Cause Exploration Prizes
How can we do the most good with the resources available to us?
Open Philanthropy has launched the Cause Exploration Prizes to find ideas for the best ways to use our resources. We invite you to suggest a new area for us to support, or respond to our suggested questions on health, development, or worldview investigations. We are most interested in responses to the "new area” prompt.
Submissions are now closed, and the prize recipients have been announced.
*** Thank you to all who participated in the Cause Exploration Prizes! We have contacted all prize winners via the contact information provided to us in each winning entry. Any prize money not claimed by November 4th, 2022 will be donated to GiveWell ***
First place
$25,000
One prize
Second place
$15,000
Three prizes
Honorable mentions
$500
Up to twenty prizes
Participation
$200
First 200 good-faith submissions
We’ll also invite first- and second-place prize winners (if interested) to present their work to Open Philanthropy’s cause prioritization team. We will compensate people for this time separately.
When do submissions open?
The window for submissions has now closed, and prize recipients have been announced.
The closing date for submissions was Thursday, August 11, 2022, at 11 pm PDT (extended from previous deadline of August 4).
What are the eligible topics?
We’re most interested in responses to our open prompt: “What new cause area should Open Philanthropy consider funding?”
However, our other prompts are equally eligible for prizes, and may be especially interesting to people with prior knowledge in a relevant area. These include questions on health, development, and worldview investigations.
Why are we organizing the Cause Exploration Prizes?
We are a philanthropic funder. Our mission is to help others as much as we can with the resources available to us.
We believe choosing causes is the most important decision a philanthropist can make, so we think hard about where our funding can help others the most. To maximize impact, we prioritize causes based on three criteria: importance, tractability, and neglectedness.
We hope the Cause Exploration Prizes identify new cause areas and funding strategies within our Global Health and Wellbeing portfolio that help us have a large positive impact on the world.
You can read more about Open Philanthropy and see our vision and values on our website. You can also find more information about our process of strategic cause selection.
Will all submissions be posted publicly?
Yes. All good-faith submissions will be shared on the Effective Altruism Forum to allow others to learn from them. If you prefer, your submission can be published anonymously, and we can handle the logistics of posting to the Forum. See more detail on our submissions page.