The Top Charities Fund supports the highest-priority funding needs among our top charities.

We find and recommend outstanding giving opportunities and publish our research to help donors give more effectively and with greater confidence.

All donations here support our Top Charities Fund. Donations to the Top Charities Fund are granted on a rolling basis to support cost-effective funding opportunities at our top charities. We use our latest research to grant the funds to the top charity (or charities) where we believe they’ll do the most good.

Learn more and view past grants at https://www.givewell.org/top-charities-fund


Photo caption: At health centers in Sierra Leone supported by Helen Keller Intl, mothers who bring their children in for twice-yearly vitamin A supplemention can also receive comprehensive counseling about birth control options that are available to them free of charge. Combining family planning and children's healthcare services benefits both mother and child. 2019.

Top Charities Fund

Delivering unconditional cash directly to the world's poorest households via secure mobile transfers. 

Since 2009, GiveDirectly has delivered more than $580 million in unconditional cash transfers to families in need. These one-time cash transfers allow recipients to invest in what they need most and have been shown to improve their earnings, children’s school attendance, health, nutrition, and mental well-being.
 
GiveDirectly uses government data to target villages where most or all residents are living in extreme poverty, defined by the World Bank as earning under $2.15/day. In-country GiveDirectly staff enroll one member of each household in the entire village to receive a one-time transfer of about $1,000 USD sent in two installments using mobile money. Recipients can then withdraw the mobile funds as cash with local agents and use the funds to invest in what they need – whether it’s on starting a business, education, making their home safer/sturdier, healthcare, or livestock.
 
GiveDirectly uses rigorous experimental research (randomized controlled trials) to measure the impact of their unconditional cash programs and answer public policy questions, generating evidence on key design and implementation questions across varied contexts. You can find over 300 studies on the positive impacts of cash transfers in GiveDirectly’s Cash Research Explorer.

GiveDirectly

LEEP advocates to prevent lead poisoning and improve the health, wellbeing, and potential of children worldwide. 

LEEP advocates for regulation on lead paint to reduce lead poisoning and improve the health, wellbeing, and potential of children worldwide. Lead poisoning is a colossal issue causing disability in 815 million children worldwide.

Currently, we are working on programs in Malawi, Zimbabwe, Madagascar and Pakistan, and are looking to expand to another 7 countries in the next year.

To learn more about our work, check out:
https://leadelimination.org/projects/
https://leadelimination.org/faqs/
https://leadelimination.org/blog/

Thank you for helping us to address the problem of lead poisoning, and improve the health of children worldwide.

Lead Exposure Elimination Project (LEEP)

We research and advise on the legal challenges posed by artificial intelligence.

The Institute for Law & AI (LawAI) is an independent think tank that researches and advises on the legal challenges posed by artificial intelligence. We believe that sound legal analysis will promote security, welfare, and the rule of law.

Would you like to learn more or talk to us? You can always [contact us](https://law-ai.org).

Thank you for your support!

Institute for Law & AI

FWI reduces the suffering of farmed fish by researching and executing evidence-based interventions in high-priority contexts.

The mission of Fish Welfare Initiative (FWI) is to reduce the suffering of farmed fish as much as possible. We do that specifically by researching and testing evidence-based welfare interventions, and then implementing them in high priority contexts. Our main implementation program right now focuses on collaborative farmer outreach in India to improve water quality and reduce stocking densities. As of this writing, this program currently works with about 100 farms (www.fwi.fish/farmers). FWI also invests significantly in research to identify and test more promising welfare improvements (www.fwi.fish/post/rnd-plans-2024).

Thanks to the support of all those who have donated, as of this writing FWI estimates that we have improved the lives of about 1.5M fish. You can learn more about our impact and how we came up with these numbers at www.fwi.fish/impact.

To learn more about our work, you can subscribe to our monthly in-depth newsletter at www.fwi.fish/news.

To learn about the value of a donation to FWI, as well as its pros and cons, see www.fwi.fish/donate.

Fish Welfare Initiative

We want to make life better for wild animals.

We are dedicated to finding evidence-backed ways to improve the lives of animals in the wild.

We depend on individual donors to help us make life better for wild animals. To a small nonprofit working hard on a big problem, your support is more crucial now than ever!

Wild Animal Initiative

We are a think tank dedicated to figuring out the best ways to make the world a better place.

Rethink Priorities is a research organization that conducts critical research to inform policymakers and major foundations about how to best help people and nonhuman animals in both the present and the long-term future.

Our research spans everything from animal welfare to the threat of nuclear war. We explore neglected but promising areas to improve the world and try to further build the community of researchers working on understanding how to do this most effectively.

If you'd like to support one of our fiscally sponsored projects (e.g. Epoch), you can give via Every.org, and let us know how to allocate your gift at info@rethinkpriorities.org.

Rethink Priorities

We do foundational mathematical research to ensure smarter-than-human artificial intelligence has a positive impact.

The Machine Intelligence Research Institute is a research nonprofit studying the mathematical underpinnings of intelligent behavior. Our mission is to develop formal tools for the clean design and analysis of general-purpose AI systems, with the intent of making such systems safer and more reliable when they are developed.

The field of AI has a reputation for overselling its progress. In the “AI winters” of the late 1970s and 1980s, researchers’ failures to make good on ambitious promises led to a collapse of funding and interest in AI. Although the field is now undergoing a renaissance, overconfidence is still a major fear; discussion of the possibility of human-equivalent general intelligence is still largely relegated to the science fiction shelf.

At the same time, researchers largely agree that AI is likely to begin outperforming humans on most cognitive tasks in this century. Given how disruptive domain-general AI could be, we think it is prudent to begin a conversation about this now, and to investigate whether there are limited areas in which we can predict and shape this technology’s societal impact.

Researchers at MIRI tend to be relatively agnostic about how the state of the art in AI will change over the coming decades, and how many years off smarter-than human AI systems are. 

Machine Intelligence Research Institute

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We are a nonprofit, so instead of charging fees we rely on the generosity of donors like you.

Choose a donation for Every.org

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Monthly donations help nonprofits focus on mission and long-term impact, not fundraising. Cancel anytime.

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Instructions to get up to $300 matched: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/oMBKeyx7ir8Jnbenz/make-a-usd50-donation-into-usd100-6x

About the Legal Priorities Project: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/PvBLDPkqKvdHQkKPn/introducing-the-legal-priorities-project

I donated to MIRI because I believe transformative AI is likely to be developed this century and MIRI is working to ensure it will have a positive impact.