Hey everyone! The next issue of TBD wasn't scheduled to go out until June, but because a lot has gone down the past month (to say the least), I've put together this supplemental edition to share some important, time-sensitive new resources.
Like many of you, I saw my world change dramatically in what seemed like the blink of an eye back in mid-March. Within a span of a long weekend, we went from dropping off my older child at preschool as normal to the governor of my state ordering all restaurants and other gathering spaces closed by nightfall. By the end of that same week, large swaths of the United States were under mandatory stay-at-home orders with no end date in sight. Looking back, it feels like all of these changes just kind of happened. But it's important to remember that each of them was the result of a policy decision made by a person or group of people who got together, considered the options, and determined what they felt was the best choice.
Most of us won't ever be faced with a dilemma as momentous as whether to lock down an entire state or country, but the decisions social sector leaders in the days and weeks ahead are nevertheless fraught with great uncertainty and have the potential to impact lots of people's lives. So how should we respond? Clients and colleagues have been reaching out to me in recent weeks to ask for help thinking through that question, so I wrote an article as a guide for all of us in the social sector who are grappling with this moment. I considered some fundamental questions I keep hearing over and over again, including:
- Is it wise to divert resources from our mission to address COVID-19?
- Should I dip into my endowment/reserves or take on debt to deal with the crisis?
- How can I plan effectively in the midst of such tremendous uncertainty?
- What does it mean to evaluate impact in a time like this?
- What can I do today to make a difference?
Whether you want to do everything you can to stop the pandemic in its tracks, are more concerned with managing the indirect effects of the crisis, or are still trying to figure out the role we ought to play, we can all benefit from considering our options carefully and rigorously. My goal in this piece is to help you figure out what the right path looks like for you and your team, regardless of where you sit. And if you'd like further assistance, feel free to reach out — I’m happy to chat.
(Continue reading)
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CoronaGiving: Strategies to Defeat the Pandemic
Over the past couple of weeks, I've been working with a small group of individual donors who are interested in finding the best opportunities to donate money, time, and other resources to fight the pandemic. So far, we have identified around 25 strong candidates and are in the process of preparing an article for the Effective Altruism Forum that will include our top recommendations and where we decided to direct funds. In the meantime, I am posting links and brief commentary on many of the potential grantees and actions we're considering on a running basis.
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Stuff You Should Know About
- Several resources are now available to researchers for tracking government actions in various places around the world. The most comprehensive database is the University of Oxford's Coronavirus Government Response Tracker, which calculates a "stringency index" by country covering school and workplace closings, restrictions on movement, and other social distancing policies globally. (I was surprised to learn that most of the world's schools are no longer operating, even in countries with few confirmed cases.) Another resource, COVID-19 Policy Watch, is slightly more user-friendly but only tracks 18 countries at present. Finally, another group at the University of Oxford, the Future of Humanity Institute, is in the process of building out its own database of policy responses that is currently incomplete but contains more disaggregated data than the other two.
- Now that they've faced down the decision of whether to implement a lockdown, the biggest question policymakers are grappling with now is when and how to open things back up. It's hardly a simple decision, with the costs of the shutdown rapidly skyrocketing on the one hand but lagging testing capacity, no treatments yet confirmed to be effective on the other. Some other relevant considerations? People tend to be quite resilient to hardship in general, but long-term unemployment is a notable exception. In the developing world, there is a much stronger argument to be made that lockdowns cause more harm than good due both to more fragile economic conditions as well as the fact that the average population is much younger. At the same time, the supply chain problems causing shortages of personal protective equipment like face masks are not easily solved and testing methodologies may not yet be precise enough for a post-lockdown reality. Our friend Tomas Pueyo, whose work was featured in the last TBD, has continued posting some of the best analysis on this over the past month, but many details remain to be sorted out.
- If you had told me a month ago that some of the most thoughtful social media commentary on the intersection of pandemic policy, disinformation, and the philosophy of science would be coming from the frozen meat company Steak-Umm, I....well, I'm not quite sure what I would have said, to be honest. But 2020 has brought strange times, and here we are. Steak-Umm's highbrow musings coincided with the hiring of one Nathan Allebach as its social media manager, and strange as it may seem there really is a marketing strategy behind it all. As Allebach put it back in October 2018: "We’ll see. I’m planning to go pretty far with it."
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Reassessing Your Philanthropy in the Time of COVID
Earlier this month, The Philanthropy Workshop, a training and peer learning program for major donors and foundation trustees, hired me on short notice to deliver a presentation on adapting principles of strategic philanthropy to the current crisis. TPW recorded the program and is making it available for free to help a broader audience benefit from the insights we generated. Click below to view the program (40 minutes):
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That's all for now!
If you enjoyed this edition of TBD, please consider forwarding it to a friend. It's easy to sign up here. See you next time!
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