Charity incubation

Discuss the topic on this page. Here is the place to ask questions and propose changes.
Comments2
Sorted by

Things that could be added:

  • Discussion of how this is similar to startup incubators like Y Combinator
  • Discussion of non-EA charity incubators/incubation? Is that done?
  • Discussion of how various EA orgs have emerged from or spun out of other orgs (e.g., Rethink Priorities from Rethink Charity, EA Funds and GiveWell and maybe 80k from CEA, maybe AI Impacts from MIRI, maybe SPARC from CFAR)
    • Those "maybe"s are because I'm going off memory rather than double-checking things
  • Discussion of how some EA orgs offer operational support to other orgs
    • I think in most cases, these are cases where the latter orgs have emerged from or spun out of the former
    • But maybe there are cases of orgs which emerged separately, but where the founders knew and had worked with the more established org or whatever, and the established org offered some support due to economies of scale etc.?
      • I'm not sure how the boundaries should be drawn between that and charity incubation

This entry emerged from the Discussion page on Longtermist Entrepreneurship Fellowhip, where I said:

I included Charity Entrepreneurship in Related entries because that's another example of an EA incubator for charities or altruistic projects, and that seems to be an uncommon type of thing, so it seems worthwhile for each entry to point to the other one. But I guess there's some chance readers would assume these links are implying the two orgs are formally associated or share staff or something? (And that'd be bad, because that's false, as far as I'm aware.)

And Pablo said:

Yeah, I think ideally the entry listed under 'Related entries' should be 'charity incubator', but we don't have such an article (maybe we should?). [...]

And I said:

Regarding a charity incubator entry: I originally wrote: "I think that seems fairly clearly worth having if there are at least 3 EA-aligned ones (so this, CE, and one more), or if there are these 2 plus at least a couple posts proposing there be more or discussing non-EA ones or the like. Do you know if that's the case?" 

But then I remembered at least two other examples of nearby things: GiveWell incubation grants and Rethink Priorities looking to hire an executive director for an invertebrate welfare project that would then be spun out of the org. (Disclaimer: I haven't followed the Rethink thing closely; for all I know, it's possible the plan has changed slightly or that I'm misrepresenting it or something.) And there've been some other instances of one EA org kind-of incubating or spinning out another. So it seems to me such a tag is indeed warranted, but that it might be better called "charity incubation". So I'm now making that entry (and will add it to related entries here).

So nice suggestion :)