From the EA Funds website, here is the amount of money unallocated in each fund:
- Long-Term Future: $348,167
- Global Development: $497,957
- Animal Welfare: $75,109
- EA Community: $206,271
Some of them haven't disbursed any funds in quite a while. I asked the CEA team about this and got the following reply:
The answer to this is that currently the fund manager have a great deal of discretion about when they give out grants, and they tend to do so in large chunks with somewhat low frequency. This is a situation we may be giving more consideration in the future, because indeed there are reasons to question whether the granting frequency as it currently is an optimal situation.
It seems problematic to have ~$1.1million dollars in the bank and no commitment as to when this will be handed out.
For the Animal Welfare fund, I mind less – the fund manager makes many small donations to a bunch of charities, and it seems unlikely I'd ever be able to match his skill in doing this. But in the case of the Global Development fund (which so far has mostly just handed money to AMF and has half a million dollars in the pot), I could just pay my monthly donation into a low-risk ETF, make a small yield on it, and then donate the total myself at the end of the year.
Interested to hear people's thoughts on this!
I understand the desire of the fund to ensure the money is being handed out optimally, but there's two issues that worry me. First, like investing, there is often a compounding effect to altruism - you help someone locally and they are able to improve the local economy, help others, etc. We may be missing out on the benefits of donating now the current fund system. While there is an argument for giving later vs giving now, Assuming the money isn't properly invested and compounding (it may well be), then we're certainly losing out. People would be better off investing the money and giving it when people are ready to receive it.
Another issue is that by giving large grants there's a greater risk than many small donations. Over or underestimated project costs, inefficiencies, and the like contribute to a chance a donation ends up misallocated or wasted. These mistakes will certainly happen, but with large one-time grants, the risk is larger. Isn't the whole point of the fund to diversify and reduce risk and inefficiencies?
It seems like it's less risky and more efficient to just donate directly to the charities in the index. In fact, couldn't the fund just list where they recommended donations go at any given moment?