Giving What We Can
Giving What We Can
Comprehensive reference page on Giving What We Can covering its history, pledge structure, research approach, and criticisms; notes 10,000+ pledgers, \$340M+ donated historically, \$80M in 2024, and a 6x giving multiplier claim with acknowledged uncertainty. GWWC recommends AI safety orgs (CHAI, GovAI) under its catastrophic risk cause area.
| Founded | November 2009 |
| Founders | Toby Ord, William MacAskill, Bernadette Young |
| Headquarters | Oxford, UK (originally); independent entity since August 2024 |
| Type | Nonprofit / Effective Altruism Organization |
| Flagship Program | 10% Pledge |
| Members | 10,000+ (as of 2025) |
| Total Donated by Community | $340M+ (historical) |
Key Links
| Source | Link |
|---|---|
| Official Website | givingwhatwecan.org |
| Twitter/X | twitter.com/givingwhatwecan |
| linkedin.com/company/giving-what-we-can | |
| Wikipedia | en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giving_What_We_Can |
| EA Forum Topic | forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics/giving-what-we-can |
Overview
Giving What We Can (GWWC) is an effective altruism nonprofit that promotes effective giving through education, outreach, and advocacy centered on the 10% Pledge—a commitment to donate at least 10% of one's income to high-impact charities.1 The organization was founded in November 2009 at Oxford University by philosophers Toby Ord and William MacAskill, along with Bernadette Young.2 Its mission, as stated by the organization, is to create a world in which giving effectively and significantly is a cultural norm, and ultimately to work toward a world without preventable suffering or existential risk.3
Rather than evaluating individual charities directly, GWWC's research approach focuses on evaluating impact-focused charity evaluators such as GiveWell, Animal Charity Evaluators, and Founders Pledge, and then publishing recommendations across cause areas including global health, animal welfare, and reducing global catastrophic risks.1 The organization frames this through the lens of cause prioritization: identifying global problems that are pressing, solvable, and neglected.
GWWC grew from 23 founding members in 2009 to more than 10,000 pledgers by 2025, with its community having collectively donated over $340 million to effective charities.4 The organization operated under the umbrella of the Centre for Effective Altruism from 2011 until late August 2024, when it became an independent legal entity.5
History
Founding
The organization originated from Toby Ord, a philosopher at Balliol College, Oxford, who was inspired by ethicists including Peter Singer. After concluding that his future income could save a substantial number of lives through strategic charitable donation, Ord committed a large proportion of his income to effective charities.6 He collaborated with fellow Oxford philosopher William MacAskill and his wife Bernadette Young—then a physician in training—to launch GWWC in November 2009 as an international community encouraging members to pledge at least 10% of their income to cost-effective charities.2
The organization launched with 23 members, a group that included notable figures such as philosopher Peter Singer, development economist Rachel Glennerster, and economist Michael Kremer (later a Nobel laureate).2 Within one year, 64 members had joined, collectively pledging approximately $21 million.6
Organizational Development
In 2011, the Centre for Effective Altruism was incorporated as an umbrella organization for GWWC and 80,000 Hours, and the term "effective altruism" came into broader use around this time.5 GWWC hired its first full-time staff in 2012, having previously been run entirely by volunteers; it also incubated The Life You Can Save, which later spun off as its own organization.6
Membership growth accelerated steadily over the following decade: GWWC surpassed 1,000 members in 2015, reached 5,000 members in 2020, and exceeded 9,000 10%-Pledge signers by December 2024.15 In late August 2024, GWWC spun out from CEA to become its own independent legal entity.5
2024–2025 Developments
According to GWWC's own reporting, the community donated over $80 million to charity in 2024, and nearly 900 new individuals took the 10% Pledge that year—a figure the organization characterized as a greater than 50% increase over the approximately 600 new pledgers in 2023.7 The organization also published a 2025 strategy announcing an ambitious long-term goal of reaching 1 million pledgers donating $3 billion annually to high-impact charities.8 In August 2025, GiveWell noted GWWC's milestone of reaching 10,000 total 10% pledgers.9
The Pledges
The 10% Pledge is GWWC's flagship program, inviting members to commit to donating at least 10% of their income to effective charities for the remainder of their working lives. According to GWWC, the pledge is designed to be flexible—members can donate to any effective charities they choose, and the organization states that the commitment is to consider high-impact giving from income above a modest living standard rather than a rigid annual enforcement mechanism.10
GWWC also promotes three additional pledge variants to encourage broader participation:
- Trial Pledge: A shorter-term commitment, typically for one year, allowing people to experience significant giving before making a longer commitment.
