Open Philanthropy donations made to Just Impact

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

We do not have any donee information for the donee Just Impact in our system.

Full donee page for donee Just Impact

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 1 50,000,000 50,000,000 50,000,000 50,000,000 50,000,000 50,000,000 50,000,000 50,000,000 50,000,000 50,000,000 50,000,000 50,000,000 50,000,000
Criminal justice reform 1 50,000,000 50,000,000 50,000,000 50,000,000 50,000,000 50,000,000 50,000,000 50,000,000 50,000,000 50,000,000 50,000,000 50,000,000 50,000,000

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 2021
Criminal justice reform (filter this donor) 1 50,000,000.00 50,000,000.00
Total 1 50,000,000.00 50,000,000.00

Skipping spending graph as there is at most one year’s worth of donations.

Full list of documents in reverse chronological order (0 documents)

There are no documents associated with this combination of donor and donee.

Full list of donations in reverse chronological order (1 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 1)Donation dateCause areaURLInfluencerNotes
50,000,000.0012021-11Criminal justice reformhttps://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/us-policy/criminal-justice-reform/just-impact-safely-reducing-incarcerationZachary Robinson Donation process: The money is seed funding for an organization being spun out of Open Philanthropy. The decision to provide seed funding is tied with the whole process of spinning out. https://www.openphilanthropy.org/blog/our-criminal-justice-reform-program-now-independent-organization-just-impact has more details.

Intended use of funds (category): Regranting

Intended use of funds: Grant "to launch Just Impact. Just Impact describes itself as “a criminal justice reform advisory group and fund that is focused on building the power and influence of highly strategic, directly-impacted leaders and their allies to create transformative change from the ground up.”" Given its role as a successor to Open Phil's grantmaking, it is expected that most of these funds will be regranted to other criminal justice reform organizations.

Donor reason for selecting the donee: The post https://www.openphilanthropy.org/blog/our-criminal-justice-reform-program-now-independent-organization-just-impact goes into details on the reasons for spinning Just Impact out of Open Philanthropy, including: reduced interest in Open Philanthropy continuing to fund criminal justice reform, ability of a separate organization to attract other donors, ability of a separate organizations to implement more vision and strategy, and value as an experiment in spinning out organizations. The seed funding is provided to "make this transition in a way that positions the CJR work to maintain its successes, navigate the transitional period smoothly, and hopefully raise enough from other funders to have even more impact in the future."

Donor reason for donating that amount (rather than a bigger or smaller amount): The amount per unit time is a little lower than Open Philanthropy's criminal justice reform grantmaking so far ($130 million over 6 years), but likely enough for Open Philanthropy's goal to "make this transition in a way that positions the CJR work to maintain its successes, navigate the transitional period smoothly, and hopefully raise enough from other funders to have even more impact in the future."

Donor reason for donating at this time (rather than earlier or later): The timing of the grant is determined by the timing of the decision to spin out the organization. It comes two years after the post https://www.openphilanthropy.org/blog/givewells-top-charities-are-increasingly-hard-beat that has the background thinking that led to Open Philanthropy deprioritizing criminal justice reform philanthropy. It also comes a few months after https://www.openphilanthropy.org/blog/open-philanthropy-s-new-co-ceo where the near-termist portion of grantmaking got its own name "Global Health and Wellbeing" and a co-CEO, Alexander Berger, to lead it.
Intended funding timeframe in months: 42

Donor thoughts on making further donations to the donee: https://www.openphilanthropy.org/blog/our-criminal-justice-reform-program-now-independent-organization-just-impact says: "We will continue to follow progress and continually revisit the right level of support in light of both Just Impact’s impact and our understanding of our alternative giving opportunities, and may continue our support beyond this initial seed grant."

Other notes: https://www.openphilanthropy.org/blog/our-criminal-justice-reform-program-now-independent-organization-just-impact has more details on the spinout. It is also cross-posted to the EA Forum at https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/5jTiPa2MJ3umhzT3S/our-criminal-justice-reform-program-is-now-an-independent (GW, IR) by an unaffiliated individual. Affected countries: United States; announced: 2021-11-16.