Animal Welfare Fund

Basic Info

The Animal Welfare Fund aims to effectively improve the well-being of nonhuman animals, by making grants that focus on one or more of the following:

  • Relatively neglected geographic regions or groups of animals
  • Promising research into animal advocacy or animal well-being
  • Activities that could make it easier to help animals in the future
  • Otherwise best-in-class opportunities

Fund Scope

The Fund focuses on projects that primarily address farmed animals, as well as projects that could affect other large populations of nonhuman animals. Some examples of projects that the Fund could support:

  • Supporting farmed animal advocacy in Asia
  • Researching ways to improve the welfare of farmed fish
  • Promoting alternative proteins in order to reduce demand for animal products
  • Advocating against the use of some cruel practice within the industrial agriculture system
  • Growing the field of welfare biology in order to improve our understanding of different ways to address wild animal suffering

Read more about Fund scope and limitations

About the Animal Welfare Fund

The Animal Welfare Fund has historically supported many different interventions, including advocacy in neglected countries, research that improves our understanding of relevant issues, and campaigns that push large corporations to improve their farm animal welfare policies. In recent payouts, the Fund has made a number of small startup grants to emerging organizations, as well as grants to more established players in the space.

Grantmaking and Impact

The Animal Welfare Fund has recommended several million dollars' worth of grants to a range of organizations, including:

Supporting emerging animal welfare groups in a range of countries

The Fund has supported corporate and policy campaigns and movement building for farm animal welfare issues around the world, with grants to advocacy organizations working in 26 countries, including Argentina, Bangladesh, Brazil, Chile, China, Colombia, Czechia, Greece, Hong Kong, Italy, Japan, Poland, South Africa, Spain, Taiwan, Ukraine, and the United States.

Supporting research to improve the focus and efficacy of animal advocacy

In addition to funding direct work on animal welfare, the Fund also supports research that improves our understanding of how to most effectively help animals. This research has focused on better understanding the well-being of wild animals, which species are most promising to focus on, and  which interventions are the most effective at reducing animal suffering.

Supporting campaigns to reform corporate policies

Tens of billions of animals suffer as a result of their use in food production. By tackling this issue at the level of commercial supply chains, corporate campaigns can be high-leverage opportunities to improve the lives of tens of billions of animals. The Fund has granted to a range of organizations with relatively strong track records of securing commitments from large food companies; these organizations include Compassion in World Farming USA and Sinergia Animal.

Supporting research on and advocacy for alternative proteins

Finding culinary alternatives to meat is an important step toward reducing the suffering of animals raised for food. While commercial alternative protein companies are generally able to raise private funding, other organizations that build support for alternative proteins (like academic groups and grassroots organizations) are relatively underfunded. The Fund has granted to organizations around the world, including in the UK (CellAG), Israel (The Modern Agriculture Foundation), and globally (Cellular Agriculture Society).

For more information, please check the full list of the Animal Welfare Fund’s Payout Reports.

Why donate to this Fund?

Animal welfare is a hugely important area due to its scale and neglectedness.

Annually, hundreds of billions of vertebrate animals are subject to factory farming. Roughly 75 billion terrestrial farmed animals are raised and slaughtered each year, as well as tens of billions of farmed fish. Farmed invertebrate animals (for example, shrimp and lobsters) may number in the trillions.

Many experts now agree that numerous species of animals are very likely conscious and capable of feeling pain. Current practices within animal agriculture are likely to cause extreme suffering over the course of animals’ lives. Moreover, there exist hundreds of trillions of wild animals, many of which likely experience significant suffering that could be reduced through human intervention.

The field of animal advocacy receives only a few percent of total charitable donations, with most of that money going to the comparatively few companion animals in shelters. This leads to some groups of animals being highly neglected in relation to their numbers and likely capacity for suffering.

Why you might choose not to donate to this Fund

We think it’s important that donors are well informed when they donate to EA Funds. As such, we think it’s useful to think about the reasons that you might choose to donate elsewhere.

You don’t support working on farmed animal suffering and/or corporate reforms, or you wish to support only a particular type of work

Thus far, much of the Fund’s grant money has gone toward work on reducing farmed animal suffering through positive yet incremental changes to this cruel system. You might believe that it is wrong to support such changes (rather than working to directly eliminate the system). In that case, some of the Fund’s grants may not be a good match for your worldview.

The Fund also supports many different types of work (from research to advocacy); if you think one type of work is more promising than others, you may prefer to give directly to organizations which focus on that work.

The Fund has made a range of grants. Some were aimed at improving farm animal welfare, while others were not (e.g. the March 2019 grant to Wild Animal Initiative for research on interventions to improve the welfare of wild animals). If you would prefer to focus only on animals in a particular context (e.g. only farmed animals, or only wild animals), you may prefer to give directly to organizations which focus on that context.

Payout Reports

Note: Public payout reports are optional for grantees of this fund.

We have discontinued payout reports but you can find our most recent grants here

Animal Welfare Fund FAQ

How do I make a donation using EA Funds?

You can donate to any of the EA Funds by following this link, or clicking the blue button at the top of each Fund’s page.

First, choose the Funds or organizations you would like to make a donation to. You can choose up to 10 Funds/organizations as part of a single allocation.

If you are donating to more than one Fund/organization you'll need to choose how to split your donation between them. By default, all the sliders will be split equally between the Funds/organizations you've chosen. To change this, simply drag the sliders around until you have the allocation you want.


What is the risk profile of the Animal Welfare Fund?

The Animal Welfare Fund makes donations to a range of different interventions. Some are likely to be more proven interventions, while others are likely to be higher-risk, but potentially higher-return opportunities. As such, we categorize the Fund’s risk level as ‘low-medium’.

For more information on how we think about grantmaking risk, please read our Risk Profiles page.


How often does the Animal Welfare Fund make grants?

The Animal Welfare Fund makes grants on the regular EA Funds grantmaking schedule, with recommendations made in February, July, and November each year.


What other donation opportunities exist in this space? How is the Animal Welfare Fund different from a donation to Animal Charity Evaluators’ Recommended Charities or EAA Fund?

Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE) is a charity evaluator specifically focused on evaluating animal charities and conducting research in the animal welfare space. ACE has two research programs. The first is their Evaluation Program which comprises all the work ACE does to recommend charities based on their performance on four criteria. Donors interested in improving animal welfare may want to consider donating directly to ACE’s Recommended Charity Fund. ACE also has a Recommended Charity Fund.

ACE’s second research program is their Movement Grants Program. It is overseen by a different set of people than those responsible for the EA Animal Welfare Funds’ decisions, and they have their own views about which organizations are most effective. Still, their Movement Grants Program is intended to strengthen the global animal advocacy movement by giving grants to animal advocacy groups worldwide. The corresponding Movement Grants Fund is also an option for donors who are interested in funding groups working on various approaches to animal advocacy, especially those that are underfunded, target large numbers of animals, and are in regions with a relatively small animal advocacy movement. Therefore, it has a similar scope to Animal Welfare Fund.

The Animal Welfare Fund’s management team may also choose to support high-value organizations that might not qualify as ACE Top Charities. For example, the fund could support newer but still-promising organizations with less evidence to support them, or organizations with smaller funding gaps.


Can I apply for funding to the Animal Welfare Fund?

The Animal Welfare Fund accepts applications for funding. Please submit your application by using the link below.

Apply here


For more information about EA Funds in general, see our FAQ page.

Fund Managers

Fund Advisors