Open Philanthropy donations made to Humane Slaughter Association

This is an online portal with information on donations that were announced publicly (or have been shared with permission) that were of interest to Vipul Naik. The git repository with the code for this portal, as well as all the underlying data, is available on GitHub. All payment amounts are in current United States dollars (USD). The repository of donations is being seeded with an initial collation by Issa Rice as well as continued contributions from him (see his commits and the contract work page listing all financially compensated contributions to the site) but all responsibility for errors and inaccuracies belongs to Vipul Naik. Current data is preliminary and has not been completely vetted and normalized; if sharing a link to this site or any page on this site, please include the caveat that the data is preliminary (if you want to share without including caveats, please check with Vipul Naik). We expect to have completed the first round of development by the end of July 2024. See the about page for more details. Also of interest: pageview data on analytics.vipulnaik.com, tutorial in README, request for feedback to EA Forum.

Table of contents

Basic donor information

ItemValue
Country United States
Affiliated organizations (current or former; restricted to potential donees or others relevant to donation decisions)GiveWell Good Ventures
Best overview URLhttps://causeprioritization.org/Open%20Philanthropy%20Project
Facebook username openphilanthropy
Websitehttps://www.openphilanthropy.org/
Donations URLhttps://www.openphilanthropy.org/giving/grants
Twitter usernameopen_phil
PredictionBook usernameOpenPhilUnofficial
Page on philosophy informing donationshttps://www.openphilanthropy.org/about/vision-and-values
Grant application process pagehttps://www.openphilanthropy.org/giving/guide-for-grant-seekers
Regularity with which donor updates donations datacontinuous updates
Regularity with which Donations List Website updates donations data (after donor update)continuous updates
Lag with which donor updates donations datamonths
Lag with which Donations List Website updates donations data (after donor update)days
Data entry method on Donations List WebsiteManual (no scripts used)
Org Watch pagehttps://orgwatch.issarice.com/?organization=Open+Philanthropy

Brief history: Open Philanthropy (Open Phil for short) spun off from GiveWell, starting as GiveWell Labs in 2011, beginning to make strong progress in 2013, and formally separating from GiveWell as the "Open Philanthropy Project" in June 2017. In 2020, it started going by "Open Philanthropy" dropping the "Project" word.

Brief notes on broad donor philosophy and major focus areas: Open Philanthropy is focused on openness in two ways: open to ideas about cause selection, and open in explaining what they are doing. It has endorsed "hits-based giving" and is working on areas of AI risk, biosecurity and pandemic preparedness, and other global catastrophic risks, criminal justice reform (United States), animal welfare, and some other areas.

Notes on grant decision logistics: See https://www.openphilanthropy.org/blog/our-grantmaking-so-far-approach-and-process for the general grantmaking process and https://www.openphilanthropy.org/blog/questions-we-ask-ourselves-making-grant for more questions that grant investigators are encouraged to consider. Every grant has a grant investigator that we call the influencer here on Donations List Website; for focus areas that have Program Officers, the grant investigator is usually the Program Officer. The grant investigator has been included in grants published since around July 2017. Grants usually need approval from an executive; however, some grant investigators have leeway to make "discretionary grants" where the approval process is short-circuited; see https://www.openphilanthropy.org/giving/grants/discretionary-grants for more. Note that the term "discretionary grant" means something different for them compared to government agencies, see https://www.facebook.com/vipulnaik.r/posts/10213483361534364 for more.

Notes on grant publication logistics: Every publicly disclosed grant has a writeup published at the time of public disclosure, but the writeups vary significantly in length. Grant writeups are usually written by somebody other than the grant investigator, but approved by the grant investigator as well as the grantee. Grants have three dates associated with them: an internal grant decision date (that is not publicly revealed but is used in some statistics on total grant amounts decided by year), a grant date (which we call donation date; this is the date of the formal grant commitment, which is the published grant date), and a grant announcement date (which we call donation announcement date; the date the grant is announced to the mailing list and the grant page made publicly visible). Lags are a few months between decision and grant, and a few months between grant and announcement, due to time spent with grant writeup approval.

