Be a Champion for Your Charitable Cause

Our Causes

Across our portfolio, we tackle the most urgent issues affecting people, animals, the planet, and our future. At Ark Philanthropy, we concentrate our grantmaking on seven specific charitable causes. We focus on neglected causes with actionable solutions and the potential for scalable impact.

If you’re interested in other causes, we’re excited to help you explore your area of interest and develop a plan to make impactful grants.

Criminal Justice Reform

The United States, with only 4.2% of the world's population, incarcerates 20% of the world's prisoners. Our criminal legal system is deeply flawed, perpetuating inequalities and injustices and failing at rehabilitation. We recommend grants to highly effective grassroots organizers and policy advocates who are working towards a fairer system, mitigating harms of the prison system, and supporting a restorative approach to justice.

Climate & Environment

Our planet is nearing a critical tipping point as climate change accelerates. Investing in solutions that can help prevent the most severe impacts of global warming is essential. We must address this issue from various perspectives. This includes advocating for sustainable food systems change, investing in innovative technologies and policies, and providing aid to communities adversely affected by climate change.

Animal Welfare

Farmed animals endure some of the most severe suffering on our planet. However, their advocacy movement only receives 0.8 percent of the funds that companion animal welfare organizations raise. We strive to transform animal agriculture to eliminate the most harmful practices and move towards a future free from factory farming. We support a variety of interventions to improve farmed animal welfare including corporate campaigns, legislative change, and alternative protein development.

Women’s Issues

Gender inequity is a widespread problem that requires global solutions. Through our work, we aim to ensure that individuals living in the most under-resourced contexts have access to reproductive health and family planning services and live free of violence. We work with innovative and impactful organizations, prioritizing solutions that can scale to serve as many women as possible.

Global Health & Wellbeing

While many of us have access to high-quality medicine, much of the world does not. Preventable diseases cause tens of millions of deaths every year. We can take action to prevent this. We support a variety of grants that address critical global health issues, including malnutrition, noncommunicable diseases, and mental health. We also support interventions that get at the root causes of these problems, such as poverty reduction and development.

Education

Access to education is crucial for breaking the cycle of poverty and building a better future for individuals and their families. We identify organizations that implement evidence-based, scalable interventions to expand education in the most under-resourced communities. By improving both access to and the quality of education, we aim to create lasting, meaningful change for as many children as possible, empowering them to reach their full potential.

Existential Risks

We are driven by a dedication to the well-being of future generations. Our grandchildren deserve to inherit a thriving world. To achieve this, we focus on providing grants to prevent existential risks. Our grantmaking efforts target the most pressing existential threats of our time, including nuclear security, pandemic preparedness, and regulations for artificial intelligence.

Grantmaking

At Ark Philanthropy, we help clients make exceptional, field-leading grants. Guided by your area of interest and values, we identify tailored charitable opportunities that are evidence-backed, neglected, actionable, and have the potential to produce impact at scale. To achieve real-world impact, we are guided by foundational values.

Our grantmaking values:

  • Our commitment to truth-seeking drives us to investigate grants with an open, unbiased, and curious mind. We allow our research to inform our decision-making, and we only recommend grants that meet our high standards, even if our recommendations push us in a direction that differs from our personal preferences or the charities that we like.

  • We strive to create as much positive change through philanthropy as possible. Acknowledging the significant moral and epistemic uncertainties in this work, we employ diverse strategies and perspectives to maximize our impact across a variety of worldviews. Since we cannot fund every worthy cause, we recognize the necessity of making tough trade-offs to ensure our resources are directed where they can achieve the greatest impact.

  • Our recommendations are guided by rigorous research and data analysis, using the highest standards of evidence. We use meta-studies, RCTs, and expert opinions to evaluate interventions when available, seek a convergence of evidence when making decisions, and prioritize organizations that monitor and evaluate the impact of their work. Our commitment to evidence-based decision-making gives us high confidence in the grants we recommend to our clients.

  • We are dedicated to promoting radical equality through our grantmaking efforts. Guided by a framework of justice, we evaluate all grant opportunities with the core belief that every life holds equal value. Our grantmaking serves as an act of justice. We prioritize grants that benefit as many people as possible and work in under-resourced communities that have been impacted by historical injustices and colonization.

  • Our grantmaking process is rigorous and vetted by leading experts, ensuring that grantee organizations have a strong track record, capable leadership, effective teams, and uphold transparency as a core value. When we recommend a grant, we do so with trust that the organization is best suited to implement its intervention.

    We believe our grantees are best positioned to determine how to allocate their funds. Therefore, we generally recommend unrestricted grants and limit reporting requirements to key information necessary for evaluating impact, allowing grantees to focus their time and resources on serving their communities.

    We prioritize organizations that empower local leadership and teams, are culturally responsive, and pursue an anti-colonial approach.

    We are committed to building equitable relationships with our grantees, working as a thought partner to support their implementation. Additionally, we help grantees by making strategic connections that fill crucial gaps, solve problems, and enable them to achieve their goals.