We will use this to pre-screen your application, so please make sure to as concrete as possible and include the key reasons in favor of your project here. (max 100 words).
Manifund builds infrastructure to make philanthropy fast, transparent, and incentive-aligned — we’ve moved ~$3.3mm to projects in EA, longtermism, and more.
We’re looking for $500k to support 4-5 FTE and larger funding experiments over the next year.
Document describing your plans, reasons this grant is one of the most impactful opportunities, track record (if applicable), and any other factors that distinguish it from other projects in the space (max. 1000 words). You may link to an existing application containing this information. Ensure that this link can be accessed by anyone e.g. a shared google document.
Manifund (manifund.org) was created in early 2023. Over the last year, we’ve funded 128 projects totaling ~$3.3mm, with 1.5 full-time employees. Our goal in 2024 is to scale up the programs we’ve started, move $10-$100mm, hire 1-3 additional FTE, and experiment with more funding mechanisms and other meta interventions.
We iterate quickly, so consider this a rough sketch of our plans.
In a regranting round, a donor delegates a grantmaking budget to high-trust individuals with field-expertise, called “regrantors.” Regrantors make grant decisions based on the objectives of the original donor, with limited overhead. You can read more about regranting on Manifund here.
We’ve run one regranting round for $1.9mm, and we’ll be launching a second round of regranting in April for $1.5mm, primarily for regrantors with expertise in the AI safety space. We also plan to run additional rounds of regranting this year in other impactful cause areas.
Impact certificates are venture funding for charitable endeavors. Investors fund founders by buying shares (”certs”) in their projects, which pay out if the project later receives a retroactive prize from a philanthropic funder. See also our and ACX’s explainers.
We’re currently running an impact market for project proposals in ACX Grants 2024, in partnership with ACX, EA Funds, and SFF. We’re excited about scaling impact certs beyond early-stage test cases and into the broader EA ecosystem, and have started conversations with folks from Effective Ventures and Lightcone about partnering on this.
Our open call allows anyone to publicly propose a charitable project and raise funding on our site, similar Kickstarter or GoFundMe. Most prominently, MATS and AI Safety Camp have found success with our open call, raising a total of $190k and $56k respectively.