Projects, People and Processes | Coefficient Giving

Editor’s note: This article was published under our former name, The Open Philanthropy Project. Some content may be outdated. You can see our latest writing here. Holden Karnofsky is a co-founder and the former CEO of Open Philanthropy. He left Open Philanthropy in April 2024. One of the challenges of large-scale philanthropy is: how can a small number of decision-maker(s) (e.g., donors) find a large number of giving opportunities that they understand well enough to feel good about funding? Most of the organizations I’ve seen seem to use some combination of project-based, people-based, and process-based approaches to delegation. To illustrate these, I’ll use the hypothetical example of a grant to fund research into new malaria treatments. I use the term “Program Officers” to refer to the staff primarily responsible for making recommendations to decision-makers. These different classifications can also be useful in thinking about how Program Officers relate to grantees. Program Officers

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• Jeremy Kintana