In this post, I’m going to take a fresh look at malnutrition, a cause that interests me a lot. I have two goals in mind here: Think through the issue, and what I’d need to know to decide where to donate. This is particularly relevant since there’s a good chance we’ll be studying malnutrition in…

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Sean Stannard-Stockton wants to see more research focused on particular nonprofits, rather than on “techniques” for helping people; his reasoning is that this would be more useful to donors. I don’t believe it’s possible to evaluate a nonprofit as an organization, completely in isolation from what it does and whether it works. Especially if I’m…

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Sean asks (via email): What’s your view on whether funders should do research on techniques and then fund organizations that use those techniques or do research on organizations and let them decide on techniques? I was intrigued with your education research post, but was wondering if it might make more sense to find smart dynamic…

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About a year ago, we participated in a Giving Carnival on the topic of metrics in philanthropy, and laid out the metrics we were planning on using – along with caveats. Seeing a continuing interest in this topic (even including a panel called “Metrics Mania”), I’d like to share a bit of my progressed thinking…

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There’s a big question in my mind about K-12 education. The question is which of the following hypotheses about helping disadvantaged children is the best bet: Disadvantaged children are so far behind by age 5 that there’s nothing substantial to be done for them in the K-12 system. Disadvantaged children are so far behind by…

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Phil Cubeta’s recent post about payday loans got me thinking about our choice to grant a microfinance organization in our Global Poverty cause. We decided to grant Opportunity International for two reasons: The belief that there is likely a significant shortage of access to credit in the developing world. The very fact that someone repays…

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