SparkWell
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Accelerate your nonprofit's path to impact
Accelerate your nonprofit's path to impact
Sparkwell is an Anti Entropy program designed to help high-impact nonprofit projects test ideas, develop operational capabilities, and launch as independent entities. We provide a temporary home for a diverse range of promising initiatives.
What We Believe
What We Believe
We believe that we’re living through a transformational period in history. Catastrophic risks loom large, whether from climate change, factory farming, pandemics, nuclear or cyber warfare, or the misalignment or misuse of intelligent systems.
A transformational period in history warrants a transformation in philanthropy — and we want to give innovative projects the support they need to test their ideas and scale. We leverage our skills and experience with nonprofit operations to guide enrolled projects through a bespoke acceleration roadmap.
Within 6–24 months, your project will graduate into an independent entity with operational best practices. This will put you in a position to scale your activities — and help mitigate the catastrophic risks facing us.
Participating in the SparkWell program has been a game-changer for our project. We’ve been able to receive 501(c)(3) funding, run a hiring round, build operational capacity, and ultimately get to work! The support we received — especially around budgets and grant writing — has been invaluable as we raise further funding. We are grateful to have SparkWell as a partner in getting our start and putting us on the path to impact and independence.
Jessie Hsia
Project Manager at Collider
How does the program work?
How does the program work?
SparkWell offers 6-month, 12-month, or 24-month tracks to accommodate projects at different stages.
We enable each project to:Test ideas
Test ideas
Receive tax-exempt funding via Anti Entropy's 501(c)(3)
Run your project, including hiring staff, contractors, an managing expenses
Receive feedback and develop your theory of change
Develop operational capabilities
Develop operational capabilities
Access your bank account, company card, and dashboard
Receive mentorship and resources from your Project Liaison
Leave bookkeeping and compliance to us
Launch an independent entity
Launch an independent entity
Monitor progress along entity formation milestones
Be on track to independence within 6, 12, or 24 months
Launch an independent entity when you’re ready
We apply a 7% service fee on funds raised or received during the program.
The projects we’re supporting
The projects we’re supporting
Currently enrolled projects include:
AI Character Evaluations
AI Character Evaluations
AI Character Evaluations purpose is to reduce catastrophic risk posed by AI systems by conducting and sharing research evaluating AI behavioral propensities, including but not limited to evaluations that the AI Character Evaluations conducts for frontier AI developers.
Animal Ask assists animal advocacy organisations in their efforts to reduce farmed animal suffering by providing research to help optimise and prioritise future asks.
They provide animal advocacy organisations with in-depth research, narrowly targeted at key decisions between different animal asks, and provide organisational support.
BDE Research for Scalable Oversight
BDE Research for Scalable Oversight
This project creates synthetic benchmarks that enable controlled experiments on how different argument types and evidence structures affect judge accuracy in debate-based oversight.
Providing bespoke management of philanthropic assets for high net-worth donors.
Bridging the gap between investors and non-profits to influence companies to adopt AI governance best practices and help humanity navigate the risks from AI.
Website
Aiming to sustainably increase smallholder farmer incomes by improving their productivity, beginning with enabling the distribution of asset-collateralized loans for productive assets such as water tanks, and with the possibility of expanding into other farm productivity and climate-resilience support.
Black-Box Mitigation of AI Research Sabotage Project
Black-Box Mitigation of AI Research Sabotage Project
Research into a black-box detection approach to address potential AI sabotage.
Cedar Research
Cedar Research
Communicating Evidence and Demonstrations of AI Risk with a special focus on mass surveillance and privacy risk.
Increasing Brazilian state and civil society capacity regarding AI safety and governance.
Foster a bold, timely and proper US-China-led AI treaty to ensure a safe and fair AI future.
Debate Empirics
Debate Empirics
This project aims to test how different methods of information presentation and judgment instruction affect human accuracy in judging AI debates by having participants evaluate debate transcripts with verifiable answers under different conditions.
Help humanity safely navigate the creation of powerful AI systems through foundational mathematics research that gives us an understanding of the nature of AI agents.
Improving the grant-making ecosystem via transparently created systems and accountability mechanisms.
Epistemic Garden
Epistemic Garden
Delivering public tools to map how ideas spread, starting with psyop detection.
Supporting Kangaroo Mother Care practices proven to save newborn lives.
Foundations First
Foundations First
Foundations First helps public schools in Sub-Saharan Africa address low learning outcomes by improving foundational literacy and numeracy through sustainable differentiated learning implementation.
Provide public service journalism about global development, focusing on cost-effective interventions to improve global health and well-being.
Investigating if AI Debate could be a Practical Scalable Oversight Protocol
Investigating if AI Debate could be a Practical Scalable Oversight Protocol
Investigating if AI Debate could be a Practical Scalable Oversight Protocol is a project investigating whether AI debate fosters truth-seeking behaviour, exploring how debate affects model accuracy and judge performance across real-world tasks, with further research into scalable oversight, deceptive debaters, or debate-based control protocols.
