The Open Philanthropy Project recently announced a grant to CFAR for $1,035,000 across the next two years, earmarked toward a combination of improving our organizational competence, providing scholarships for promising effective altruists and similar folk to attend CFAR workshops, and assisting with SPARC and EuroSPARC.

We very much appreciate the grant, and we are looking forward to putting it to work improving CFAR and streamlining SPARC operations. (We recently ran EuroSPARC, with funding from the first portion of this Open Philanthropy grant, but the grant only became public just now.) When applying for the grant, we worked out a one-year plan to improve our organizational competence that we are excited about implementing over the coming year. It includes hiring contractors, clarifying staff roles, and spending the time to replace our kluge-y systems for accounting and financial reporting -- and more generally working to shift from “scrappy early stage nonprofit” to “streamlined midstage organization with well-functioning internal institutions”. We suspect we should have done some of this work before; and we are grateful for Open Philanthropy Project’s assistance in doing it now. More details at the link.

Cheers!