Frequently asked questions

The Life You Can Save was founded to promote high-impact philanthropy, meaning giving that is research-backed and cost-effective. Our mission is to improve the lives of people living in poverty by changing the way people think about and donate to charity. We do research to develop a list of recommended nonprofits delivering high-impact interventions across all of the dimensions of poverty. We then work to raise awareness of and connect donors with our recommended giving opportunities to increase the impact of giving. Through our research and funds, we offer a simplified donating process for individuals who want to maximize their impact in uplifting people experiencing extreme poverty.

Our organization was co-founded by Peter Singer, a philosopher widely recognized for his work on animal rights, bioethics, his influence on the effective altruism movement. In 2009, Singer wrote the book The Life You Can Save about ways that we can all support interventions that alleviate poverty and the suffering that stems from it. Endorsed by Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates, the book argues that if we can provide immense benefit to someone at minimal inconvenience to ourselves, we should do so. Peter was approached by psychologist and executive Charlie Bresler to collaborate in 2013, and together they co-found The Life You Can Save, a registered 501c3 charity. The organization was designed to support readers who were inspired to begin their own giving journey.

The Life You Can Save believes that donating to highly impactful nonprofits offers an effective means for individuals and organizations living with extra means to contribute to poverty alleviation, in addition to other opportunities to reduce suffering in the world. The Life You Can Save serves to help individuals respond to the call for action to contribute to the fight against global poverty. 

While governmental support continues to be critical to addressing poverty, the best nonprofits are able to assess and address needs quickly and effectively, often serving as a crucial partner for governments, companies, and other stakeholders, and supporting innovation and research in different ways than other organizations.We urge people everywhere to engage in advocacy with their governments to support effective foreign aid programs. 

We recommend and promote charities that do some of the best work in this sector. These nonprofits have proven track records for making dramatic impact in improving lives. We therefore recommend supporting their work with your donations.

Information about our financials can be found in our Annual Reports as well as on Guidestar.

Although we generally encourage donors to support our recommended charities, The Life You Can Save itself relies on donations to keep our organization running. This is a great way to leverage your dollars, as every $1 we spend on our operations has historically generated an average of $11 for our recommended charities. You can support The Life You Can Save here.

The Life You Can Save seeks to increase donations to our recommended charities through all channels. However, donating through our website helps us measure our impact more accurately, which in turn helps inform our self-assessment and planning. 

When you donate through The Life You Can Save we make it easy for you to have the highest impact possible, by donating to our Maximize Your Impact Fund, or a subset of charities working in the same cause area (via one of our Cause Funds).

If you do choose to donate via a charity’s direct website, it would be very helpful to us if you would indicate that you learned of their organization through The Life You Can Save.

We are happy to discuss interview possibilities for spreading the word about The Life You Can Save and our recommended charities. Please submit your inquiry via our Contact Us page.

Giving Games are now managed by Giving What We Can (GWWC). To view their resources or apply for funding, please visit their Giving Game page. GWWC also runs and sponsors Charity Elections, school-wide events where high school students choose which charities receive real money donations.

Please refer to our Tax Deductibility page for details.

Please refer to our Payment Options page for details.

When we give money to a nonprofit, we assume the money will be used to do good. But that’s not always the case. Some organizations accomplish very little; a few may even unintentionally cause harm. Most nonprofits probably have some positive impact, but the amount of good they achieve varies widely. By ensuring that you give to high-impact nonprofits, you can be confident that your donations will make a significant difference in ways that deeply impact people’s lives.

What makes a nonprofit high-impact, how do we know whether it’s effective, and how can we use this information to guide our giving?

At The Life You Can Save, we define high-impact organizations as those that consistently achieve measurable, evidence-supported, and sustainable improvements in the lives of individuals, which would not have happened without their contribution. Read more here.

We believe that “overhead ratio” is a highly problematic way to measure a charity’s worth. In his 2013 TED Talk, activist and fundraiser Dan Pallotta argues that equating frugality with morality is a limiting way of measuring nonprofit effectiveness. The biggest problem with this metric is that it completely ignores how much good a charity’s programs accomplish, and even whether they accomplish any good at all.

We encourage donors to think about the cost-effectiveness of their gifts: how many people can be helped and how much those lives will be improved from a donation of a particular size. To read more about the overhead myth, read The Life You Can Save’s blog on this topic here.

