Mission

SAF’s mission is to secure funding and fiscal sponsorship for projects that will benefit the long-term survival and flourishing of sentient life, including but not limited to humans.

Purpose

In recent years, there has been an explosion of volunteer and philanthropic interest in protecting certain moral values in the long-term future, such as the survival and flourishing of humanity, the well-being of future sentient lifeforms, or the cultivation of better epistemic norms for civilization-scale decision-making. It is often difficult to evaluate the most effective interventions for impact across such long time horizons, and many relevant interventions may not yet have dedicated institutions in today’s world. As such, there is an upwelling of interest from individual people seeking to undertake a limited-term period of self-directed work or study oriented at impacting the long-term future.

We (Andrew Critch, Alex Flint, and Eric Rogstad) already see this first-hand. We currently serve as volunteers on the Board of Directors of the Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative (BERI), and have also established a DAF at the Silicon Valley Community Foundation called the Survival and Flourishing Fund (SFF; https://survivalandflourishing.fund/) to administer grants from funding provided directly from Philanthropist Jaan Tallinn (cofounder of Skype) and through BERI.