Notes on grant financing: See https://www.openphilanthropy.org/giving/guide-for-grant-seekers or https://www.openphilanthropy.org/about/who-we-are for more information. Grants generally come from the Open Philanthropy Fund, a donor-advised fund managed by the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, with most of its money coming from Good Ventures. Some grants are made directly by Good Ventures, and political grants may be made by the Open Philanthropy Action Fund. At least one grant https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/us-policy/criminal-justice-reform/working-families-party-prosecutor-reforms-new-york was made by Cari Tuna personally. The majority of grants are financed by the Open Philanthropy Project Fund; however, the source of financing of a grant is not always explicitly specified, so it cannot be confidently assumed that a grant with no explicit listed financing is financed through the Open Philanthropy Project Fund; see the comment https://www.openphilanthropy.org/blog/october-2017-open-thread?page=2#comment-462 for more information. Funding for multi-year grants is usually disbursed annually, and the amounts are often equal across years, but not always. The fact that a grant is multi-year, or the distribution of the grant amount across years, are not always explicitly stated on the grant page; see https://www.openphilanthropy.org/blog/october-2017-open-thread?page=2#comment-462 for more information. Some grants to universities are labeled "gifts" but this is a donee classification, based on different levels of bureaucratic overhead and funder control between grants and gifts; see https://www.openphilanthropy.org/blog/october-2017-open-thread?page=2#comment-462 for more information.

Miscellaneous notes: Most GiveWell-recommended grants made by Good Ventures and listed in the Open Philanthropy database are not listed on Donations List Website as being under Open Philanthropy. Specifically, GiveWell Incubation Grants are not included (these are listed at https://donations.vipulnaik.com/donor.php?donor=GiveWell+Incubation+Grants with donor GiveWell Incubation Grants), and grants made by Good Ventures to GiveWell top and standout charities are also not included (these are listed at https://donations.vipulnaik.com/donor.php?donor=Good+Ventures%2FGiveWell+top+and+standout+charities with donor Good Ventures/GiveWell top and standout charities). Grants to support GiveWell operations are not included here; they can be found at https://donations.vipulnaik.com/donor.php?donor=Good+Ventures%2FGiveWell+support with donor "Good Ventures/GiveWell support".The investment https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/us-policy/farm-animal-welfare/impossible-foods in Impossible Foods is not included because it does not fit our criteria for a donation, and also because no amount was included. All other grants publicly disclosed by open philanthropy that are not GiveWell Incubation Grants or GiveWell top and standout charity grants should be included. Grants disclosed by grantees but not yet disclosed by Open Philanthropy are not included; some of them may be listed at https://issarice.com/open-philanthropy-project-non-grant-funding

Full donor page for donor Open Philanthropy

Basic donee information

ItemValue
Country United Kingdom
Websitehttps://www.hsa.org.uk/
Twitter usernameHSAofficial
Wikipedia pagehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humane_Slaughter_Association
Open Philanthropy Project grant reviewhttps://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/us-policy/farm-animal-welfare/humane-slaughter-association-fish-welfare
Launch date1911

Full donee page for donee Humane Slaughter Association

Donor–donee relationship

Item Value

Donor–donee donation statistics

Cause areaCountMedianMeanMinimum10th percentile 20th percentile 30th percentile 40th percentile 50th percentile 60th percentile 70th percentile 80th percentile 90th percentile Maximum
Overall 3 570,402 1,172,772 419,236 419,236 419,236 419,236 570,402 570,402 570,402 2,528,678 2,528,678 2,528,678 2,528,678
Animal welfare 3 570,402 1,172,772 419,236 419,236 419,236 419,236 570,402 570,402 570,402 2,528,678 2,528,678 2,528,678 2,528,678

Donation amounts by cause area and year

If you hover over a cell for a given cause area and year, you will get a tooltip with the number of donees and the number of donations.

Note: Cause area classification used here may not match that used by donor for all cases.

Cause area Number of donations Total 2019 2017
Animal welfare (filter this donor) 3 3,518,316.00 570,402.00 2,947,914.00
Total 3 3,518,316.00 570,402.00 2,947,914.00

Graph of spending by cause area and year (incremental, not cumulative)

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Graph of spending by cause area and year (cumulative)

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Full list of documents in reverse chronological order (1 documents)

Title (URL linked)Publication dateAuthorPublisherAffected donorsAffected doneesAffected influencersDocument scopeCause areaNotes
Grants to Support Farm Animal Welfare Work in China2017-08-09Lewis Bollard Open PhilanthropyOpen Philanthropy Compassion in World Farming WildAid World Animal Protection Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Humane Slaughter Association Jeanne Marchig Centre Animal Welfare Standards Project Green Monday Griffith University Brighter Green Broad donor strategyAnimal welfare/factory farming/ChinaThe document describes the strategy of the Open Philanthropy Project to focus on farm animal welfare advocacy in China, and lists ten grants that are part of this strategy. It is announced 2017-08-09 at https://groups.google.com/a/openphilanthropy.org/forum/#!topic/newly.published/ngrjni1iKLg on the mailing list; this comes 9.5 months after the strategy was unofficially announced by Lewis Bollard at https://www.facebook.com/groups/EffectiveAnimalActivism/permalink/656583861179155/ (2016-10-25) on Facebook.

