Resolves YES if I get a better return on my time from fundraising activity that is independent of posting on Manifund.
Resolves NO if I get a better return on my time from the Manifund proposal or people who are motivated to fund the charity after becoming aware of the Manifund proposal.
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I'm a trustee of a charity that trains people to provide PTSD treatment to children, and I've put a project on Manifund asking for funding so that the charity can continue its work.
https://manifund.org/projects/enable-communities-to-cure-ptsd-in-children-after-state-failure
High numbers of traumatised children and collapse of services that can treat with PTSD tend to happen at the same time, so we need NGOs to step in an address the problem, which is severe, systemic and intergenerational. We have a proven solution to this, but we can't establish sustainable long-term funding because the problem tends to show up with a concurrent collapse in institutions providing with funding in the area, and most of the establish global emergency response NGOs are focused on other aspects.
I think this is the kind of work the Effective Altruism should fund, because in a good world the services would exist, and in this world other entities won't provide them. I believe this provides an imperative for this to be a non-zero allocation.
Strictly, I think that's a deontological justification not a consequentialist one, so I'm interested in whether it holds any weight with people thinking about how to allocate investment.
Notwithstanding, I think a non-zero allocation can be justified on consequentialist grounds too.
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Generally EA doesn’t fund disaster relief. Then again, if this intervention is very neglected relative to other areas of disaster relief, that could be a good argument for it. I think the deontological argument is weak, because there are plenty of charities that provide services that work to close the gaps between what is and what should be. To be convincing, you would have to show that your charity is more efficient at closing that gap than the next best option.
My impression of why EAs generally recommend against donating to disaster relief is that:
It’s often heavily donated to. This wouldn’t apply to your charity/solution area.
The damaged infrastructure in a disaster zone is often unable to effectively absorb a sudden influx of funds and people.
Other reasons I’m not as sure about/forgot
Closing gaps
The deontological argument is for selecting problem areas where charities should be funded, rather than which charities in those problem areas should be funded.
The idea on closing gaps is not that we should invest in charities that close gaps but that we should invest in charities that close gaps that markets and states can't close. If we don't do this, we have permanent gaps. Granted we might prefer to live with these gaps than to attempt to close them.
On our intervention - we can demonstrate rates of success in eliminating clinically significant PTSD of 100%. Costs vary across contexts. Our cost model is fairly consistent - we send trainers, they train people, those people go on to provide treatment over a career span. Benefits can be measured using counts and clinical measures. It may be reasonable to consider the intergenerational impact of trauma when calculating benefits. It may also be reasonable to include the value of having some infrastructure rather than no infrastructure.
There is more detail and links in comments here if you are interested: https://manifund.org/projects/enable-communities-to-cure-ptsd-in-children-after-state-failure
Handling influx of funds and people
I'm suggesting investing in maintaining and growing the operations of an organisation that deploys people into these zones, rather than unbounded investment into the zones themselves.
Demonstrate more efficient than the next best alternative
I'm not sure what these are - I don't see any other claims to 100% success rates, I would expect the next best alternative to fail in severe cases of PTSD. I don't see where cost reduction could take place - we are already training people who do not have clincial backgrounds and our trainers are training on a voluntary basis. Costs are things like a projector and some plane tickets.
An alternative might be to wait to treat people when they are adults - but then you do not get benefits on educational and family outcomes etc. that you have from a child not having PTSD.
The deontological argument is probably stronger than I thought it was. Manifund might not be the best place to get funding from EA. Your organization could also apply for a grant from Give Well at https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfyNqKTkNlIJqXOrxWugMMV5YXqSvripXld6o0OBOVUkrowjg/viewform or by searching “GiveWell”, clicking the “giving funds” tab on their website, selecting “all grants fund” from the dropdown, and scrolling down to “How can organizations apply for GiveWell grants?”. The Happier Lives Institute https://www.happierlivesinstitute.org is an organization in EA that’s focused on mental health, and might be easier to get funding from; I couldn’t find a place on their website that indicates if/where they accept applications for funding.
It will probably be difficult to get funding from EA organizations because they have a really high bar and compare across cause areas- your organization will be judged against other organizations in various areas of global health, even if they’re in different cause areas such as malaria prevention or treating depression. Two things that could help your organization is that it has the potential to grow and attract funding from other disaster relief organizations, increasing their effectiveness, and that it’s pursuing a very neglected cause area, which often means that donations are more effective there. Two things that could hurt your organization is that it doesn’t seem to have randomized controlled trials of intervention effectiveness and that it’s working in disaster relief. Here’s a post on the GiveWell blog that I think I derived my thinking from: https://blog.givewell.org/2010/02/01/does-haiti-earthquake-relief-have-room-for-more-funding/ However, your charity doesn’t suffer from the overfunding problem.
I wish you luck!