Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Wild Animal Initiative has urgent need for more funding and more donors, published by Cameron Meyer Shorb on August 6, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

Our room for more funding is bigger and more urgent than ever before. Our organizational strategy will be responsive both to the total amount raised and to how many people donate, so smaller donors will have an especially high impact this year.

Good Ventures recently decided to phase out funding for several areas (GV blog, EA Forum post), including wild animal welfare. That's a pretty big shock to our movement. We don't know what exactly the impact will be, except that it's complicated.

The purpose of this post is to share what we know and how we're thinking about things - primarily to encourage people to donate to Wild Animal Initiative this year, but also for anyone else who might be interested in the state of the wild animal welfare movement more broadly.

Summary

Track record

Our primary goal is to support the growth of a self-sustaining interdisciplinary research community focused on reducing wild animal suffering.

Wild animal welfare science is still a small field, but we're really happy with the momentum it's been building. Some highlights of the highlights:

We generally get a positive response from researchers (particularly in animal behavior science and ecology), who tend to see wild animal welfare as a natural extension of their interest in conservation (unlike EAs, who tend to see those two as conflicting with each other).

Wild animal welfare is increasingly becoming a topic of discussion at scientific conferences, and was recently the subject of the keynote presentation at one.

Registration for our first online course filled to capacity (50 people) within a few hours, and just as many people joined the waitlist over the next few days.

Room for more funding

This is the first year in which our primary question is not how much more we can do, but whether we can avoid major budget cuts over the next few years.

We raised less in 2023 than we did in 2022, so we need to make up for that gap.

We're also going to lose our biggest donor because Good Ventures is requiring Open Philanthropy to phase out their funding for wild animal welfare. Open Phil was responsible for about half of our overall budget.

The funding from their last grant to us will last halfway through 2026, but we need to decide soon how we're going to adapt.

To avoid putting ourselves back in the position of relying on a single funder, our upcoming budgeting decisions will depend on not only how much money we raise, but also how diversified our funding is. That means gifts from smaller donors will have an unusually large impact. (The less you normally donate, the more disproportionate your impact will be, but the case still applies to basically everyone who isn't a multi-million-dollar foundation.)

Specifically, our goal is to raise $240,000 by the end of the year from donors giving $10k or less.

Impact of marginal donations

We're evaluating whether we need to reduce our budget to a level we can sustain without Open Philanthropy. The more we raise this year - and the more donors who pitch in to make that happen - the less we'll need to cut.

Research grants and staff-associated costs make up the vast majority of our budget, so we'd need to make cuts in one or both of those areas. Donations would help us avoid layoffs and keep funding external researchers.

What we've accomplished so far

Background

If you're not familiar with Wild Animal Initiative, we're working to accelerate the growth of wild animal welfare science. We do that through three interconnected programs: We make grants to scientists who take on relevant projects, we conduct our own research on high-priority questions, and we do outreach through conferences and virtual events.

Strategy...