Christian Campaign for Effective Charity - Guidance for Donors

If you haven’t done so already, read about the charities supported by the Christian Campaign for Effective Charity here.

Choosing Among Charities

Three of the five charitable programs highlighted as OFTW Top Picks (Against Malaria Foundation, Malaria Consortium, Helen Keller International) are estimated to save lives at a similar estimated cost, of $3,000-$5,000 on average. Among these three, it’s difficult to choose any one over the others. Perhaps the key takeaway is that for many of us in developed economies, over the course of our own lifetimes, our giving is capable of saving multiple lives. 

The other two top picks (Deworm the World, GiveDirectly) focus less directly on preventable deaths, and more on the general burden of extreme poverty. It’s hard to say which of these themes is more important overall. Jesus spoke about both “having life” and “having it abundantly”, but gives us no formula to make tradeoffs between longevity and quality of life in our charitable giving. Between the two “quality-of-life” charities on the list, it is also difficult to decide. GiveWell notes that if their internal estimates are accurate, deworming is “significantly more cost-effective than cash transfers”. On the other hand, they note that evidence in favor of cash transfers is “exceptionally strong”, while deworming’s benefits have a higher margin of uncertainty. There is also the question of whether to give more weight to experts (GiveWell has access to much better data than the typical person in extreme poverty about what interventions work best for a given problem) or to the individual beneficiaries of charity (who have direct access to their own preferences and priorities). It’s not an easy call to make, and GiveWell maintains an admirable amount of humility in their recommendations, while making a great deal of material available to the public.

Keeping in mind that great commandment “love your neighbor as yourself”, it can be helpful to imagine that you were born into extreme poverty, potentially facing any of the threats that these charities address. This exercise can help you reflect on the things that are hard to quantify, and overlay this with the evidence GiveWell has carefully assembled about things that can be quantified (noting as they do in all of their materials the various uncertainties behind the estimates they are making). Some of this evidence includes things like surveys of low-income individuals about how they view difficult trade-offs. This material challenges us not to overweight our own intuitions, but always to keep the beneficiaries of our giving in mind.

You can bring all this to God in prayer, asking as Solomon did, for a “discerning heart” or an “understanding mind”. In the end, choosing the one charity that is most compelling to you is an option, as is just supporting all five via the default OFTW Top Picks donation option. Another excellent option is to select GiveWell’s Maximum Impact Fund. This option gives GiveWell discretion to apply the funds wherever the potential impact is greatest, taking into account the latest information about each charity’s room for additional funding. You can read more about their process here.

Potential Concerns

Finally, the campaign offers the option of contributing to a much broader portfolio of charities, the Entire OFTW Portfolio. You can view the list of 18 charities in this portfolio (the 5 top picks plus 13 others) here. We won’t discuss each of these in detail, and our team is not quite as familiar with the rest of the list as we are the OFTW Top Picks.

However, if you do go this route we would raise a couple of concerns. First, keep in mind that concentrating your giving on a short list of highly effective charities does not mean that you think everything else is unworthy of funding. One helpful principle is thinking at the margin; given the funding decisions made by others, it’s good to ask where your donation will do the most additional good. GiveWell narrows down their recommendations to a reasonably short list by focusing on room for more funding as a key input into their process; and OFTW’s Top Picks portfolio narrows this down further by just picking one among several current GiveWell top charities in the deworming space that are very similar.

The second concern we would flag is specific to just one of the 18 charities in that broader portfolio - Development Media International (DMI). Their objective is to “run radio, television and mobile campaigns to change behaviours and improve lives in developing countries”. Over the years, their programs have covered a broad range of topics including child development, nutrition, and tuberculosis testing. Another subject they have covered is family planning, including topics like artificial contraception, which could be of concern to some Christians but not to others. As an ecumenical organization, EA for Christians does not take positions on many matters that various churches and individuals within churches see differently. We do, however, seek to flag any potential areas of controversy that might arise from a faith-based perspective, and let donors make up their own minds. A description of DMI’s most recent family planning initiative, and sample media materials, can be found here.

Over time, as the list of included charities changes, perhaps the most important aspect of this review process will not be in the very occasional identification of the potential conflicts between some Christian perspectives and mainstream effective altruism, but in highlighting just how infrequently such conflicts arise, and how much common ground we all have, especially when it comes to helping the poor. Our hope is that the layer of review we provide as a Christian organization, combined with the opportunity to give in Jesus’s name, will encourage donors otherwise wary of secular charities to give with confidence.

Being the Hands of Christ

In closing, as you think through the guidance offered here, perhaps reflect upon on this:

Remember Christ has no human body now upon the earth but yours; no hands but yours; no feet but yours. Yours, my brothers and sisters, are the eyes through which Christ's compassion has to look upon the world, and yours are the lips with which His love has to speak.

These words are commonly attributed to St. Teresa of Avila, but other sources (here and here) state that Sarah Elizabeth Rowntree, a Quaker medical missionary, would be the accurate attribution. Whoever said it first, the lines speak powerfully to us today as we seek to be good stewards of whatever resources are at our disposal.

One might note that God has other ways of healing the world besides ourselves: spiritual comforts, miracles, answered prayers, divine intervention, and such. But the call for us to act is always there too, as Jesus taught us to follow the example of the Good Samaritan. As a community of Christians given the tools of effective altruism, let us seek to act in support of those words in the Lord’s Prayer: “thy kingdom come, thy will be done”.