Q. What is The Cade Moore Foundation and what does it do?

A. We are a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt nonprofit and a private foundation.

Basically we are a nonprofit that supports other nonprofits.

We like to partner with organizations with a "Help me help you." approach to charity-work.

Our approach could be described as "Help me help you help them."

Q.  Why "evidence-based" altruism?

A.  There is a movement called "Effective Altruism".

"Effective Altruists" have made some wonderful changes in the world.  But from our perspective, their approach can sometimes be a bit narrow-sighted and lose sight of the big picture in their pursuit of the most efficient way possible to donate their time and money.

To give an example, Effective Altruists saved a lot of human lives by distributing insecticide treated bed nets all over Africa to reduce cases of Malaria and other mosquito-borne illnesses.

But now mosquitoes have developed a resistance to certain insecticides.  And while historically those insecticides have been good at killing mosquitoes they're also good at killing fish and amphibians.

But it's not only the insecticide that is the problem.

Those bed nets were distributed in regions with food scarcity.  And instead of being used as a bed net were often used to fish.

Traditional fishing nets have larger holes so the juvenile fish can just swim out and live to see another day and reproduce to sustain the population.  The holes in the bed nets are small enough to keep mosquitoes out and therefore fish of all ages in; decimating local fisheries and worsening local food insecurity.

If you only look at measures such as "lives saved per dollar" the program looked great.  And while the program was saving a lot of human lives it was also killing a lot of fish.  Those communities depended on those fisheries on to meet their caloric and nutritional needs.  So yes the program saved lives but there were hidden costs which were not fully accounted for.

And it's not as if insecticide treated bed nets were the only option.  They were just the most "efficient" when it came to lives saved per dollar.

There were alternatives to insecticide treated bed nets that didn't have those issues.  E.g. there are fairly inexpensive pills you can take (chemoprophylaxis) which did not receive the same level of support because they were considered less "effective" because they did not have as high of a lives saved per dollar metric.

If you have Effective Altruism on one side of a spectrum then on the other side you might find anti-effective altruism.

Which is what happens when people try to do good but they actually end up causing unintended harm which outweighs the good accomplished.  (A net negative impact.)

Or in the middle of the spectrum ineffective altruism which is a net neutral.  Those programs aren't really harming people but they aren't particularly helpful either.

 Both could be described as a feelings over facts or ego driven approach to charity-work where people do what feels right but not necessarily what is actually the correct approach based on available evidence.

Evidence-based altruism approaches charity-work from a more holistic perspective and tries to pay attention to the big picture, the small picture, and everything in between.

Q. Why a private foundation and not a garden variety nonprofit?

A. People who have spent years in the nonprofit sector often have many of the same complaints.  Those complaints include that:

• The field is "too siloed"

• Nonprofits compete over limited funds instead of of collaborating on problem solving 

• They try to do everything "in-house" when they should outsource certain things 

• Nonprofits can be incredibly inefficient

Private foundations and coalitions can address a lot of these problems.

Q. What is "coalition building" and why is it important?

A.  "A coalition is a temporary alliance or partnering of groups in order to achieve a common purpose or to engage in joint activity.[1] Coalition building is the process by which parties (individuals, organizations, or nations) come together to form a coalition. Forming coalitions with other groups of similar values, interests, and goals allows members to combine their resources and become more powerful than when they each acted alone.[2]"

While coalitions are great for handling the big complicated problems partnerships and collaboration agreements can be equally effective for problems that are narrower in scope.

Being a private foundation we can identify nonprofits working independently towards a common goal and offer to support them both if they work together.

Q. What is an example of a nonprofit you partner with and how did you help them?

A. One of our nonprofit partners is The OpenEMR Foundation.

The OpenEMR Foundation manages the most popular free open-source Electronic Medical Recordkeeping software system in the world that is "downloaded more than 5,000 times per month, and has an estimated usage by 100,000 medical providers across many borders and languages."

The OpenEMR Foundation and their community of users and supporters rely on their community web forum to:

Help each other setup, maintain, and troubleshoot their individual installations

Collaborate on developing improvements to the codebase

Get the word out about important patches and updates 

And so much more

There is virtually always several new posts per day with conversations among multiple people happening on many of those posts.

The community forum is critical infrastructure for the project and contains a huge knowledgebase that would be a massive blow to the community to lose.

Historically The OpenEMR Foundation would back up the data held on the forums on a regular basis.

However the software they used became so out of date that the backup tool was no longer backwards compatible.  Meaning that if there were to be an issue with the community web forum in the future; any posts and comments made after the last time it was backed up would disappear into the abyss along with any information and knowledge added to the community forum in that time.

The Cade Moore Foundation paid to update their community web forum software and migrate their data over to a newer version.

An OpenEMR Foundation board member had the following to say:

"Incredibly generous"

"Thanks again for the generous donation and it came at a much needed time; appreciate the background and perspective you shared too.

Thanks to the extra cash on hand we were able to update the community forum which had been on the priority list for quite a while."