Why and how to found a (GiveWell) nonprofit
We’ve argued against nonprofit jobs as an early career move, because many have little impact and you often don’t get good career progression.
However, there’s a certain type of nonprofit opportunity that we think is very exciting: start a nonprofit focused on implementing an evidence-backed intervention in international development i.e. try to make the next Against Malaria Foundation.
Why?
- There’s lots of evidence-backed interventions that don’t have a well-run, transparent organisation implementing them.
- Scaling up many of these interventions can be expected to have a big impact.
- There’s a huge pool of funding for nonprofits going after these opportunities, most notably from GiveWell, but also foundations like Gates and CIFF, as well as government aid agencies. These groups would like to fund more nonprofits, but can’t find enough that meet their criteria.
We’ve talked about this opportunity for years – see our exploratory career profile on it – and it has become even more pressing recently. The money flowing through GiveWell is growing rapidly, but the pipeline of nonprofits isn’t.
GiveWell recently made a post about exactly the sorts of nonprofits they’d like to fund:
- Charities that implement GiveWell’s priority programs: vitamin A supplementation, immunizations, conditional cash transfers, micronutrient fortification, or even bednets and deworming (since our top charities that focus on the latter two have limited room for more funding).
