In the News

Articles

1. Open Philanthropy Launches Programs for South Asia, Global Aid Work

   Influential research and grant-making organization Open Philanthropy announced this week that it has hired lead officers for its first “new causes” in more than five years: South Asian air quality and global aid advocacy. The group expects the two programs to support its efforts to cost-effectively direct millions of dollars toward grants aimed at boosting incomes or increasing the years of healthy life for the world’s lowest-income people.

   Devex January 6, 2022

2. Dustin Moskovitz, the Philanthropist Conquering Silicon Valley

   Inspired by The Life You Can Save, the Australian philosopher Peter Singer’s book about ethical giving, [Dustin Moskovitz and Cari Tuna] established Good Ventures in 2011 to oversee their donations and investments. Open Philanthropy, which helps advise the group, maintains a public spreadsheet ranking U.S. policy issues where it believes capital can have the greatest impact. Criminal justice reform and macroeconomic stabilization policy currently top the list.

   Financial Times October 5, 2020

3. 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 April 30, 2020

4. How Philanthropists are Tackling COVID-19

   The Open Phil anthropy Project granted US$17.5 million last year to Sherlock Biosciences, a startup firm in Cambridge, Mass., that’s developing quick, inexpensive tools for diagnosing viruses.

    

   Barron's Penta March 18, 2020

5. 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 September 23, 2019

6. Important But Neglected: Why an Effective Altruist Funder Is Giving Millions to AI Security

   Nearly everything about the organization comes across as highly rational … there is that openness to possibilities—from animal welfare to runaway tech—and the ongoing transparent analysis of its own choices that makes the Open Philanthropy Project such a compelling endeavor.”

    

   Inside Philanthropy March 22, 2019

7. 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 June 6, 2018

8. 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 May 17, 2018

9. 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 April 17, 2018

10. 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 January 12, 2018