I learned about factory farming as a teenager and was struck by its scale and neglectedness. When I entered the animal advocacy space as an adult, I was dismayed to learn that most advocacy wasn't strategic — it was based on anecdotes rather than concrete evidence. Now I lead the Farm Animal Welfare Program at Open Philanthropy, using research and careful reasoning to identify the best grant opportunities to improve the wellbeing of as many farmed animals as possible.
Through college and law school, I struggled to find effective ways to address factory farming. One standard approach was litigation, but I realized this wasn't working — we were just repeating the same playbook that had been failing us for years. What seemed to be missing was a framework for stepping back, looking at the big picture, and asking: which of these approaches actually makes sense?
I learned about effective altruism during the interview process for my current role at Open Philanthropy, and it clicked immediately. Two principles really resonated with me: taking seriously the interests of people and animals geographically distant from you, and approaching charity as a quest to have the greatest impact possible.
"It's funny — when I describe those principles to people, they're like, 'Well that just sounds like common sense,' and I'm like, 'Yeah, but it's not common practice."
Somewhat counterintuitively, effective altruism actually made me a little less altruistic — in a good way. When I first learned about factory farming, my instinct was to donate every dollar possible and live off a pittance. I was extreme about my veganism and treated it like a symbol of personal purity. But strategic thinking showed me that militant personal sacrifice isn't what drives impact. I can have a much greater impact by making high-quality decisions and connections as a grantmaker.
During my time in the animal welfare space, one of the wins I've been most excited about is getting major food companies to adopt baseline animal welfare standards in their supply chains. Advocates have now secured policies from over 2000 food companies globally — including McDonald's and Walmart and Costco — to get rid of cages in their egg supply chain. When these campaigns started a decade ago, less than 10% of US hens were out of cages. Now it's almost 50% — that's over 200 million animals in better conditions.
"My approach to doing good has been to try and find the highest impact ways to reduce suffering where I can and to constantly try and reassess whether the things I'm doing are actually reducing suffering in the world."
For me, effective altruism is a framework for thinking about how to do the most good in the world, and a community of other people thinking hard about that too. My advice to someone curious about effective altruism is to stay open to different approaches and find ways to get involved that are interesting and sustainable for you personally. Seek out communities achieving real progress — seeing tangible impact can be really empowering and is so much better than surrendering to a sense of futility.
