# Giving What We Can **Giving What We Can (GWWC)** is the **pledge-community organization at the heart of the Effective Altruism movement**, founded in November 2009 at the University of Oxford by philosophers [[Toby Ord]] and [[William MacAskill]]. Its flagship program is **the GWWC Pledge** — a public, legally non-binding commitment by the pledger to donate at least **10% of their lifetime post-tax income** to the charities they consider most effective. By 2026 the pledger count had crossed approximately 9,000 public signatories, with cumulative pledged donations (based on projections of current pledger income over remaining working lives) estimated in the billions of dollars. GWWC is operationally under the [[Centre for Effective Altruism]] umbrella (though undergoing operational decentralization as of 2024-2026) and substantially funded through [[Open Philanthropy]]. GWWC matters for the KB for three reasons. First, it is the **single most important individual-level recruiting mechanism in the Effective Altruism movement** — a public pledge converts someone from sympathetic-but-uncommitted into a community member with an ongoing financial stake and a visible, trackable identity in the movement's institutional apparatus. Second, it is the **originating institutional moment** of EA as an organized movement rather than just a philosophical argument — the pledge predates the [[Centre for Effective Altruism]] by two years and is the community nucleus around which CEA was later built. Third, its **public pledger registry** functions as a large-scale dataset of the EA community's social and professional networks — a dataset that has been used by researchers inside and outside the movement to map the demographic, occupational, and geographic characteristics of the Effective Altruism community. ## Founding (2009) GWWC emerged from a series of 2008-2009 conversations at Oxford's Faculty of Philosophy among a small group of graduate students and early-career philosophers, including Ord, MacAskill (then known as William Crouch), and several others. The intellectual inputs were: - **Peter Singer's "Famine, Affluence, and Morality" (1972)** — the foundational essay arguing that relatively wealthy people have strong moral obligations to direct resources toward the world's poorest - **[[Derek Parfit]]'s *Reasons and Persons* (1984)** — the philosophical framework for aggregating moral value across individuals and across time - **[[GiveWell]]'s emerging evidence-based-charity research (2007 onward)** — the practical demonstration that charities vary by orders of magnitude in cost-effectiveness, making deliberate choice of recipient a significant moral question Ord's personal practice was the proximate catalyst. Ord had committed to live on a modest fixed income (initially around £18,000/year, adjusted for inflation since) and donate everything above that threshold — a commitment he has maintained for more than 15 years. The pledge infrastructure was created in part to allow others to make structurally similar commitments at lower personal cost (the 10% floor is a meaningful commitment without requiring Ord's level of personal sacrifice). The founding event was a launch announcement at the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics at Oxford in November 2009. The original signatories were ~23 Oxford-area philosophers, students, and early supporters. ## The Pledge Structure The core GWWC commitment has several structural features worth noting: - **10% minimum, lifetime**: The pledger commits to donating at least 10% of their post-tax income, every year, for the remainder of their working life (or until they withdraw the pledge) - **To the most effective charities the pledger can identify**: Not to a specific organization or GWWC itself — the pledger retains full discretion on recipient, with guidance provided by GWWC's research and recommendations - **Public**: The pledger's name, commitment date, and home country are recorded on the GWWC website's public pledger registry - **Legally non-binding**: No legal mechanism enforces the pledge; withdrawal is possible and publicly recorded - **The Trial Pledge**: A lower-commitment variant (1-9% for a defined period) for people not ready for the lifetime commitment Alongside the individual pledge, GWWC has expanded to operate: - **Company Pledge**: For businesses committing to a percentage of profits - **Further Pledge**: For pledgers committing to higher percentages (Ord's personal commitment is one example) - **Donation processing**: GWWC operates infrastructure for pledgers to route giving through tax-efficient vehicles in multiple countries - **Charity evaluation**: GWWC publishes research on which charities it considers most effective, drawing on GiveWell, Open Philanthropy, and internal analysis ## The Earning to Give Doctrine GWWC is intellectually inseparable from the **"earning to give"** doctrine — the EA claim, articulated prominently by MacAskill and Ord, that someone with the capacity for a high-earning career may do more good by taking that career and donating aggressively than by entering a direct-service profession. The doctrine was influential within the movement through the 2010s and was a significant justification for EA-community celebration of figures like [[Sam Bankman-Fried]] before the FTX collapse. Post-FTX, the doctrine has been substantially re-examined within EA, with many figures (including MacAskill) walking back the more aggressive formulations. The GWWC pledge itself does not require earning to give — most pledgers are not exceptionally high earners — but the pledge and the earning-to-give doctrine were historically connected in how EA recruited and retained high-income professionals. ## Growth Curve GWWC's pledger count growth is documentary of EA's broader expansion: - **2009**: ~23 initial signatories (Oxford-area philosophers and students) - **2013**: ~400 pledgers - **2016**: ~2,000 pledgers - **2020**: ~5,000 pledgers (accelerating with the 10-year anniversary push) - **2023**: ~8,000 pledgers - **2026**: approximately 9,000 pledgers The **cumulative pledged donations** — a projection of pledger income over remaining working lives at 10% — is estimated in the low billions of dollars. Actual donations routed through GWWC's tracking infrastructure are a subset of this (many pledgers donate without formally reporting through GWWC), but the reporting donations alone are in the hundreds of millions of dollars cumulative. ## Institutional Relationship with CEA and Open Philanthropy GWWC became part of the [[Centre for Effective Altruism]] umbrella when CEA was founded in 2011; for more than a decade GWWC operated as a CEA program rather than an independent organization. The 2023-2026 decentralization of CEA's sub-organizations has begun moving GWWC toward greater operational independence, part of the broader post-FTX governance reforms. Funding has come principally from [[Open Philanthropy]] grants to CEA, from individual donor support within the EA community, and from GWWC's own donation-processing fee structure. As with CEA generally, the Open Philanthropy funding dependence is a recurring topic of governance debate. ## Critical Commentary GWWC has faced fewer specific criticisms than other EA organizations — the pledge structure is widely respected across the political spectrum as a meaningful personal commitment — but several lines of critical commentary are documented: - **Rich-world framing**: Critics argue that the pledge's 10%-of-post-tax-income structure is calibrated to professional-class Western incomes and effectively operates as a movement for relatively wealthy English-speaking pledgers - **Cause-area drift**: The post-2015 shift in EA priorities toward AI safety and longtermism has meant that pledgers' aggregate giving has shifted toward those areas over time, a shift that some pledgers — especially those who joined on the global-health framing — have found disorienting - **Community dynamics**: The public pledge registry creates a visible community identity that some community members describe as productive and others describe as socially binding in ways that make exit from the community (or serious critical engagement with the movement) personally costly ## Connection to the KB Ecosystem - **[[Effective Altruism]]**: GWWC is the movement's oldest institutional expression; the 2009 founding is EA's institutional origin point. - **[[Centre for Effective Altruism]]**: Parent organization from 2011 until the 2023-2026 decentralization; shares funding, staff, and governance with CEA. - **[[Toby Ord]] / [[William MacAskill]]**: Co-founders; Ord's personal practice is the proximate catalyst for the pledge structure. - **[[Peter Singer]]**: Intellectual grandparent; "Famine, Affluence, and Morality" is the foundational essay. - **[[Open Philanthropy]]**: Principal funder of the operational infrastructure. - **[[Dustin Moskovitz]]**: Signatory (through Moskovitz/Tuna public giving) and principal funder of the umbrella operation. - **[[Longtermism]] / [[TESCREAL]]**: The post-2015 longtermist turn has shifted the aggregate direction of pledger giving toward longtermist cause areas. - **Earning-to-give doctrine**: GWWC is institutionally adjacent to the earning-to-give argument that was a prominent part of EA recruiting in the 2010s and was partially walked back post-FTX. ## See Also - [[Toby Ord]] - [[William MacAskill]] - [[Peter Singer]] - [[Centre for Effective Altruism]] - [[80,000 Hours]] - [[Open Philanthropy]] - [[Dustin Moskovitz]] - [[Effective Altruism]] - [[Longtermism]] - [[TESCREAL]]