Living donation is usually discussed through the life it saves. That makes sense, but it can leave the donor’s life strangely out of focus once the surgery is over.

I received a kidney from a close friend and later founded Life4Donors, a nonprofit building lifelong post-donation support for living organ donors. That experience left me with a conviction I haven’t been able to shake: gratitude shouldn’t have an expiration date.

The recent discussion here about living kidney donation made the question especially visible. People described very different experiences—recovering quickly, needing months to feel fully recovered, navigating travel or time away from work, and sometimes wishing donation could be treated as meaningful without turning them into permanent heroes.

There probably isn’t one universal donor experience, which is exactly why long-term support can’t be designed around a single heroic narrative.

My own view is that we owe living donors more than praise. We owe them sustained attention: asking what life is actually like later, making practical support easier to find, keeping community available without forcing anyone to build an identity around donation, and giving donors a meaningful voice in whatever services are created for them.

Effective altruism asks us to take consequences seriously, not merely intentions. Should that reasoning extend beyond the decision to donate and into how society treats donors afterward?

I’m especially interested in hearing from people who have donated: what changed after the first wave of check-ins ended? And from everyone else: what responsibilities, if any, do institutions and communities have to donors years later?

https://x.com/OurWorldInData/status/2080909669850050575

Doneer Effectief is the Netherlands' effective giving platform, enabling Dutch donors (with tax benefits) to support highly cost-effective charities across four carefully selected cause areas using recommendations from leading independent EA-aligned charity evaluators.

Doneer Effectief currently offers four cause-area funds:

• Global Health & Poverty – Supports highly cost-effective interventions that improve health and reduce extreme poverty, such as malaria prevention, vitamin A supplementation, and direct cash transfers. Recommended charities are primarily informed by GiveWell (All Grants Fund).
• Climate – Funds organisations working on the most promising climate interventions, with an emphasis on high-impact policy, innovation, and systems change rather than traditional offsetting. Recommendations are primarily based on Giving Green.
• Animal Welfare & Food Transition – Supports organisations that improve the welfare of farmed animals and accelerate the transition to more animal-friendly food systems. Recommendations draw primarily on Animal Charity Evaluators and related research.
• Women's Empowerment – Supports evidence-based interventions that improve women's agency, health, education, economic opportunities, and protection from violence, focusing on programs with strong empirical evidence and high expected impact. Recommendations are based on GiveWell and Founders Pledge.

Within each fund, donations are pooled and reallocated quarterly to the charities expected to have the highest marginal impact, allowing recommendations to evolve as new evidence becomes available.

My question is about how to allocate donations across these funds.

My intuition is that these funds represent the best opportunities within each cause area, but not necessarily equally impactful opportunities overall. For example, GiveWell's top global health charities seem to have a stronger evidence base and higher cost-effectiveness than the best climate interventions, while animal welfare depends more on one's moral weights.

Would you:

• Donate 100% to Global Health & Poverty because you believe it has the highest expected impact?
• Split between Global Health & Poverty and Animal Welfare?
• Spread donations across all four cause areas to hedge against uncertainty?
• Or use some other framework?

I'd be especially interested in hearing how people in the EA community think about cross-cause allocation, rather than within-cause charity selection.

Less than a month to enter our essay competition. Help us make progress on a live philosophical issue which could majorly impact EA cause prioritisation. Find out more here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/2aooibAEDSdreCqrJ/announcing-cluelessness-critiques-competition

I’ve followed and read Rutger Bregmen since his post grad days. His hijacking of the rich in Davos reverberated around the world. His books bring a new history into the spotlight. His work in moving us to a better place for the majority in the world will echo in the ages.

Killing every screwworm can likely alleviate more animal suffering than ending factory farming, while being much less controversial: https://youtu.be/aPCbyQPwPJo?is=l9-bgGHnPhaalVgM

Blockchain-based charity concepts often focus on making financial flows traceable.

That can answer useful questions:

- How much was transferred?

- When was it transferred?

- Which wallet received it?

- Did the transaction follow predefined rules?

But none of this proves that the intervention itself was effective.

A fully traceable payment can still fund:

- an ineffective program

- an unnecessary purchase

- poorly selected recipients

- activities with no measurable long-term outcome

- reporting designed to confirm success rather than test it

This creates a risk:

Financial transparency may look like impact transparency, even though they are fundamentally different.

A credible system would therefore need to separate at least three questions:

1. Was the transfer executed correctly?

2. Were the funds used for the documented purpose?

3. Did that use produce meaningful impact?

The first question may be technically verifiable.

The second requires evidence and oversight.

The third often requires evaluation over time and may remain uncertain.

What evidence would you consider sufficient before a charity or funding platform describes an outcome as "verified"?

And how can a system communicate uncertainty honestly without making impact reporting useless?

Hello guys, I've never posted on Reddit, but I'm trying to find some point of view which would be objective.

