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Welcome to our first quarterly newsletter of 2025! 

We recently announced the launch of our new Abundance and Growth Fund, which will spend at least $120 million over the next three years to accelerate economic growth and boost scientific and technological progress while lowering the cost of living. In addition, we published our 2024 annual review, which also lays out our top priorities for 2025. 

We are continuing to grow our team — please see here or the end of the newsletter for open roles and other ways to get involved, and keep reading for more updates and highlights from this quarter.  
 

Best,
Jeremy Klemin 
Content Editor 
Updates

In addition to launching the Abundance and Growth Fund and publishing the annual review, we: 

  • Expanded our leadership team. Liz Givens joined us as Director of Partnerships; Emily Oehlsen was promoted to President; Otis Reid was promoted to Managing Director, Global Health and Wellbeing; and Derek Hopf was promoted to Managing Director, Operations. 

  • Published an update on our Effective Giving & Careers program, detailing our progress so far and priorities for the coming year. The team also launched a Request for Proposals (RFP) for effective giving organizations (deadline April 20).

  • Launched two RFPs related to AI: one on improving capability evaluations (deadline April 1), and another on technical AI safety research (deadline April 15). 

  • Wrote about major accomplishments that Global Health & Wellbeing grantees achieved in 2024.
Open Philanthropy in the News
Media coverage of our programs and grantees:

  • Bloomberg and Philanthropy News Digest covered the launch of the Abundance and Growth Fund.

  • Devex published a visual story on recent global efforts to combat lead poisoning, highlighting our joint work with the Lead Exposure Action Fund and the Partnership for a Lead-Free Future. 

  • Vox mentioned our support for clinical trials of the R21 malaria vaccine in a piece about scaling up vaccine rollouts. 

  • Slate featured the work of our grantee, the Center for Building in North America, in an article about single-stair building reform.

  • Science wrote about this year’s Spirit of Asilomar and the Future of Biotechnology conference, which we funded fellowships to attend. 

  • Nature published research by Nobel Prize winner and Open Phil grantee David Baker on using computational protein design to neutralize lethal snake venom. 

  • Inside Precision Medicine covered the work of Open Phil grantee Dr. Bali Pulendran. His team’s research, recently published in Nature Immunology, found a molecular signature in the blood that predicts the durability of vaccine responses.
Interviews with Open Philanthropy staff:

  • Matt Clancy, Research Fellow in Abundance and Growth, appeared on the Financial Times podcast to discuss reasons for productivity growth slowdown. 

  • Lewis Bollard, Program Director in Farm Animal Welfare, was quoted in a Forbes article about cage-free commitments due in 2025.

  • Ajeya Cotra, Senior Advisor in Potential Risks from Advanced AI, was quoted at length in a Vox article about whether AI systems can truly think and reason.
Writing by Open Philanthropy Staff

  • Lewis Bollard, Program Director in Farm Animal Welfare, wrote about the controversy surrounding animal welfare certification programs. 

  • Martin Gould, Senior Program Associate in Farm Animal Welfare, wrote a guest post about farm animal economics for Lewis’s newsletter. 

  • Jacob Trefethen, Program Director in Global Health & Wellbeing, has two new blog posts: one on generosity and foreign aid, and another on the NIH and NSF.

  • Alex Lawsen, Senior Program Associate in Potential Risks from Advanced AI, wrote about the design of whistleblower policy as it relates to AI safety.

  • Deena Mousa, Chief of Staff in Global Health & Wellbeing, published a piece in Nautilus on what rove beetles can tell us about the predictability of life, and co-wrote a piece with Lauren Gilbert in Asterisk about the utility of weird research.

  • Oliver Kim, Research Fellow in GHW Cause Prioritization, wrote about exchange rates and USAID historical data in his blog Global Developments. 
New Grants
Photo courtesy of the Animal Welfare Observatory
We announced a number of grants, including:
In Abundance & Growth:
In Farm Animal Welfare:

  • The Animal Welfare Observatory to support its work on corporate and institutional advocacy campaigns to improve farm animal welfare in Spain.

  • Compassion in World Farming (CIWF) to support its farm animal welfare work in Europe. CIWF will use the grant to continue its corporate outreach on broiler chicken welfare, as well as its efforts to end the use of cages and crates for all farmed animal species.
In Effective Giving & Careers:

  • High Impact Professionals (HIP) for general support. HIP helps impact-oriented working professionals have a higher social impact by maintaining a talent directory of job seekers and running an accelerator program for promising professionals.

  • Generation Pledge (GP) for general support. GP is a global community of inheritors from ultra-high-net-wealth families who commit to using their capital for impact and donating a percentage of their inheritances to charity.
In Potential Risks from Advanced AI:
In Global Catastrophic Risks Capacity Building:
In Scientific Research:
In Global Health R&D:

  • The Vaccine Formulation Institute to support the clinical development of novel, open-access adjuvants. Adjuvants are key components added to vaccines that enhance the body’s immune response.

  • The University of Oxford to support Professor Simon Draper‘s team and accelerate their program to develop an improved first-generation malaria vaccine (R21/Rh5/R78C). We also funded Professor Draper’s team for a project to manufacture blood-stage vaccines (Rh5 and R78C) to enable rapid clinical evaluation in combination with the R21 malaria vaccine.
In Global Aid Policy: 

  • The Center for Global Development (CGD) for general support. CGD is a think tank that researches and promotes policy to improve the health and wellbeing of people in developing countries.
In Biosecurity & Pandemic Preparedness:

  • SecureBio to support its Nucleic Acid Observatory (NAO) program. NAO will use the funds to scale up its sequencing efforts and conduct R&D on pandemic early warning systems.
In Global Public Health Policy:
In Forecasting:

  • The Centre for Economic Policy Research to support a collaboration on predicting the macroeconomic impacts of cash transfers. This grant was made jointly between our Forecasting and Global Health and Wellbeing Cause Prioritization teams. 
To see more grants we've awarded, visit our grants page.
Jobs and Other Opportunities

We’re hiring for: 

  • A Senior Program Officer to lead strategy and grantmaking on our new Abundance and Growth Fund (deadline March 31).

  • A Chief of Staff to Andrew Snyder-Beattie on the Biosecurity & Pandemic Preparedness team (deadline March 30).

  • A Head of People to lead our people strategy as we grow both our giving and our staff (deadline March 30).

  • Operations roles based in either SF or DC (rolling deadline).

As always, please consider referring candidates to these roles — if we hire someone you referred, we’ll give you $5,000.


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