Many of our recommended charities deliver interventions that avert deaths that would otherwise likely occur. For instance, numerous studies show that malaria interventions, such as those run by Against Malaria Foundation and Malaria Consortium dramatically reduce child mortality. Development Media International’s mass media campaign of health messaging is estimated to have saved approximately 3,000 children’s lives over the course of a three year radio campaign. A randomized controlled trial showed that Living Goods-supported community health workers reduced under-5 mortality by 27%.

Just as significantly, the work of all of our recommended charities improves lives in a range of ways that provide people a better chance to stay healthy, attend school, work productively, plan families and escape the downward spiral of poverty. Restoring a blind person’s vision through cataract surgery, keeping children safe from parasitic worm infections, providing inputs and training to improve crop productivity or to start a new business, and giving a woman her life back through obstetric fistula surgery are just a few examples of the types of life-transforming work our charities do.

Our charities provide a range of interventions across a broad range of causes, improving and saving lives in different ways. Our Impact Calculator helps you see the impact your donation can have with each of our recommended organizations.

We know that many people in the U. S. and other developed countries live in terrible poverty, and we do not seek to diminish their plight. Our aim is to point out that we have a greater capacity to help those living in degrees of poverty in the developed world. However, since donors can’t give to every charity, we encourage people to direct their dollars to where they will  go the farthest. GiveWell’s excellent piece “Giving 101: Your dollar goes further overseas” offers some striking examples of the difference in cost-effectiveness between giving domestically and giving to organizations that work in the world’s poorest countries.

We recognize that there are multiple issues which demand attention and that most of them are intertwined. The Life You Can Save was created to focus directly on improving health and opportunities for individuals and communities living in global poverty, as discussed in our founder Peter Singer’s book of the same name. 

Our focus doesn’t suggest that global poverty is the only worthwhile cause. However, we do think this is an area where donors can have a profound impact by funding , high-impact, cost-effective and evidence-based programs. We also believe that global poverty is multifaceted and multidimensional, and have prioritized offering recommendations that reflect that complexity. For instance, we’ve added recommendations for educational nonprofits in addition to the health and economic well-being recommendations we’ve traditionally offered.

For donors seeking to improve animal welfare, we suggest reading Peter’s seminal book in this area, Animal Liberation and fully updated Animal Liberation Now, and reviewing research from Animal Charity Evaluators.

Our recommendations are based on rigorous assessments by our research and evaluation team, other nonprofit evaluators, and through collaboration with sector colleagues and subject matter experts. Nonprofits are recommended based on factors such as proven impact, cost-effectiveness, transparency, sustainability, and room for funding. To learn more about how we select our charities, click here or see below.

To identify these charities, we:

1. focus on urgent problems with concrete solutions that don’t get enough funding; 
2. use scientific evidence to identify the highest impact solutions to each problem, using the most relevant methods and metrics;
3. find and rigorously screen high-quality, cost-effective organizations working on these solutions.

You can learn more about our charity selection process in our charity evaluation framework here.

Not necessarily. We recommend organizations for which there is considerable evidence of effectiveness and impact and are not able to assess all nonprofits. If an organization is not recommended by The Life You Can Save, it may just mean that we have not had the opportunity to assess it. By giving to an organization that is on the list of recommended nonprofits, you can have more confidence that your donation is creating high-impact.

The Life You Can Save has a small research and evaluation team so we do not have the capacity to accept applications. To learn more about how we select our charities, click here or see above.

The Life You Can Save using the multidimensional poverty index to define and measure extreme poverty – which means experiencing significant deprivations across the dimensions of health, education and living standards. This may include not having enough income to meet the basic human needs for adequate food, water, shelter, clothing, sanitation, health care, and education. Its manifestations include hunger and malnutrition, limited access to education and other basic services, social discrimination and exclusion, as well as the lack of participation in decision-making. We measure extreme, or multidimensional poverty, as experiencing deprivation in more than a third of the indicators outlined in the Global Multidimensional Poverty Index. According to the University of Oxford, 1.1 billion people meet this definition, with half living in Sub-Saharan Africa, half being children, and over 80% living in rural areas. Most individuals experiencing this level of poverty do not have adequate sanitation, housing or cooking fuel. The definition of “regular” poverty varies by country. As noted by GapMinder, poverty “may refer to the threshold for eligibility for social welfare or the official statistical measure of poverty in that country. In Scandinavia, the official poverty lines are 20 times higher than the poverty lines in the poorest countries, like Malawi, even after adjusting for the large differences in purchasing power. The latest US census estimates that 13 percent of the population lives below its poverty line, putting it at approximately $20/day.”

