LTFF and EAIF are unusually funding-constrained right now
UPDATE 2023/09/13: Including only money that has already landed in our bank account and extremely credible donor promises of funding, LTFF has raised ~1.1M and EAIF has raised ~500K. After Open Phil matching, this means LTFF now has ~3.3M additional funding and EAIF has ~1.5m in additional funding. From my (Linch)'s perspective, this means both LTFF nor EAIF are no longer very funding constrained for the time period we wanted to raise money for (the next ~6 months), however both funds are still funding constrained and can productively make good grants with additional funding. See this comment for more details. Summary EA Funds aims to empower thoughtful individuals and small groups to carry out altruistically impactful projects - in particular, enabling and accelerating small/medium-sized projects (with grants <$300K). We are looking to increase our level of independence from other actors within the EA and longtermist funding landscape and are seeking to raise ~$2.7M for the Long-Term Future Fund and ~$1.7M for the EA Infrastructure Fund (~$4.4M total) over the next six months. Why donate to EA Funds? EA Funds is the largest funder of small projects in the longtermist and EA infrastructure spaces, and has had a solid operational track record of giving out hundreds of high-quality grants a year to individuals and small projects. We believe that we’re well-placed to fill the role of a significant independent grantmaker, because of a combination of our track record, our historical role in this position, and the quality of our fund managers. Why now? We think now is an unusually good time to donate to us, as a) we have an unexpectedly large funding shortage, b) there are great projects on the margin that we can’t currently fund, and c) more stabilized funding now can give us time to try to find large individual and institutional donors to cover future funding needs. Importantly, Open Philanthropy is no longer providing a guaranteed amount of funding to us and