- Company Pledge: A corporate commitment for organizations wishing to give a portion of revenue or profits to effective charities.
- Further Pledge: For those who wish to go beyond 10%, committing a higher percentage of income or wealth.1
The organization also provides donor advising services for high-net-worth donors considering major gifts, connecting them with networks of researchers to guide their philanthropic strategy.11
Research Approach
GWWC's research team does not independently evaluate individual charities. Instead, it assesses the methodologies and track records of established charity evaluators—such as GiveWell, Animal Charity Evaluators, Longview Philanthropy, and Founders Pledge—and publishes recommendations based on these evaluators' outputs.112 This "meta-evaluator" model is intended to help donors navigate an ecosystem of expert evaluators without requiring them to conduct their own due diligence from scratch.
The organization structures its recommendations around three primary cause areas: global health and wellbeing, animal welfare, and reducing global catastrophic risks. Within the last category, GWWC has highlighted AI safety and governance organizations, recommending outfits such as the Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence (CHAI) and the Governance of AI (GovAI) as funding opportunities for donors concerned about existential risk from advanced AI systems.1314
GWWC has also published educational content drawing on behavioral economics research, including studies examining how presenting cost-effectiveness information affects donor behavior, and experiments linking charitable giving to subjective wellbeing.15
Role in the Effective Altruism Community
GWWC is widely regarded as one of the founding institutions of the effective altruism movement. Its launch in 2009 predates the broader popularization of EA and helped establish the movement's cultural norm of committing a meaningful, defined fraction of income to charity. The organization has collaborated with or incubated several other EA-adjacent organizations, and it maintains partnerships with outfits like Giving Multiplier (a matching fund platform active since November 2020) and the School for Moral Ambition.11
Coefficient Giving has provided grants to effective giving initiatives (EGIs) in the GWWC ecosystem, and early impact estimates—while difficult to verify independently—suggested leverage ratios that EA-adjacent analysts considered substantial.16 An 80,000 Hours analysis from 2015 argued that donating to GWWC could generate a higher return per dollar than donating directly to GiveWell-recommended charities, though such estimates carry significant methodological uncertainty.16
Criticisms and Limitations
Pledge Design Critiques
Critics have raised several concerns about the structure of the 10% Pledge itself. One line of criticism focuses on potential anchoring effects: by celebrating 10% as the benchmark, GWWC may inadvertently cause some donors to give less than they otherwise would, treating 10% as an adequate ceiling rather than a floor.10 A related concern is that pledge recruitment efforts may primarily accelerate pledges that would have occurred anyway, rather than creating net-new giving, which would significantly reduce the organization's counterfactual impact.10
The flat 10% structure has also been criticized for failing to account for diminishing marginal utility of income—a progressive or income-scaled giving norm might be more equitable.17 Others have noted that the pledge's impact calculations have historically assumed a "perpetual present," summing future donations without appropriate discounting or accounting for shifting cause priorities over time.17
Intermediary and Overhead Concerns
Some critics question whether GWWC's position as a meta-charity—an intermediary encouraging giving to other charities—provides sufficient value to justify its operational costs. The concern, sometimes called "intermediary drag," is that the overhead of running GWWC may not be offset by the additional giving it generates, particularly given uncertainty about counterfactual impact.18
Operational Mistakes
GWWC has itself acknowledged several operational shortcomings. In a published account of its mistakes, the organization noted that between 2016 and 2020, it allocated relatively little staff time to running GWWC after merging functions into CEA. Julia Wise, who held primary responsibility for GWWC since 2017, already had full-time community health responsibilities, and technical capacity was spread across multiple projects. This resulted in delayed fixes to technical problems, reduced communications to members, and website functionality that did not meet user expectations.19
The organization also acknowledged that some student groups had run pledge drives that occasionally resulted in people taking the pledge at a young age without adequately thinking through the long-term commitment, and that some communications presented the pledge as something to be taken quickly rather than carefully considered.19
Broader Philosophical Criticisms
Critics in the EA-adjacent community and beyond have raised broader concerns: that emphasizing giving to global strangers undermines duties to family, local community, or compatriots; that some recommended charities may have unintended negative consequences inadequately disclosed by evaluators; and that "earning to give" frameworks may normalize participation in ethically questionable industries.202122 GWWC and its supporters have published responses to many of these concerns, but the debates remain active.10
The association of the broader EA movement with Sam Bankman-Fried, sentenced to 25 years in prison, has generated reputational challenges for EA-affiliated organizations including GWWC, though critics and supporters disagree about how much individual misconduct reflects on the underlying philosophical framework.20
Key Uncertainties
Several aspects of GWWC's impact remain genuinely uncertain:
- Counterfactual impact: How much of the giving attributed to GWWC would have occurred anyway through other channels is difficult to measure. GWWC's own 2024 impact evaluation reportedly used a 6x giving multiplier, derived from a substantial internal analysis, but such estimates depend heavily on assumptions about donor counterfactuals.7
- Pledge attrition: Data on how many pledgers continue to fulfill their commitments over time, and at what levels, is not comprehensively public.
