The Emerging Challenges Fund (previously called the “Longtermism Fund”) is managed by Longview Philanthropy and directs funding to highly effective organisations working to safeguard the long-term future of humanity.
We were involved in the creation of the fund and initially managed its communications by writing the grant reports and public updates. In November 2023, we stepped down from this role, and now Longview is fully responsible for the fund. We did this so that we could come to a more impartial decision on whether to recommend the fund, based on independently evaluating Longview’s grantmaking.
What kind of work does the Emerging Challenges Fund support?
The fund supports work that reduces existential and catastrophic risks, such as those coming from misaligned artificial intelligence, pandemics, and nuclear war.
The Emerging Challenges Fund aims to be a strong donation option for a wide range of donors interested in reducing global catastrophic risk. The fund focuses on organisations that:
- Have a compelling and transparent case in favour of their cost effectiveness that most donors will understand; and/or
- May benefit from being funded by a large number of donors (rather than one specific organisation or donor).
Grants so far
The Emerging Challenges Fund has awarded grants to several organisations and projects aligned with its key priorities, including:
- ARC Evals (now called METR) — At the time of the grant, this was the evaluations project at the Alignment Research Center which works on “assessing whether cutting-edge AI systems could pose catastrophic risks to civilization.” (It is now a standalone non-profit.)
- SecureBio — SecureBio is a nonprofit working alongside the MIT Sculpting Evolution Group on highly targeted projects seeking to prevent or respond to the next pandemic.
- The Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace — CEIP’s nuclear policy program aims to develop a better understanding of the most dangerous nuclear escalation pathways and identify and promote policy interventions to mitigate risks.
- Rethink Priorities' Existential Security Team (formerly the General Longtermism Team) — The General Longtermism Team work on improving strategic clarity about how to improve the long-term future, such as whether and how much to invest in new longtermist causes. They have written about their past work and future plans in arecent EA Forum post.
See the full list of grant recipients by viewing the grant reports below:
- December 2023
- August 2023
- December 2022
Why donate to the Emerging Challenges Fund?
As part of our work evaluating evaluators, we investigated Longview’s grantmaking. After doing so, we decided to recommend the fund because:
- Longview has solid grantmaking processes in place to find highly cost-effective funding opportunities.
- In the grants we evaluated, we generally saw these processes working as intended, which makes us optimistic about the cost-effectiveness of the grants.
- The scope and structure of the Emerging Challenges Fund is — by design — consistent with what we are looking for with our Risks and Resilience Fund: a fund that makes grants that are relevant and understandable to a wide variety of donors looking to reduce global catastrophic risks.
We don’t know of any clearly better alternative donation option in reducing GCRs.
If you’re interested in learning more about Longview, we recommend reading our evaluation report. For a more casual introduction, see this video with one of the fund managers: Longview’s co-CEO, Simran Dhaliwal.
Fund managers
The fund’s grantmaking will be informed by all of Longview’s work, and therefore everyone in their team plays a role. The fund managers are:
- Kit Harris — Longtermist Grants Officer at Longview Philanthropy
- Simran Dhaliwal— Co-CEO of Longview Philanthropy
- Tyler John— Global Priorities Research Programme Officer at Longview Philanthropy
- Carl Robichaud— Nuclear Weapons Policy Programme Officer at Longview Philanthropy
FAQ
How are grants decided?
Longview Philanthropy aims to fund the most cost-effective organisations that fit within the fund’s mandate. Longview’s evaluation of cost effectiveness is informed by its past and ongoing work trying to find the most impactful longtermist organisations, as well as the work of other funders.
Often, this will involve making grants to organisations where Longview’s team are especially involved (for example, having provided early funding, conducted thorough evaluations, or helped found the organisation). In other cases, Longview’s judgement of cost-effectiveness will be based on its judgement of evaluations done by other funders.
The size of the grants will be determined based on the resources given to the Emerging Challenges Fund and the overall funding needs of the organisations being considered.
What’s the difference between the Emerging Challenges Fund and the Long-Term Future Fund?
We think the Long-Term Future Fund (LTFF) is also a compelling option for donors, though it makes different kinds of grants. We document these differences in more detail in our investigations of the LTFF and the Emerging Challenges Fund. The biggest differences is in the kinds of grants each fund makes: the LTFF is likely to support researchers early in their careers, or highly targeted outreach efforts to encourage more people to work to improve the long-term future. We ultimately don’t have a view on which fund is more cost-effective.
Will the Emerging Challenges Fund's grants cause other donors to give less to the same organisations?
In many cases, major funders will react to Emerging Challenges Fund grants by making smaller donations to the recipient organisations. These funders will then have resources freed up for supporting other longtermist projects, which we see as a good thing. However, if your values differ from these other funders, then you may disagree.
We suggest looking through Open Philanthropy’s grants to reduce global catastrophic risk to inform whether your values are in fact aligned with other funders in a similar space. You can also see some of the organisations Longview Philanthropy has supported in the past, but it is worth noting that many of their grant recommendations are not public.
Giving What We Can does not take any fees from donors using our platform or from charities listed on our platform. We are independently funded to promote our mission of making giving effectively and significantly a cultural norm. Read more on ourtransparency page.
Please note that GWWC does not evaluate individual charities. Our recommendations are based on the research of third-party, impact-focused charity evaluators our research team has found to be particularly well-suited to help donors do the most good per dollar, according to their recent evaluator investigations. Our other supported programs are those that align with our charitable purpose — they are working on a high-impact problem and take a reasonably promising approach (based on publicly-available information).
At Giving What We Can, we focus on the effectiveness of an organisation's work -- what the organisation is actually doing and whether their programs are making a big difference. Some others in the charity recommendation space focus instead on the ratio of admin costs to program spending, part of what we’ve termed the “overhead myth.” See why overhead isn’t the full story and learn more about our approach to charity evaluation.
