FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
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The next rounds of the program will run February-March and August -September.
Our Incubation Program is run online with two weeks in person in London to connect face to face with your instructors and fellow participants. Transportation costs will be covered.
People from most countries should be able to come to London for a short trip on a holiday visa. We’ll help successful candidates in thinking through their visa options.
The program requires a full-time commitment of two months, and all costs are covered. This includes a modest stipend of £1900/month, travel and accommodation (for the in-person week), tuition, and materials. If you have higher expenses due to special circumstances, you may qualify for additional financial assistance. Please apply as usual.
If for any reason you will not be able to start a charity, we provide an additional two-month stipend and career mentorship to provide a safety net during the period of looking for alternative opportunities.
WHEN AND WHERE DOES THE PROGRAM RUN?
You will receive a message from CE staff within 4-6 weeks of the application deadline to let you know if you are moving on to the next application round. If we have not contacted you within 6 weeks of the application deadline, feel free to reach out to candidates@charityentrepreneurship.com
Yes! See our advice for reapplying.
APPLICATIONS
Anyone from any country can apply. The program is mostly run online, so there are no barriers to participation. All costs of travel and accommodation for in-person weeks are covered.
Absolutely! If you have dependents you need to care for, you can definitely still attend the program and start an effective charity. We’ve had participants who are new parents or who have had other family commitments. CE will provide financial assistance in the form of stipends for the duration of the program where required. We are all about supporting you to make it work.
We are significantly more likely to accept people who, if they decide to start a charity, anticipate doing so soon after the program. With this in mind, we recommend you apply in the year you would like to found an organization. In the meantime, sign up for our newsletter to get notified when applications open each year.
CAN I ATTEND THE PROGRAM?
The best way to know for sure if you would be a good fit is to apply. We generally search out people who are open-minded, excited to learn, driven, and passionate. If this sounds like you, check out our article on traits that make a great nonprofit entrepreneur and take our quiz:
If founding a charity feels like an exciting opportunity to you, we encourage you to apply! Even if you aren’t a perfect fit for our program, you’ll be one step closer to finding your true career path.
Credentials are less important in entrepreneurship than in other fields. When selecting candidates, we're far more interested in what skills and knowledge you can demonstrate than in your academic history. For example, completing a self-directed project is an excellent indicator that you are a good fit for charity entrepreneurship, as the ability to take initiative and work independently is absolutely necessary for the career. ​
Generally, some useful skills and educational background knowledge include management (particularly nonprofit management), statistics, study design, monitoring and evaluation, ethics, accounting, writing for public audiences, and marketing.
Most importantly, you don’t need to have prior experience in starting a charity. That’s what the program is for.
Of course, project and professional experience is helpful, but it’s not necessary. Many of the leading charities in the Effective Altruism movement were started by people with little or no prior experience in the field (e.g., GiveWell, the Centre for Effective Altruism, the Against Malaria Foundation, etc.).
Entrepreneurial and organizational experience can be useful. Experience in managing individual or team projects (including discussion groups, conferences, papers, and fundraisers) will serve you well as well.
WHAT BACKGROUND DO I NEED?
HOW TO PREPARE
No, we encourage you to start one of the new charity ideas that we recommend from our research. Our team has conducted hundreds of hours of research to identify the most promising interventions and cause areas. We believe that the skills required to start and operate an effective charity are very different from the skills required to do excellent research. If you are open to multiple ideas, you will have an even better chance of being accepted into the program.
No. Applicants often have an initial preference. However, during the program, you will learn a lot more about the options and where you might be best suited given your background and predispositions. Usually, applicants choose the intervention they think would have the highest impact and where they would have a comparative advantage. Finding a suitable co-founder during the program might also influence your final decision on the idea you pursue. It’s great to have a sense of what you’re interested in, but an open mind never hurts.
