Support our work

The research behind this fund was made possible by individual donors who back Rethink Priorities, and depends on continued support to stay rigorous, current, and useful.

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Our team

A team built for cross-cause thinking

The Rethink Priorities Cross-Cause Fund sits on top of work done by our Worldview Investigations Team (WIT), and Interdisciplinary Research Team, groups established specifically to tackle the hard questions that most donors don't have time to engage with: how to compare welfare across species, how to reason under deep uncertainty, how to weigh present benefits against future ones, how to aggregate competing moral views into a single allocation.

The team brings together training in philosophy, economics, statistics, cognitive science, moral psychology, and decision theory . The fund's allocations also draw on the in-house expertise of RP's Global Health and Development, Animal Welfare, AI departments, so the cross-cause model is informed by researchers working directly in each area, not just secondary literature.

Support value

What individual donors have made possible

The Cross-Cause Fund and Donor Compass exist because individual donors believed cross-cause prioritization research was worth funding. Six years of their support have underwritten:

The Moral Weight Project, the first serious effort to compare welfare capacities across species
The CURVE sequence on how risk attitudes, discounting, and uncertainty change cause prioritization
The CRAFT sequence, including the Giving Portfolio Builder and Moral Parliament tools for reasoning under moral uncertainty
The Cross-Cause Cost-Effectiveness Model that sits behind the Fund's recommended allocation

Everything on this website, including our recommended allocation, the Donor Compass, and the methodology, rests on that body of work.

Our Plans

What additional funding would unlock

More support lets us keep this infrastructure live and extend it. In the near term, we plan to:

Add cause areas

Climate change and non-partisan democracy protection are both under active assessment. We've completed initial work comparing climate interventions to global health interventions, and we've commissioned a review of democracy-focused giving.

Add funds

The Lead Exposure Action Fund is already being integrated. Giving Green and others, including Ambitious Impact funding circles and the Survival and Flourishing Fund, are on our evaluation list.

Keep the model current

Cost-effectiveness estimates, moral weights, and fund-level data go stale quickly. A meaningful share of donor support simply pays for the ongoing maintenance that keeps the allocation honest.

Refine the methodology

We're finalizing dedicated methodology, optimal-spending, and donor-preference documents, each drawing on WIT's broader research agenda.

Improve the Donor Compass

We want to iterate on the tool based on user feedback, making it clearer, more intuitive, and better at helping donors translate their values into a personalized allocation.

Explore longer-term frontiers

Digital minds and AI welfare, wild animal welfare, additional biosecurity interventions, and economic growth interventions in low- and high-income countries are all on our longer-term agenda.

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How to support

If these tools have been useful to you, consider donating to Rethink Priorities. Your support helps us refine the models, update the data, and expand the range of funds and cause areas covered — so more donors can give more effectively.

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Prefer to talk first? Reach out at fund@rethinkpriorities.org.