Summary
- The Animal Welfare Fund, the Long-Term Future Fund, and the EA Infrastructure Fund (formerly the EA Meta Fund) are calling for applications.
- Applying is fast and easy – it typically takes less than a few hours. If you are unsure whether to apply, simply give it a try.
- The Long-Term Future Fund and EA Infrastructure Fund now support anonymized grants: if you prefer not having your name listed in the public payout report, we are still interested in funding you.
- If you have a project you think will improve the world, and it seems like a good fit for one of our funds, we encourage you to apply by 7 March (11:59pm PST). Apply here. We’d be excited to hear from you!
Recent updates
- The Long-Term Future Fund and EA Infrastructure Fund now officially support anonymized grants. To be transparent towards donors and the effective altruism community, we generally prefer to publish a report about your grant, with your name attached to it. But if you prefer we do not disclose any of your personal information, you can now choose one of the following options: 1) Requesting that the public grant report be anonymized. In this case, we will consider your request, but in some cases, we may end up asking you to choose between a public grant or none at all. 2) Requesting we do not publish a public grant report of any kind. In this case, if we think the grant is above our threshold for funding, we will refer it to private funders.
- We are currently appointing new fund management teams. We have introduced a process by which fund managers are evaluated and (re-)appointed every two years and expect some changes to the fund management teams for the upcoming funding round. We plan to announce the new teams on the EA Forum in a few weeks.
The upcoming application deadlines and funding decision dates are:7 Mar 2021, decision by 2 Apr 202113 Jun 2021, decision by 9 Jul 20213 Oct 2021, decision by 29 Oct 20216 Feb 2022, decision by 4 Mar 20225 Jun 2022, decision by 1 Jul 20222 Oct 2022, decision by 28 Oct 2022All dates are at 11:59pm, Pacific Time. Please note that these dates are subject to change up to a month before the application deadline.In addition, the Long-Term Future Fund and EA Infrastructure Fund can evaluate time-sensitive applications more quickly. Just let us know in the application form.- This is now out of date, you can now apply anytime. Please refer to our website for up-to-date information.
- As a reminder, the minimum grant size at EA Funds has been reduced from $10,000 to $1,000.
Long-Term Future Fund
The Long-Term Future Fund aims to positively influence the long-term trajectory of civilization, primarily via making grants that contribute to the mitigation of global catastrophic risks. Historically, we’ve funded a variety of longtermist projects, including:
- Scholarships, academic teaching buy-outs, and additional funding for academics to free up their time
- Funding to make existing researchers more effective
- Direct work in AI, biosecurity, forecasting, and philanthropic timing
- Up-skilling in a field to prepare for future work
- Seed money for new organizations
- Movement-building programs
See our previous grants here. Most of our grants are reported publicly, but we also give applicants the option to receive an anonymous grant, or to be referred to a private donor.
The fund has an intentionally broad remit that encompasses a wide range of potential projects. We strongly encourage anyone who thinks they could use money to benefit the long-term future to apply.
Animal Welfare Fund
The Animal Welfare Fund aims to effectively improve the well-being of nonhuman animals, by making grants that focus on one or more of the following:
- Relatively neglected geographic regions or groups of animals
- Promising research into animal advocacy or animal well-being
- Activities that could make it easier to help animals in the future
- Otherwise best-in-class opportunities
For more information about the fund’s focus, see its request for proposal and past grants.
EA Infrastructure Fund
The EA Infrastructure Fund recommends grants that aim to improve the work of projects that use the principles of effective altruism, by increasing their access to talent, capital, and knowledge. We are interested in applications from organizations and individuals working on new or established projects.
Please note that if your project relates to community building for local, regional, or national groups, you should apply to CEA’s Community Building Grants (CBG) programme. However, the EA Infrastructure Fund is still keen to fund projects initiated by local groups which are unrelated to community building. If you are uncertain whether you should apply to the EA Infrastructure Fund or the CBG programme, please contact us.
To get a better idea of what kinds of projects we might be interested in funding, you can review our past payout reports.
What types of grants can we fund?
