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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The founders of Silicon Valley’s technology companies, many of whom have amassed huge fortunes at a young age, tend to look at their philanthropic giving much as they do their companies: They study a problem, explore a number of ways to attack it and eventually invest heavily to scale up the ideas they think will be winners…
When Kendra Brooks left her low-income neighborhood in north Philadelphia last month and flew to the Federal Reserve’s annual symposium in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, she did so on the dime of a Facebook Inc. co-founder.
In the private sector, no one thinks that great investments are easy to find. A 2010 study found that the median private equity or venture capital fund requires more than three investment team members reviewing 80 companies for a year to close a single transaction. For-profit investors who find one truly great deal per year are considered stars in the field. Recently, I spent the day with the team at Battery Ventures.
Sitting behind a laptop affixed with a decal of a child reaching for an apple, an illustration from Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree, Cari Tuna quips about endowing a Tuna Room in the Bass Library at Yale University, her alma mater. But it’s unlikely any of the fortune that she and her husband, Facebook co- founder Dustin Moskovitz, command — estimated by Forbes at more than $9 billion — will ever be used to name a building.
