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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: The Future Fund’s Regranting Program, published by leopold on February 28, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. The FTX Foundation's Future Fund is a philanthropic fund making grants and investments to ambitious projects in order to improve humanity's long-term prospects. Our regranting program will offer discretionary budgets to independent part-time grantmakers, to be spent in the next ~6 months. Budgets will typically be in the $250k-few million range. We've already invited a first cohort of 21 regrantors to test the program. Large funders aren’t always aware of the best opportunities. We want to try a decentralized approach. We hope to empower a range of interesting, ambitious, and altruistic people to drive funding decisions through a rewarding, low-friction process. We are just getting started and we'd like to fund a lot of great projects. So our primary goal for 2022 is to perform bold tests of new approaches to scaling grantmaking. We very much consider this an experiment, and our goal is to decisively test whether this kind of program works. If successful, this program will help us identify great grants that we would have missed, help new people launch exciting projects, and find and empower people who could be strong grantmakers. We're also aware that the program could cause various problems. We'll try to minimize these downsides by being thoughtful about who we select, providing relevant guidance, and carefully screening grant recommendations for downside risks and conflicts of interest. We’re so excited to see what regrantors come up with! Become a regrantor We’re planning to invite additional regrantors to join the program in a month or so. Some of these will come from our existing networks, but we’re also opening up a public process to be considered as a regrantor. If you’d like to be considered as a regrantor, please 1. Recommend at least one grant via our grant recommendation form. 2. Fill out this brief expression of interest form. You can also recommend someone be considered as a regrantor here. If you’re interested, please fill these out as soon as possible; we’re reviewing materials on a rolling basis. About the role Regrantors will be assigned a discretionary budget, from which they can make grant recommendations. These will be screened primarily for downside risk, conflicts of interest, and consistency with our charitable mission and tax-exempt status. An exception is that we are less likely to approve funding for orgs that are already standard targets for EA funders, because we mainly want to fund new things. The regranting pot expires after 6 months. Regrantors will be compensated for their work based on the quality and volume of their grantmaking. The role is extremely independent. While we'll provide some documents with basic guidance, regrantors are expected to come up with all of their own ideas for the grants they recommend, do all the necessary communication with grantees, and ensure the quality of their own work. Once the grant recommendation is reviewed and approved, we'll take care of the grantee getting the money—but that's all we're planning to provide for this program. While we will fund their grants, regrantors will not be Future Fund/FTX Foundation employees or be authorized to speak for the Future Fund/FTX Foundation. What we’re looking for We're looking for people who have great grant ideas that we're likely to miss. We’ll also lean towards giving this opportunity to people who don’t already have easy access to funds, and those for whom it might make a valuable learning experience. (The regrantors we invite won’t just be a “who’s who” of EA—we expect that many of the effective altruists we most admire will receive no regranting pot at all.) We think excellent regrantors will: Have expertise related to our areas of interest and...