Ah, scale. Foundations, nonprofits, anti-poverty programs all pursue scale. Advice on how to scale abounds, in reports and articles like Getting to Scale, Strategies to Scale Up Social Programs and Three Things Every Growing Nonprofit Needs to Scale. But scale is not impact. Indeed, there’s often tension between the two. “If you have $1 million to spend, …
Five years ago, a young foreign service officer named Daniel Handel arrived in Kigali, Rwanda, to begin a new assignment with USAID. Listening to NPR online, Handel heard a Planet Money story about the nonprofit GiveDirectly, called “The Charity That Just Gives People Money.” In the story, Paul Niehaus, a founder of GiveDirectly, which delivers …
True to its name, Unorthodox Philanthropy got started with an out-of-the-ordinary proposition. In 2010, on a crowdsourcing website called Innocentive, the funder announced that it was seeking “novel, unorthodox opportunities for philanthropic investment with the potential to generate extraordinary returns to society.” It promised a prize of at least $10,000 to the best idea. Nearly …
Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and his wife Cari Tuna today said they will donate $25 million to GiveDirectly, a nonprofit that makes direct cash transfers to extremely poor people in Kenya and Uganda. It’s the largest gift to date to GiveDirectly, the largest ever shaped by the ideas of Effective Altruism and the largest so …
You know the proverb: Give a man to fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. But what if we’re not very good at giving fishing lessons? What if, instead, we simply give money to poor people, and let them decide how to …
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