Effective Altruism

Our faith requires generosity, but not all objects of our generosity are created equal. Four ideas that will make your giving count.

Effective altruism (EA) “is a project that aims to find the best ways to help others and put them into practice.” It’s not really an organization you give money to. It doesn’t have a catchy name like Bread for the World, Habitat for Humanity or Doctors Without Borders. 

It’s a concept that tries to identify the world’s most critical problems and how best to rectify the issues, or how to best alleviate the suffering of the most people. It’s similar to the question of how you feed a village. Do you give everyone some fish and repeat this every week? Or do you give each villager a pole so people can fish on their own? Or do you teach them how to fish?

EA recognizes that you can give two organizations $10 million, and one of them will do a far better job of allocating resources in a way that does the most good for the greatest number of people.

EA began as a theoretical approach to global issues in the early 2000s at Oxford University but...