Our Vision

We envisage a future in which individuals and foundations have moved past the tired mentality of just ‘leaving the world a little better than we found it’. Some ways of contributing to the common good are an order of magnitude more effective than is typical. With careful reasoning, patience and a willingness not to be bogged down by any specific way of doing good, our finite resources can transform the world. We should strive, not to make things a little better, but to do the most good with our time and money.

Our Mission

The nuclear bomb marks the birth of humanity’s ability to wipe itself out, or destroy its long-run potential. No period in human history has been more dangerous or decisive. Safeguarding humanity through this period is the challenge of our time. If we are wise, our descendants may survive for an unfathomable time and achieve levels of flourishing beyond our wildest imagination. Our focus at the Powoki Foundation is on these global challenges, such as safely navigating synthetic biology and advanced artificial intelligence. We also work to foster a society with a more long-term outlook by using our knowledge and network to influence the charity landscape, especially in the Netherlands.

Our Approach

The Powoki Foundation both makes use of and contributes to existing channels and initiatives that were previously established by a passionate global community that shares our goal of doing the most good. The foundation isn’t committed to working on any particular cause area. Instead, we use a framework of Scale, Neglectedness and Solvability to determine where our resources will have the largest positive impact on the world. The problems we tend to focus on are large in scale, relatively neglected by other actors and which our resources would do a great deal to address. Our present understanding of how to do the most good remains imperfect but, as a global community, it is continuously being improved by updating on new evidence, staying abreast of global priorities research and recognizing past mistakes.

Annual reports

Our annual reports are published (in Dutch) on the ANBI page.