Investor AI Resource Hub
Investor AI Resource Hub
Bridging the gap between investors and non-profits to influence companies to adopt AI governance best practices and help humanity navigate the risks from AI.
This project conducts technical AI safety research, with a focus on forecasting and simulation. Also concerned with mitigating existential risk and gradual disempowerment.
Mycelium
Mycelium
Building the technical foundation for a future where AI considers nonhuman welfare - through research, engineering, and capacity-building for animals and other sentient beings.
Neev Earth uses science-backed methods to help industries decarbonize for improved air quality and better lives. We work with brick kilns in South Asia to transition to optimized firing practices that improve overall profitability while reducing CO2 and air pollution - a win-win!
Professional association running open and closed events in DC on a monthly basis to engage policy professionals working to mitigate existential risks.
Project Acorn
Project Acorn
A small-grants fund targeting early-stage animal advocacy projects, time-sensitive policy windows, and orgs that fall through the cracks of other animal funders
Project Prevail
Project Prevail
This project focuses on developing unsupervised scalable oversight methods to address extreme epistemic risks in human-AI interaction (hyper-persuasion, manipulation, sustained sycophancy) with systemic downstream impact.
Partnering with academics, industry, and policymakers across North and South America to tackle the New World Screwworm.
Shepherd's Warning
Shepherd's Warning
Shepherd's Warning promotes public education on the responsible development and safe deployment of artificial intelligence, with a focus on engaging faith communities and religious institutions in AI safety discourse. The project develops and disseminates educational resources, curricula, and related programming to help individuals and communities understand the ethical, social, and long-term implications of emerging AI technologies. Through research, collaboration, and outreach, Shepherd's Warning seeks to broaden participation in AI safety conversations across civil society.
The Great Refactor
The Great Refactor
Using AI to automatically refactor memory-unsafe C and C++ code into Rust at scale, eliminating critical security vulnerabilities in our software supply chain. They focus on protecting critical infrastructure and key components of the AI software stack by making foundational code memory-safe and more efficient.
The Mulder Institute
The Mulder Institute
The Mulder Institute supports the transition to more resilient and sustainable food systems by advancing research, policy, advocacy, collaboration, and stakeholder engagement across the public and private sectors.
Third Wave Venture Studio
Third Wave Venture Studio
Third Wave is a venture studio that strengthens the capacity of the philanthropic ecosystem to identify, launch, and scale high-impact charitable organizations. Its activities include researching gaps in the ecosystem; recruiting, training, and supporting founders; incubating and accelerating new charitable organizations and initiatives; and providing seed funding, including regrants to third-party organizations, to help them launch and operate effectively.
SparkWell gave me a trusted, tax-efficient way to support an emerging nonprofit I believe in. The operational guidance and oversight they provide gave me confidence that the project is on a solid path to long-term impact.
Luke Ding
Philanthopist
Applications are assessed based on impact potential, team capabilities, and program fit.
Selected applicants are invited for in-depth discussions with our team.
Final selections made by the SparkWell team with notification to all applicants.
If SparkWell sounds like the right fit for your high-impact project, we invite you to apply!
The SparkWell team
The SparkWell team
Jeffrey Poche (Chair, Program Director)
Jeffrey Poche (Chair, Program Director)
Jeffrey is responsible for the oversight of the SparkWell program and for Anti Entropy as a whole. Prior to SparkWell, Jeffrey served as Operations Manager at the Centre for Long-Term Resilience, and before that Chief Operating Officer of Fountain Forward.
Partners
Partners
GrowthForce provides financial support to SparkWell projects, including bookkeeping, invoice payments, and financial dashboards.
You can reach out to us at contactus@antientropy.org.
All contracts, agreements, and financial arrangements related to SparkWell projects are formally established with and through Anti Entropy as the legal entity. This structure provides the SparkWell projects with the benefits of Anti Entropy's charity status while maintaining clear operational boundaries.
You can support SparkWell and its projects via donations or grants to Anti Entropy.
What people are saying about SparkWell
What people are saying about SparkWell
SparkWell handled operational setup for NYC hub project, including pay and benefits for our two staff. I hate paperwork and am terrible at it, and they helped us keep it to a painless minimum! Onboarding was fast, the team have been responsive, and the price is right. I also appreciated when they reached out to remind us of included help they offer with important functions like grant-writing and our website. I've worked with a lot of fiscal sponsors but this level of proactive nurturing was new to me.
Jacob Eliosoff
Cryptocurrency Fund Manager
SparkWell enabled us to hire and pay international contractors with ease, leveraging their flexible infrastructure to build our team quickly. Their clear approach to compliance, backed by helpful and timely support, ensures we stay agile and avoid getting bogged down.
Luis Enrique Urtubey De Césaris
Project Lead at AI Safety Brazil
SparkWell helped us get up and running in a matter of weeks. The speed at which we could start accepting funds was a game-changer for our project. I also found the documentation extremely thorough and helpful!
Francisco Carvalho
Project Lead at Open Memetics Institute
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