In wealthy societies, most poverty is relative. In the United States, 97% of those classified by the Census Bureau as poor own a color TV. Three quarters of them own a car and three quarters have air conditioning. These figures do not in any way deny that the poor in wealthy societies face genuine hardship, but rather that poverty measurements in wealthy countries are simply not designed to capture levels of extreme deprivation. 

Extreme poverty is characterized by difficulties of a different order. The 1.1 billion  people living in multidimensional poverty are poor by an absolute standard tied to the most basic human needs. This kind of poverty kills. While a child born in Spain today can expect to live beyond 83 years, children born in countries such as Sierra Leone, Nigeria and Chad have a life expectancy of less than 55 years. Sub-Saharan Africa continues to be the region with the highest under-five mortality rate in the world: one child in 13 dies before his or her fifth birthday, a ratio 20 times higher than the 1 in 263 mortality rate in Australia and New Zealand. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that about 7,500 children under the age of 5 die each day from preventable causes associated with extreme poverty. This is over 300 children an hour or 5 per minute. These causes of death include insufficient nutrition, lack of access to clean water, inadequate health care services, malaria, dysentery, and neonatal infection. These are diseases and health problems that are essentially non-existent in the developed world thanks to countless advances. And yet despite these improvements, several billion people continue to live and die in poverty, struggling daily with its dire effects.

The world is making rapid progress toward ending extreme poverty. However, across all countries, 1.1 billion people are experiencing multidimensional poverty (UNDP, 2023). This means that 1.1 billion people globally face daily barriers to their wellbeing such as lack of access to healthcare, education, or opportunities to improve their livelihoods. Many don’t have enough to eat enough, can’t afford to send their children to school, and lack access to safe drinking water. These people are vulnerable to diseases that have been eradicated in high-income countries. Malaria, which was eradicated in the United States almost 70 years ago, killed an estimated 1,700 people—mostly young children—every day in the developing world in 2020 (WHO, 2022).

Fortunately, it’s easier than ever to help and help effectively. By giving even modest donations to high-impact nonprofits that work to reduce barriers to human development, you can make a significant, lasting difference to hundreds of lives. 

Read more here about why it makes sense to focus your giving internationally.

You do not need to stop giving to local charities. However, we encourage you to start giving—or giving more—to highly impactful international nonprofits that can accomplish more good per dollar donated and help those living in the most serious deprivation.

When asked whether the United States allocates more, less, or about the same amount to foreign aid as other developed nations, only 1 out of 20 Americans guessed correctly. Most are surprised to learn that the U.S. ranks near the bottom of developed countries in the percentage of national income allocated to foreign aid (official development assistance or ODA). In 2022, the U.S. gave only 24 cents of every $100 of earnings — or  0.235% to foreign aid (OECD, 2022). 

The United Nations Millennium Development Goals encourage all developed nations to allocate 0.7% of their gross national income to overseas development assistance — that’s 70 cents in every $100. For comparison, this is less than the credit card fee many consumers barely notice when paying for overseas purchases. Few countries have reached that target.

For more, see Peter Singer’s column Trump’s Unethical Aid Cuts.

When giving to an effective charity, the size of your donation directly correlates with how and how many people you are able to help. You don’t have to be a millionaire to make a significant difference; donations of all sizes can meaningfully improve an individual’s quality of life. Check out our impact calculator to learn the types of outcomes you can support with your contributions.

• Our annual reports, blog and newsletter (subscribe below) all provide regular information about recent progress of The Life You Can Save and our recommended charities. 
• Our founder Peter Singer’s TED Talk is on our website and on YouTube.
• Another wonderful resource is the 10th Anniversary Edition of The Life You Can Save, Peter’s landmark book about addressing world poverty through effective giving. You can download the eBook and audiobook versions for free.

You can join us in changing the culture of giving:

• Spread the word – share a free download of The Life You Can Save book with your friends, family, coworkers, and on social media;
• Follow us (on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn or X) and share our posts with your networks to increase the reach of the message;
• Host your own online fundraiser – let us know so we share it with our network;

Speak with one of our advisors about how to approach your own giving journey.

Spread the word! Share a free download of The Life You Can Save book with your friends, family, coworkers, and on social media.