2020-H1 grant round

SFF’s had finalized its grant decisions for 2020-H1:
SFF-2010-H1 S-process Recommendations Announcement

The total funding distributed will be around $1.8MM, above the high end of our expected $0.8MM-1.5MM estimate. We are considering running another similar grant round in 2020-H2 (July-Dec), but a final decision on this has not been made.

2019-Q4 grant round

SFF had finalized most of its grant decisions for 2019-Q4:
SFF-2019-Q4 S-process Recommendations Announcement

The total funding distributed will be around $2MM, at the high end of our expected $1MM-$2MM estimate. We are considering running another similar grant round in Q2, Q3, or Q4 of 2020, but this decision has not been finalized.

About Us

Survivalandflourishing.fund is a website maintained by the Fund Advisors of the Survival and Flourishing Fund (SFF), a Donor Advised Fund held at the Silicon Valley Community Foundation.

Our goal is to bring financial support to organizations working to improve humanity’s long-term prospects for survival and flourishing. We use this website to host announcements about our plans to investigate grant-making opportunities.

SFF was initially funded in 2019 by a grant of approximately $2 million from the Organizational Grants Program of the Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative (BERI), which in turn was funded by donations from philanthropist Jaan Tallinn.

Survival and Flourishing Fund Advisors

Alex Flint

Fund Advisor

Alex Flint previously worked as Staff Software Engineer at Cruise Automation, which creates autonomous driving technology. Alex joined Cruise after the company he co-founded, Zippy, was acquired. Previously, Alex was Head of Engineering at Kite. Alex holds a DPhil in Engineering from Oxford University and a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Adelaide.

Andrew Critch

Fund Advisor

Andrew Critch is currently a full-time research scientist in the EECS department at UC Berkeley, at Stuart Russell's Center for Human Compatible AI. He earned his PhD in mathematics at UC Berkeley studying applications of algebraic geometry to machine learning models. During that time, he cofounded the Center for Applied Rationality and SPARC. Andrew has been offered university faculty positions in mathematics and mathematical biosciences, worked as an algorithmic stock trader at Jane Street Capital's New York City office, and as a research fellow at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. His current research interests include logical uncertainty, open source game theory, and avoiding arms race dynamics between nations and companies in AI development.

Eric Rogstad

Fund Advisor

Eric works at EMX.com, where he was a founding engineer, building a new cryptocurrency derivatives exchange. Previously, he worked as a software engineer at Microsoft and Amazon.com, and was co-founder of Arbital.com, a platform for finding, reading, and creating crowdsourced, intuitive explanations, developed partly in response to the observation that arguments about civilization-scale priorities like existential risk are complex and in need of better organizational tools for conveying them. Eric holds a BSE in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Duke University.

Past Grant Recommendations

Below is a complete list of grants we have thus far recommended to be made from the Survival and Flourishing Fund, accurate up to the final date listed in the table. Recommendations after that final date might not be listed yet.

Date of Recommendation	Grantee Organization	Amount	Purpose
2019-08	80,000 Hours	280000	General Support
2019-08	Center For Applied Rationality	110000	General Support
2019-08	Centre for the Study of Existential Risk	40000	General Support
2019-08	Future of Life Institute	130000	General Support
2019-08	Global Catastrophic Risks Institute	60000	General Support
2019-08	LessWrong 2.0	260000	General Support
2019-11	80,000 Hours	40000	General Support of 80,000 Hours
2019-11	AI Impacts	70000	General Support of AI Impacts
2019-11	AAAI/ACM conference on AI, Ethics and Society (AIES 2020)	20000	General Support of AIES
2019-11	Alliance to Feed the Earth in Disasters (ALLFED)	10000	General Support of ALLFED
2019-11	Center For Applied Rationality	150000	General Support
2019-11	Charter Cities Institute	60000	General Support of the Charter Cities Institute
2019-11	Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, University of Cambridge	50000	General Support of Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, University of Cambridge
2019-11	Earth Law Center	30000	General Support
2019-11	Global Catastrophic Risk Institute	30000	General Support of GCRI
2019-11	Longevity Research Institute	160000	General Support
2019-11	Median Group	50000	General Support
2019-11	Modeling Cooperation	50000	General Support of Modeling Cooperation
2019-11	OAK (Optimizing Awakening and Kindness)	100000	General Support of OAK (Optimizing Awakening and Kindness)
2019-11	Ought Inc.	100000	General Support
2020-05	LessWrong	290000	General Support
2020-05	Machine Intelligence Research Institute	20000	General Support
2020-05	Quantified Uncertainty Research Institute	120000	General Support
2020-05	80,000 Hours	120000	General Support
2020-05	Future of Life Institute	100000	General Support

Contact

If you need to reach SFF, you can send an email to sff(char)contact@googlegroups.com, with (char) replaced by a hyphen (to avoid spam). Note that we are a volunteer-run organization and might take some time to respond.