quite so far outside of the mainstream as the Open Philanthropy Project, which guides the charitable giving of Dustin Moskovitz, the cofounder of Facebook, and his wife, Cari Tuna, a former Wall Street Journal reporter.

    Stanford Social Innovation Review

  7. This Powerhouse Funder Is New to Scientific Research. Where Are Grants Going?

    When we first wrote about the Open Philanthropy Project—a now-independent outfit created by GiveWell and the foundation of Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and his spouse Cari Tuna, who remain its principal backers—it was taking a highly deliberative approach to developing its funding methodology. Over the course of several years, OPP laid out its focus areas and the core principles that would guide grantmaking in those areas.

    Inside Philanthropy

  8. Research Funder Knocks on the NIH’s Door Looking for Ideas—And Big Grants Flow

    One challenge in science philanthropy is finding the right niche where a grantmaker can really make an impact. Research is complex and expensive, after all, and even the wealthiest donors are working with a lot less money than corporate or government funding sources.

    The Open Philanthropy Project—a funding outfit anchored by the wealth of Dustin Moskovitz and Cari Tuna—has been facing that very challenge, and over the past year, it ran quite a unique RFP to track down some high-risk, high-reward research to fund.

    Inside Philanthropy

  9. Mapping The Brain’s Microbiome: Can Studying Germs In The Brain Lead To A Cure For Alzheimer’s?

    Could it really all come down to infection? Two scientists and a team of researchers are trying to find out. Harvard researchers, Dr. Rudolph Tanzi and Robert D. Moir, PhD, are heading up a team, funded by the Cure Alzheimer’s Fund and the Good Ventures Foundation, that has taken on mapping the microbiome, the population of microorganisms, some helpful and some pathological, that exists inside the brain.

    Forbes

  10. Philanthropy Awards, 2016

    Through their Good Ventures Foundation and the Open Philanthropy Project, Moskovitz and Tuna have set a great example for other emerging donors by not only revealing grants in a timely fashion, but also explaining the thinking behind grantmaking in blog posts.

    Inside Philanthropy