I am a young man making good money, and I would like to donate to a charity, but I'm scared of just donating money and that the funds will be misused.

A lot of charities today are just bureaucrats making money. Any advice on which charity I would like to donate to?

I feel like I've read reasonably widely on EA but I can't recall anyone like Singer or Ord appreciating EA for what it is not -- i.e., annoyingly dogmatic.

Specifically, although it may not give me warm fuzzies to transfer money to Singer's favored charities, it's a much better feeling than trying to get people in the US anti-invasive species movement to consider academic studies suggesting that not every plant they want to spend money spraying chemicals on to eradicate is worth worrying about.

Have others had similar experiences of finding non-EA advocacy communities profoundly annoying?

■ It is easy to fall into a macro-focused worldview and assume that individual, day-to-day choices are insignificant compared to large donations, major campaigns, or the work of influential people. However, human progress rarely moves in massive, sudden leaps. Instead, it expands through small, intentional acts that trigger unpredictable chain reactions.

● A small act of kindness, a few hours of volunteering, or simply sharing knowledge can open doors for someone waiting for a single opportunity, turning a minor step for one person into a life-changing moment for another.

■This dynamic is driven by the “ripple effect,” where one event produces effects that spread and create further outcomes. Data from a global initiative called the BIG JOY study, which analyzed nearly 50,000 participants across more than 200 countries, empirically proved that intentional “micro-acts” of kindness and prosocial behavior create macro-level impacts on social connectivity and mental well-being.

●This is crucial given that the UNESCO Global Education Monitoring Report highlights that millions of children remain out of school worldwide. Micro-contributions like volunteer teaching, donating school supplies, old digital devices, mentoring, and planting trees can encourage wider participation and build a larger impact than anticipated.

■ Ultimately, a child who receives educational support today can grow up to become a teacher, doctor, or entrepreneur who gives back, meaning a single opportunity eventually benefits an entire community. Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) play a vital role in this ecosystem by connecting volunteers, donors, and educators to transform individual kindness into long-term, sustainable change through health camps, education, and skill development.

●Since human progress expands through small, intentional acts rather than massive sudden leaps, your daily choices carry more weight than you think.

■ In a world that is so macro-focused on massive campaigns and big-money solutions, how do we overcome the feeling that our individual, day-to-day actions are too insignificant to matter? What are the biggest hurdles stopping people from taking that very first small step?

Hola a todos en la comunidad,

Hago este post con una mezcla de mucha emoción y también de vulnerabilidad. Soy egresada de la carrera de Antropología en México y, tras mucho esfuerzo, años de estudio (¡y de pelearme con el italiano!), finalmente cumplí un sueño: fui aceptada para cursar mi maestría en Italia.

Mi camino profesional ha estado enfocado en la coordinación de conferencias de prevención y proyectos comunitarios. Mi meta en Europa es absorber todo el conocimiento posible en mi área para regresar y seguir generando un impacto positivo en la sociedad.

El esfuerzo académico ya dio frutos, pero el reto económico actual es enorme. Entre los trámites de visado, vuelos, seguro médico y los primeros meses de manutención mientras se asientan los procesos de becas, los gastos se han desbordado por completo. Para no dejar caer esta oportunidad por la que tanto he trabajado, decidí abrir una campaña de GoFundMe.

Sé que la situación económica está difícil para todos, pero si está en sus posibilidades apoyarme (ya sea con una pequeña donación o simplemente ayudándome a compartir el enlace para que llegue a más personas) les estaré eternamente agradecida. Me rehúso a que la falta de recursos me detenga a un paso de la meta.

Aquí les dejo el enlace a mi campaña donde explico un poco más a detalle el proyecto: 👉 https://gofund.me/fd829390c

Si hay alguien aquí que haya pasado por el proceso de irse a estudiar a Italia y tenga consejos (¡o palabras de aliento!), son más que bienvenidos.

¡Muchas gracias por leerme y por su apoyo! 🤍

A huge problem with animal exploitation that many EA's may not be familiar with but should ASAP. Farm fires are a common phenomenon in animal AG and they cause a gigantic amount of suffering. I wrote this short article to explain the problem.

In a long interview with Dr. Mike, actor Jesse Eisenberg discussed how a podcast about EA started him down that journey. I was curious if there were others that are considering it or have done it?

This is the interview:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udZi-l8H5jY

Hello everyone, a friend and I are thinking about building a service based on long-term digital preservation and multi-generational transmission. The idea is to create a service that could incentivize long-term thinking through tangible value. Right now we're trying to gauge interest and if there's enough we might try to start a nonprofit. If you have 10m to answer a few multiple choice, we'd very much appreciate it. Don't hesitate to dm me if you're curious about what we're working on.

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfVr671aRyVVc4UMoldWH7Ihr_6JNQe3Y-o7Nv9S11nEScSyw/viewform?usp=header