- Cause area effectiveness: GWWC's recommendations span cause areas with very different evidence bases—from the well-studied landscape of global health interventions to the speculative territory of long-term AI risk mitigation—and the relative value of these areas is deeply contested.
- Anchoring vs. inspiration: Whether the 10% norm raises or lowers average giving among people who encounter it depends on the population and is an empirical question without a definitive answer.
Sources
Footnotes
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Giving What We Can - Wikipedia — Giving What We Can - Wikipedia ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5
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Who Started Giving What We Can - givingwhatwecan.org — Who Started Giving What We Can - givingwhatwecan.org ↩ ↩2 ↩3
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GWWC Strategy - givingwhatwecan.org — GWWC Strategy - givingwhatwecan.org ↩
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Giving What We Can History - givingwhatwecan.org — Giving What We Can History - givingwhatwecan.org ↩
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Giving What We Can - EA Forum Topic — Giving What We Can - EA Forum Topic ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4
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GWWC History - givingwhatwecan.org — GWWC History - givingwhatwecan.org ↩ ↩2 ↩3
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What We Achieved Together: $80M Donated, 6x Giving Multiplier in 2024 - givingwhatwecan.org — What We Achieved Together: $80M Donated, 6x Giving Multiplier in 2024 - givingwhatwecan.org ↩ ↩2
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Announcing Our 2025 Strategy - givingwhatwecan.org — Announcing Our 2025 Strategy - givingwhatwecan.org ↩
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August 2025 Updates - GiveWell Blog — August 2025 Updates - GiveWell Blog ↩
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5 Things You've Got Wrong About the Giving What We Can Pledge - EA Forum — 5 Things You've Got Wrong About the Giving What We Can Pledge - EA Forum ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4
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Giving What We Can - givingwhatwecan.org — Giving What We Can - givingwhatwecan.org ↩ ↩2
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GWWC Research and Approach - givingwhatwecan.org — GWWC Research and Approach - givingwhatwecan.org ↩
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Citation rc-515d (data unavailable — rebuild with wiki-server access) ↩
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Evaluability Bias in Charitable Giving - PMC — Evaluability Bias in Charitable Giving - PMC ↩
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Donating to Giving What We Can Is Higher Impact Than Donating to GiveWell-Recommended Charities - 80,000 Hours — Donating to Giving What We Can Is Higher Impact Than Donating to GiveWell-Recommended Charities - 80,000 Hours ↩ ↩2
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Contra the Giving What We Can Pledge - EA Forum — Contra the Giving What We Can Pledge - EA Forum ↩ ↩2
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Giving What We Can, 80,000 Hours, and Meta-Charity - LessWrong — Giving What We Can, 80,000 Hours, and Meta-Charity - LessWrong ↩
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Our Mistakes - givingwhatwecan.org — Our Mistakes - givingwhatwecan.org ↩ ↩2
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The Problem with Effective Altruism - Persuasion — The Problem with Effective Altruism - Persuasion ↩ ↩2
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Leif Wenar's Criticisms of Effective Altruism - Richard Pettigrew's Substack — Leif Wenar's Criticisms of Effective Altruism - Richard Pettigrew's Substack ↩
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Objections to Earning to Give - benkuhn.net — Objections to Earning to Give - benkuhn.net ↩
References
“First, and most obviously, the pledge recommends a flat 10% donation, regardless of a person's income. The general consensus is that utility of money goes as log(income), so giving a fixed percentage is more painful per unit of good done at lower incomes than higher ones (hence, eg., progressive income taxes).”
