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We’ve still not fixed the malaria problem… ðŸ¦Ÿ

… So I’ve donated 10% of my 2025 salary (sorry, a bit belatedly) to some top malaria prevention charities, and some other charities too.

I blog here for my own accountability and in the small hope it might encourage others to do so.

Whenever I waiver about whether this is a good idea, I like to read Julia Wise (normative determinism in full flow). In a recent blog post, she put it very simply:

  • The world has a lot of appalling problems. Many can’t be addressed very well with money, but some can.
  • On a rich-country income [check out how rich you are] you almost surely have some income you could dedicate to making the world better in whatever way seems best to you.
  • This is best done not impulsively and sporadically, but deliberately as part of your ongoing budget.
  • Donating a fraction of your income is a pretty great opportunity to make the world more like what you want it to be: with less suffering, more progress, more fairness, or whatever seems best to you.
  • You don’t have to agree with my choice of where to donate! Think it through yourself!
  • My ask to you for the coming year: think seriously about how much you want to give, and where you want to give it. One tool that I recommend is making a pledge (either for a period of time, or ongoing).

This is all done very easily over Giving What We Can’s platform — where you can select from a range of charities or cause areas. This time I plumped for GiveWell’s Top Charities Fund, which isn’t much different than the GWWC Global Health and Wellbeing Fund that I’d normally give to, but perhaps a bit more cautious.

My donation, which with gift aid, comes up to around £4,000, buys a lot of nets, seasonal chemoprevention, routine childhood vaccinations and vitamin A supplements. In all likelihood, this will save a child’s life. Maybe two.

It’s a drop in the ocean when the USA has withdrawn so much funding for global health (risking 14m deaths over the next five years), but even more vital as a result.

Join me! There’s some helpful info on trying out regular giving here: https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/get-involved/trial-pledge

Photo (of magnolia, cos it’s spring) by Til Man on Unsplash

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2024’s donations

A nurse in Indonesia

This blog is now basically just a public record of my donation pledge… I aim to write more, about other stuff, at some point. 

See previous years’ posts for the explanation of why giving 10% of your salary is a moral imperative — and also made very straightforward by the good people at Giving What We Can. 

I’ve previously donated 10% before tax, but they recommend including the gift aid in your pledge. In calendar year 2024, I earned about £40k, so I’m donating £3.2k. With gift aid of £800, this is a pretty handy amount of cash for Giving What We Can’s Global Health Fund.

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Donation record for 2023

Sorry if I’ve mentioned this before, but if you’re reading this, you’re probably in the top 5% of high earners worldwide. Perhaps top 2-3%.

If you’re not sure, you can look it up via this handy calculator.

In the absence of a global wealth taxation scheme to fund global public health – it’s just around the corner I’m sure – it’s up to you do the right thing and donate to some effective health charities.

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Very belated new year’s donations

Photo by Marta Branco on Pexels.com

The photo of turmeric will be explained, promise.

I’m very behind on life admin. Here’s what is normally an early January post of new year’s day donations. (New year’s day because it was a new year’s resolution…today it might make more sense to combine this now with something like #GivingTuesday – although that’s only a thing because Black Friday is a thing, and that’s upsetting).

Going back seven years now, I donate 10% of my earnings before tax to some of the world’s most effective health charities. I blog about it pour encourager les autres.

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Open grant applications

Previously, on this blog:

  • Research into the democracy ‘sector’ suggests that some efforts could be made to improve networking in the space (and that this is an excellent way to support the pursuit of a better democracy);
  • I wrote up some ways to do that… but it rather depends how much money is available;
  • The Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust (JRRT) put out a call for proposals to do some of this work.

On Monday, myself and a team of partners put in a bid to answer that call for proposals. Our approach has been to attempt to live the values of the thing we think should exist in future: including working together (hence five different organisations/individuals coming together on the bid) and in regards to openness: we shared a summary of our bid doc for feedback (thanks everyone who made suggestions!) — and now, here’s the actual full bid doc. (The only thing I’ve removed is the list of endorsements, because we didn’t tell endorsers that they’d be public.)

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Root causes and other stories

Last year, I published the results of a range of interviews across the democracy sector. It was only a small project, so I wasn’t able to speak to everyone I had hoped to.

Happily, Nesta funded an ‘expansion pack’ of interviews, and some more insight from these chats is below. I hope it’s of use to anyone thinking about ways to support the sector, and thus, a better democracy.

I spoke to 16 new people over the last couple of months. Given the typical size of organisations in the sector, these were mainly CEOs. Most people were working on democracy as their core mission, but for some it was one of many themes that their organisation worked on. The interviewees were a diverse group across genders, ages, locations and ethnicities. They included people working for non-profits, charities and for-profits — and people no longer working on democracy.

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Sketches for a democracy network hub

Previously, on worrying-about-democracy:

  • Our democracy needs some work;
  • Perhaps the cheapest and quickest first step is to better connect everyone who’s already working on democracy, share info, coordinate and collaborate;
  • That seems to be popular — there are lots of ideas for how this could work and what people would want from such a network; and,
  • The Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust are up for funding some of the effort needed to make this happen.

So what does that effort look like?

I’ve made a to-do list, based on the Networking for Democracy report and from further chats across the space over the last six months.

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