For grants to individuals, all of our funds can likely make the following types of grants:
- Events/workshops
- Scholarships
- Self-study
- Research projects
- Content creation
- Product creation (e.g., a tool/resource that can be used by the community)
We can refer applications for for-profit projects (e.g., seed funding for start-ups) to EA-aligned investors. If you are a for-profit, simply apply through the standard application form and indicate your for-profit status in the application.
For legal reasons, we will likely not be able to make the following types of grants:
- Grantseekers requesting funding for a list of possible projects
- In this case, we would fund only a single project of the proposed ones. Feel free to apply with multiple projects, but we will have to confirm a specific project before we issue funding.
- Self-development that is not directly related to the common good
- In order to make grants, the public benefit needs to be greater than the private benefit to any individual. So we cannot make grants that focus on helping a single individual in a way that is not directly connected to public benefit.
Please err on the side of applying, as it is likely we will be able to make something work if the fund managers are excited about the project. We look forward to hearing from you.
Major kudos for publishing the upcoming application deadlines and funding decision dates until the end of 2022! It's very useful for me for planning, as someone who might apply at some point.
These dates are now out of date, you can now apply anytime. Please refer to our website for up-to-date information.
CEA’s Community Building Grants page currently says applications are closed. When the closing was announced (August 2020), applications were expected to reopen in January. Do you know when applications are now expected to reopen? If it will be a long time and/or if CEA will only fund a narrow set of groups through CBG (which sounds like it may be the case), would the fund managers reconsider accepting applications from groups that don't have access to CBG?
That's a great suggestion, thank you. It will take me a few days to figure this out, so I expect to reply in a week or so. (Edited Sat 27 Feb: Still need a bit longer, sorry.)
Thanks for investigating Jonas!
After looking more into this, we've decided not to evaluate applications for Community Building Grants during this grant application cycle. This is because we think CEA has a comparative advantage here due to their existing know-how, and they're still taking some exceptional or easy-to-evaluate grant applications, so some of the most valuable work will still be funded. It's currently unclear when CBG applications will reopen, but CEA is thinking carefully about this question and I'll be coordinating with them.
That said, we're interested in receiving applications from EA groups that aren't typical community-building activities – e.g., new experiments, international community-building, spin-offs of local groups, etc. If you're unsure whether your project qualifies, just send me a brief email.
I'm aware this isn't the news you and others may have been hoping for, so I personally want to contribute to resolving this gap in the funding ecosystem long-term.
Edit: Huh, some people downvoted. If you have concerns about this comment or decision, please leave a comment or send me a PM.
I didn’t downvote your comment, though I am disappointed you won’t be considering applications this cycle. I hope that if CEA does choose to restrict CBG applications going forward (which seems to be under consideration per Harri) that the EAIF will fill the gap. FWIW I’d like to see EAIF funding this space even if CEA does open up applications, as I’d value diversifying funder perspectives more than any comparative advantage CEA might have.
Hi, sorry for not responding to this comment sooner.
It's taking us longer than we expected to decide on our plans for reopening applications. For context, some of the options of the programme that we're considering:
1. Continue to accept applications for funding group organizers from any EA group
2. Only accept new applications from a subset of groups
We will give an update on this by June 1st latest (~2 weeks before the deadline for the next application deadline for EA Infrastructure Fund), and either let people know when they will be able to apply for CBG funding or recommending that they should apply for EAIF funding.
We're chatting about the above with the EAIF, though it's ultimately up to them what they choose to accept applications for (so this comment shouldn't be seen as me speaking on their behalf)
Thanks for the update Harri. I'd suggest putting this info on the main CBG page so applicants have an up to date picture.
Thanks, we've now updated the page.
If someone has a project which potentially spans multiple funds, should they apply to both noting that they have done so, or apply to one noting that they are happy for their application to be passed on to the other?
The new funds UI actually has this specific point covered. At least for the (at least historically) larger overlap for the EAIF and the LTFF. See this section:
Thanks! This seems like a good system for it.
I just published this article about some potential misconceptions that may help people decide whether to apply.
Someone asked me via email for what grant amount they should apply, and whether we would consider a large grant for several full-time positions at once. I'm sharing my response here, as I think it may be useful for others as well: