Brief history: Charity Entrepreneurship was a project started by the Charity Science team with the intention of founding a highly effective charity (e.g., one that was competitive with the cost-effectiveness of current Givewell recommended charities). After six months of research into different priority program areas we found five ideas we think are worth starting a charity around. We launched Charity Science Health to start one of them.
Charity Entrepreneurship in 2017: We consider Charity Entrepreneurship a success, but there were two large areas we could see further working being done on. The first area is the creation of other high impact charities based off our other four top ideas: Given the strength of the remaining ideas, it seems worthwhile to create additional charities following our work. Right now our team does not have the capacity to start more than a single idea at a time, but we have considered and tried a few ideas in this space to hire or inspire others, and excitingly it now looks as though a second charity might be founded based on CE research. An EA we have spoken with is going to create one of the top charity ideas with our support and advice. We think this is an incredibly high impact career and will soon post a job ad to join this EA to our CE website. The second area is a broadening of our research to include other cause areas: Our research was extremely focused on evidence-based poverty interventions. However, there are many other cause areas we think could be high impact and would like to conduct similar research in these other areas, such as expanding GiveWell’s shallow reviews, but focused on what charities could be started rather than funded. Our first step on this project is to do upfront crucial considerations research before being able to dive into comparing a more diverse range of cause areas. How to help out: The speed of Charity Entrepreneurship has slowed down from our initial six month burst because a majority of our team has moved to working on other projects (primarily Charity Science Health). We want to be conscious of not spreading our team too thin, but we could imagine completing the crucial considerations research and then scaling a team to do cause area research. Currently we are not hiring for this project, but we are looking to expand our pool of volunteers and unpaid interns from our other projects. Volunteering/interning is a great way to get to know our team and help us get a sense of your skills and abilities.