Yes, but it is rare. We are happy to take a look at your charity idea. Just as we will accept you on your merits, we will also look at your idea on the merits of its reasoning and evidence. If the idea appears to be as cost-effective, evidence based, and potentially impactful as those on our recommended charities list, then we can proceed. If we feel it’s not as impactful, we may still offer you a place, but suggest you work with one of our most promising ideas instead.
CHARITY IDEAS
Our program prepares you as best as possible to put together a winning proposal. 95% of our participants receive seed funding from CE.
Here’s how it works: we usually plan to accept between 10 and 20 applicants for each round and found 4-5 new charities. During the program, we will help you find a compatible co-founder. The final pairing takes place around week 6, and after that, your team will begin working on funding proposals for review by CE’s Seed Network. The average value of seed grants is £100,000.
Founding a charity and getting that first big grant isn’t easy. It never will be. But we’ll give you a unique advantage and everything you need to have a great shot.
Many research organisations like GiveWell, calculate the cost-effectiveness of global health and poverty programs by comparing their outcomes to the impact of direct cash transfers, which serve as a benchmark. A direct cash transfer is an unconditional payment of money to individuals or households to improve their economic and social well-being. Cash transfers, such as those provided by GiveDirectly, are well-studied and offer clear, measurable benefits, like increased household consumption and improved well-being. This makes cash transfers a reliable baseline for assessing whether other interventions achieve more value per dollar.
To calculate cost-effectiveness, we can:
quantify the benefits of a program in terms of health improvements (e.g. DALYs or QALYs), income gains, or spillover effects (such as community-wide health benefits)
monetise these benefits by assigning dollar values to life-years saved, health improvements, or long-term income increases.
Divide the total program cost by the monetised benefits to calculate cost-effectiveness, which is then compared directly to the impact per dollar of cash transfers.
Make adjustments for uncertainty, operational risks, and variations in effectiveness across different populations.
If a program delivers substantially more health or economic benefits per dollar than cash transfers, it is considered to be very cost-effective and likely worth funding.
If CE does not award you a grant, you have several options, including:
1) If you still want to start your charity, you are welcome to approach other donors inside or outside our network.
2) If you decide not to start a charity this year, CE will provide you with career guidance and a 2-month transitional stipend, and connect you to relevant opportunities in its network.
3) Join a team at another CE-incubated charity (when roles are available).
In past years, participants who did not start their own charity went on to receive job offers at CE or charities we helped found, were awarded external funding for their proposal, or continued with other high-impact career options.
Cost-effectiveness is a much less developed tool within the animal welfare space than it is in global health and development. The animal movement does not have widely used metrics for cost-effectiveness like cash benchmarking or $/DALY. Therefore, external evaluations use many different metrics, though the most common are animals helped per $ and animal years affected per $. The problem with these metrics is that they do not consider how much these animals are suffering, which makes it hard to really evaluate how promising different interventions are.
Because of this, AIM has created a metric called Suffering-Adjusted Days (SADs) which is a measure of days in pain for each animal with various adjustments for: the intensity of pain (building off Welfare Footprint Project’s work), sentience, and welfare range. This is the metric that we use when evaluating the cost-effectiveness of our recommended interventions and we have a cost-effectiveness bar of 30 SADs/$. This metric is also started to be used by other organizations in the animal movement, most importantly by Animal Charity Evaluators which is the main evaluation organization in the movement.
It depends. If your job is incredibly flexible, allows you to take time off, or go on a hiatus, maybe not. However, the Incubation Program requires a full-time commitment in terms of hours you will need to spend on assessments, partner projects, and learning. That’s two months, five days a week, 8 hours a day. CE provides stipends of £1,900/month in this period (which can be increased based on needs).
In the past, very few participants were able to combine ongoing work projects with the Incubation Program, but it’s not impossible. Kindly be transparent about any other engagements so that we can find a tailored solution. In general, we highly recommend not underestimating the time you will need to work on a new charity idea.