Regranting

For our regranting program, we work with donors to delegate a grantmaking budget to individuals known as “regrantors”. Regrantors independently make grant recommendations based on their own expertise.

Why regranting?

• Regranting surfaces opportunities that donors and large grantmaking organizations might otherwise miss, as regrantors can tap into their personal networks and fields of expertise.
• The regranting model requires less overhead than traditional grantmaking, as one person is responsible for the budget rather than a committee. This allows for faster grant turnaround times, solving a key pain point for grantees.
• Certain cause areas like longtermism can be speculative, opaque, and nascent, making it harder for donors to know where to direct their money. Regranting allows donors to outsource these decisions to trustworthy individuals.

How does regranting on Manifund work?

Our website makes the regranting process simple and transparent:

1. A donor contributes money to Manifold for Charity, a registered 501c3 nonprofit, when they add money to their Manifund account.
2. The donor can then allocate the money between regrantors of their choice (or they can give directly to projects).
3. Regrantors choose which opportunities, including projects posted on Manifund through our open call or projects they learn about elsewhere, to spend their budgets on, writing up an explanation for each grant made.
4. Manifold for Charity reviews the grant to make sure it is legitimate, legal, and aligned with our mission.
5. If we approve the grant, the money will be transferred to the grantee's Manifund account, at which point they request to withdraw and we send them their funds.

FAQ

Currently all grant information is made public. This includes the identity of the regrantor and grant recipient, the project description, the grant size, and the regrantor’s writeup.

We strongly believe in transparency as it allows for meaningful public feedback, accountability of decisions, and establishment of a regrantor track records. We recognize that not all grants are suited for publishing; for now, we recommend such grants be made through other funders, such as the Long Term Future Fund, the Survival and Flourishing Fund, or Open Philanthropy.

We have no official cause-area restrictions on grants, though most of our regrantors are focused on mitigating global catastrophic risk, specifically on AI safety.

We support regrants to registered charities and individuals. For-profit organizations may also be eligible, pending due diligence. As a US-registered 501c3, we do not permit donations to political campaigns.

We look over all grants before fulfilling withdrawal requests to make sure they meet these requirements. We reserve the right to veto grants for any reason, though we expect to often defer to our regrantors’ judgement.

In certain circumstances, we permit regrantors to donate to their own projects, though we’ll evaluate these projects with a more rigorous bar before fulfilling withdrawal requests.