“As the tech team's capacity was split between several major projects, fixes to Giving What We Can tech problems sometimes took longer than they should have. Members received fewer communications than before, and website functionality was not what users expected.”
35 Things You've Got Wrong About the Giving What We Can Pledge - EA Forumforum.effectivealtruism.org·Blog post▸
“The Giving What We Can Pledge is a public commitment to donate at least 10% of your lifetime income to the organisations that can most effectively use it to improve the lives of others.”
“Celebrate Giving What We Can’s milestone of 10,000 10% pledgers who have committed to donating 10% of their income to effective charities!”
WRONG ATTRIBUTION: The claim attributes donation and pledge statistics to GWWC's own reporting, but the source is a GiveWell blog post. UNSUPPORTED: The source does not mention that GWWC donated over $80 million to charity in 2024. UNSUPPORTED: The source does not mention that nearly 900 new individuals took the 10% Pledge in 2024. UNSUPPORTED: The source does not mention that the organization characterized the number of new pledgers as a greater than 50% increase over the approximately 600 new pledgers in 2023. UNSUPPORTED: The source does not mention that the organization published a 2025 strategy announcing an ambitious long-term goal of reaching 1 million pledgers donating $3 billion annually to high-impact charities.
“Giving What We Can has since spun out and, as of late August 2024, is its own independent legal entity .”
The source states that GWWC had over 9,000 pledgers as of December 2024, not more than 10,000 by 2025. The source does not mention the total amount of donations made to effective charities.
“Giving What We Can was launched in 2009 by Toby Ord (a philosopher at the University of Oxford), his wife Bernadette Young (a physician in training at the time), and William MacAskill (another philosopher at the University of Oxford).”
The claim mentions the 10% Pledge, but the source does not mention it. The claim also mentions the organization's mission, but the source does not mention it.
“Second, you might have a very high discount rate. Giving $1 to either GWWC or 80k generates benefits in the future. So working out its cost-effectiveness involves an estimate of how one should value future donations versus donations now.”
“My claim in this post is that if you donate to these top recommended charities, you’ll have even more impact (at the margin) if you donate to Giving What We Can instead.”
The source does not mention Open Philanthropy. The source does not mention early impact estimates being difficult to verify independently. The source does not mention EA-adjacent analysts. The source is from 2015, but does not specify that the 80,000 Hours analysis is from 2015.
“GWWC has also published educational content drawing on behavioral economics research, including studies examining how presenting cost-effectiveness information affects donor behavior, and experiments linking charitable giving to subjective wellbeing.”
11Leif Wenar's Criticisms of Effective Altruism - Richard Pettigrew's Substackrichardpettigrew.substack.com·Blog post▸
“One of his complaints is that the charity evaluator websites, such as GiveWell , which sit at the heart of the movement’s efforts to encourage the world’s wealthy to donate a substantial proportion of their money and to donate it to those organizations that the available evidence suggests will do most good in expectation, do not explicitly advertise the unintended bad consequences of the activities undertaken by the charities they endorse; and, surely worse, they don’t include those consequences in their calculations of the charities’ benefits.”
The source discusses only one of the concerns mentioned in the claim: that some recommended charities may have unintended negative consequences inadequately disclosed by evaluators. The source does not mention the other two concerns: undermining duties to family, local community, or compatriots; and that 'earning to give' frameworks may normalize participation in ethically questionable industries. The source does not mention GWWC (Giving What We Can) or its supporters publishing responses to these concerns.
