Giving What We Can

Giving What We Can is a society whose members pledge to give at least ten percent of their income to the charities they judge most cost-effective. By its own account it was "the brainchild of Toby Ord, a philosopher at Balliol College, Oxford," who, inspired by the ideas of ethicists such as Peter Singer, decided in 2009 to commit a large part of his income to charity and worked with a fellow Oxford philosopher, William MacAskill, to form a society of people who would do the same. Ord, his wife, the physician Bernadette Young, and MacAskill launched it in November 2009; within a year 64 people had joined, pledging 21 million dollars, and it took on full-time staff in the summer of 2012. It lists as early supporters the Future of Humanity Institute, Balliol College and the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics.¹ Singer took the pledge in November 2009.²

Toby Ord set his own living allowance at about 18,000 pounds a year, giving away the rest toward a lifetime target of one million pounds.³ MacAskill went on to found 80,000 Hours with Benjamin Todd in 2011 and to write the longtermist What We Owe the Future.⁴

Effective Ventures and FTX

Giving What We Can became one of the projects hosted by Effective Ventures, the umbrella of two charities, Effective Ventures Foundation in the United Kingdom and Effective Ventures Foundation USA, alongside the Centre for Effective Altruism, 80,000 Hours and the EA Funds.⁵ In 2022 Effective Ventures and its projects received about 27 million dollars from Sam Bankman-Fried's FTX and the FTX Foundation. On December 13, 2023, it agreed to return 26,786,503 dollars to the FTX bankruptcy estate, a sum equal to all of the money received, and its boards then decided to spin out every project as an independent organization.⁵⁶