Full list of donations in reverse chronological order (3 donations)

Graph of all donations (with known year of donation), showing the timeframe of donations

Graph of donations and their timeframes
Amount (current USD)Amount rank (out of 3)Donation dateCause areaURLInfluencerNotes
570,402.0022019-03Animal welfare/fishhttps://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/us-policy/farm-animal-welfare/humane-slaughter-association-wild-caught-fishLewis Bollard Intended use of funds (category): Direct project expenses

Intended use of funds: Grant "to support research on ways to improve the welfare of wild-caught fish. This will allow HSA to seek proposals for a peer-reviewed and published systematic review of current fish slaughter practices, potential changes to the catching process to minimize suffering, and new stunning methods that could be more humane than current practices, economically viable for wide adoption, and feasible for on-ship use."

Donor reason for selecting the donee: Grant follows a similar June 2017 grant https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/us-policy/farm-animal-welfare/humane-slaughter-association-fish-welfare that was also focused on fish

Donor reason for donating that amount (rather than a bigger or smaller amount): Grant of £1,999,137 ($2,528,678 at time of conversion)

Other notes: Intended funding timeframe in months: 24; announced: 2019-06-26.
419,236.0032017-06Animal welfare/factory farminghttps://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/us-policy/farm-animal-welfare/humane-slaughter-association-farm-animal-welfare-advocacy-chinaLewis Bollard Intended use of funds (category): Direct project expenses

Intended use of funds: Grant to support "work to improve farm animal welfare in China. HSA plans to use this grant to translate its guides on humane handling, transport, stunning, and slaughter into Mandarin Chinese and publicize the translated publications in Chinese agriculture industry magazines. It also plans to pay for HSA staff to travel to China to lecture at veterinary universities and train staff at slaughterhouses and livestock markets, and invite Chinese officials for an expenses-paid study tour of slaughterhouses and livestock markets in the United Kingdom." Project proposal at https://www.openphilanthropy.org/files/Grants/HSA/Revised_HSA_Project_Proposal_190916.pdf

Donor reason for selecting the donee: The grant page says: "We are excited about this project’s potential to reduce suffering and institutionalize farm animal welfare values." Part of a China focus strategy announced by Lewis Bollard at https://www.facebook.com/groups/EffectiveAnimalActivism/permalink/656583861179155/ (2016-10-25) and explained in depth in a document https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/us-policy/farm-animal-welfare/grants-support-farm-animal-welfare-work-china announced at https://groups.google.com/a/openphilanthropy.org/forum/#!topic/newly.published/ngrjni1iKLg (2017-08-09)

Donor reason for donating that amount (rather than a bigger or smaller amount): Grant of grant of £331,458 ($419,236 at time of conversion). Budget breakdown in the project proposal at https://www.openphilanthropy.org/files/Grants/HSA/Revised_HSA_Project_Proposal_190916.pdf

Other notes: Affected countries: China; announced: 2017-07-19.
2,528,678.0012017-06Animal welfare/factory farming/fishhttps://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/us-policy/farm-animal-welfare/humane-slaughter-association-fish-welfareLewis Bollard Intended use of funds (category): Direct project expenses

Intended use of funds: Grant "to support research to improve the welfare of farmed fish, decapod crustaceans (crabs, lobsters), and/or coleoid cephalopods (cuttlefish, octopus, squid)." The grant page says: "This funding will allow HSA to seek proposals for research to improve the welfare of farmed fish, decapod crustaceans (crabs, lobsters), and/or coleoid cephalopods (cuttlefish, octopus, squid), and to translate related HSA publications. This work may take several years depending on the nature of the research applications received."

Donor reason for selecting the donee: The grant page says: "According to the best estimates we are aware of, fish account for about three quarters of all vertebrate farmed animals alive at any time.1 Despite this, we are not aware of any major animal welfare groups that have campaigns focused on fish welfare, and we therefore believe that it is important to start building this area of farm animal welfare advocacy and research. Over the past year, we recommended three previous grants in the area of fish welfare: one to Eurogroup for Animals, one to Dyrevernalliansen, and one to the Albert Schweitzer Foundation."

Donor reason for donating that amount (rather than a bigger or smaller amount): Grant of £1,999,137 ($2,528,678 at time of conversion)

Other notes: Grant to support research to improve the welfare of farmed fish, decapod crustaceans (crabs, lobsters), and/or coleoid cephalopods (cuttlefish, octopus, squid). Grant made in light of perceived lack of fish welfare efforts relative to importance of the issue. The funding will allow HSA to seek proposals for research to improve the welfare of farmed fish, decapod crustaceans (crabs, lobsters), and/or coleoid cephalopods (cuttlefish, octopus, squid), and to translate related HSA publications. This work may take several years depending on the nature of the research applications received. Announced: 2017-11-08.