“One common response is that it’s still not OK to participate in the Wall Street “system”. If you make commodities more expensive through trading and excessive speculation, than donate your a portion of your profits to starving people, it’s a bit disingenuous, because you are part of the reason that the price of their food is beyond their reach.”
unsupported unsupported unsupported wrong_attribution
“An almost 900 incredible people took the 🔸10% Pledge in 2024. That's almost 900 individuals who will donate, on average, around $100,000 dollars over their lifetime to the people, animals, and causes that need it most. It also shows renewed momentum: as a community of pledgers and donors, we donated over $80M to charity in 2024 alone. And compared to 600 new 🔸10% Pledgers in 2023, almost 900 new 🔸10% Pledges is a more than 50% acceleration of our growth .”
The source does not mention a 2025 strategy or a long-term goal of reaching 1 million pledgers donating $3 billion annually. The source mentions that the author can’t wait to see the community grow to one million, but this is not presented as an official organizational goal. The source mentions GiveWell noting GWWC's milestone of reaching 10,000 total 10% pledgers, but this information is not in the provided source.
“We now have 12,086 members, who have donated more than $ 357,293,413 to charity.”
The source states that GWWC has 12,086 members, not 10,000 pledgers by 2025. The source states that GWWC members have donated more than $357,293,413 to charity, not over $340 million.
“Giving What We Can is the brainchild of Toby Ord , a philosopher at Balliol College, Oxford. Inspired by the ideas of ethicists such as Peter Singer , Toby decided in 2009 to commit a large proportion of his income to effective charities. Discovering that many of his friends and colleagues were interested in making a similar pledge, Toby Ord worked with fellow Oxford philosopher Will MacAskill to create an international organisation of people who would donate a significant proportion of their incomes to cost-effective charities. Together with his wife Bernadette Young , Ord and co-founder MacAskill launched Giving What We Can in November 2009, attracting significant media attention .”
The claim that Bernadette Young was 'then a physician in training' is not explicitly stated in the source. The source only mentions that she is Toby Ord's wife. The claim that GWWC encourages members to pledge 'at least 10% of their income' is not explicitly stated in the source. The source only mentions that members donate a 'significant proportion' of their incomes.
“Our other supported programs are those that align with our charitable purpose — they are working on a high-impact problem and take a reasonably promising approach (based on publicly-available information).”
The source does not mention that GWWC has highlighted AI safety and governance organizations, nor does it recommend GovAI as a funding opportunity for donors concerned about existential risk from advanced AI systems. The source only states that GWWC does not evaluate individual charities and that their recommendations are based on the research of third-party, impact-focused charity evaluators.
“If you think these technical problems are a significant challenge that we could make progress on, we recommend donating to the Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence (CHAI). Their research agenda is to find a new model of AI in which the AI's objective is to satisfy human preferences. If you think good governance around powerful AI is important, we recommend donating to the Centre for the Governance of AI (GovAI). GovAI's aim is to provide foundational research that can be used to ensure highly advanced AI is developed safely and used to everyone's benefit.”
“We are setting ourselves a long-term Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG) of 1 million pledgers donating $3B USD to high-impact charities annually, which we will start working towards in 2025.”
WRONG NUMBERS: The source states that nearly $50 million USD was donated to high-impact charities annually, not $80 million in 2024. WRONG NUMBERS: The source states that almost 10,000 people have taken the 10% Pledge, not that this milestone was reached in August 2025.
“Giving What We Can (GWWC) is working towards a world without preventable suffering or existential risk, where everyone is able to flourish. We believe that effective charitable donations can do an astonishing amount of good towards that end. Thus, we're on a mission to create a world in which giving effectively and significantly is a cultural norm .”
The source does not mention the 10% pledge. The source does not mention that the organization was founded at Oxford University by Toby Ord, William MacAskill, and Bernadette Young.
“There are all kinds of clever objections people might make—and indeed have made—to it.”
The source does not mention 'critics in the EA-adjacent community', 'duties to family, local community, or compatriots', 'some recommended charities may have unintended negative consequences inadequately disclosed by evaluators', or 'GWWC and its supporters have published responses to many of these concerns, but the debates remain active.'
“Giving What We Can bases its charity recommendations on the research of impact-focused, expert charity evaluators like GiveWell , Longview Philanthropy , and EA Funds . We decide which evaluators to defer to for our recommendations and grantmaking based on our evaluators research .”
“Thinking about a major gift or a long-term giving plan? We’d love to talk! Our aim is to help you have the biggest impact with your giving. And if we can’t provide what you need, we’ll connect you with the right person from our network of hundreds of trusted researchers and advisors.”