By my lights, some regrantors are great, but most are substantially worse than the standard professional grantmakers, and it’s apparently nontrivial to tell which are which (and in particular Manifund is not good at this).
Thanks for the criticism; would you be able to say more, either here or privately, about what you see as what is worse about our regrants or regrantors? (In case it helps, we recently made https://manifund.org/about/regranting-data to display where our regrantors have given across the last 3 years.)
I think of our AI safety regrantor program as trying to do a pretty specific thing: make it easy for experts working fulltime in AI safety to seed new opportunities that come across their network. So first, I’d want to check that you’re comparing at similar org stage/check size, between regrantor & professional grantmakers. I think the nature of seeding new opportunities is that a lot of them are going to fail, or go towards things that don’t have an obvious good outcome.
If you’re pretty confident that our regrantor choices are bad, I’d also be interested in hearing you name specific regrantors you think would be good & why; we’re always considering new regrantors from year to year. Also, specific opportunities; while I appreciate your recent writeups on meta considerations around grantmaking, I don’t currently have a sense of where you would literally choose to send money, or would have in past years. (Maybe Bores & other political giving stuff, recently? That’s not crazy but outside of 501c3 scope and I think represents one pretty specific worldview/angle.)
Sorry for the lazy criticism. Thanks for your polite reply. And glancing at the page you just linked, I was pleasantly surprised by the 2025 stuff.
I think some disagreements here are probably intractable/illegible; it’s not worthwhile/helpful for me to try to explain my views on all of your regrantors. And I don’t have regrantor suggestions off the top of my head, sorry (fortunately, many of the non-grantmakers best positioned to be regrantors by my lights are already able to fund the lowest-hanging fruit by their lights, in various different ways).
Thanks for the criticism; would you be able to say more, either here or privately, about what you see as what is worse about our regrants or regrantors? (In case it helps, we recently made https://manifund.org/about/regranting-data to display where our regrantors have given across the last 3 years.)
I think of our AI safety regrantor program as trying to do a pretty specific thing: make it easy for experts working fulltime in AI safety to seed new opportunities that come across their network. So first, I’d want to check that you’re comparing at similar org stage/check size, between regrantor & professional grantmakers. I think the nature of seeding new opportunities is that a lot of them are going to fail, or go towards things that don’t have an obvious good outcome.
If you’re pretty confident that our regrantor choices are bad, I’d also be interested in hearing you name specific regrantors you think would be good & why; we’re always considering new regrantors from year to year. Also, specific opportunities; while I appreciate your recent writeups on meta considerations around grantmaking, I don’t currently have a sense of where you would literally choose to send money, or would have in past years. (Maybe Bores & other political giving stuff, recently? That’s not crazy but outside of 501c3 scope and I think represents one pretty specific worldview/angle.)
Sorry for the lazy criticism. Thanks for your polite reply. And glancing at the page you just linked, I was pleasantly surprised by the 2025 stuff.
I think some disagreements here are probably intractable/illegible; it’s not worthwhile/helpful for me to try to explain my views on all of your regrantors. And I don’t have regrantor suggestions off the top of my head, sorry (fortunately, many of the non-grantmakers best positioned to be regrantors by my lights are already able to fund the lowest-hanging fruit by their lights, in various different ways).