The Life You Can Save

Novato, California, 94948 United States

Mission Statement

The Life You Can Save is an organization founded by the philosopher Peter Singer and based on the basic tenet of Effective Altruism: leading an ethical life involves using a portion of personal wealth and resources to efficiently alleviate the effects of extreme poverty. We recommend a list of highly effective charities that reduce premature death or unnecessary suffering among the world's 1.3 billion poorest people.

About This Cause

The Life You Can Save excels at two vital tasks: we demonstrate the importance of effective and targeted giving, and we generate donations for some of the world’s most effective charities—while spending very little money ourselves to do so. Every dollar of TLYCS’s operations typically moves nine additional dollars to our recommended charities--a list of nonprofit organizations that are particularly effective at providing impactful, evidence-based interventions for addressing global extreme poverty. The majority of us agree: if we could easily save the life of a child, we would. If saving a drowning child meant simply wading into a shallow pond and pulling the child out, we would not hesitate to take this action. The fact that we would ruin a good pair of shoes or be late for an event would not outweigh the act of saving a child's life. Yet most of us do not follow this same impulse to save children dying around the world every day, even though these lives could be saved or improved by our donations to impactful charities. UNICEF estimates that 19,000 children die every day from preventable, poverty-related causes. Yet almost a billion people live very comfortable lives, with money to spare for many things that are not vital to survival. When did you last spend money on something to drink, when drinkable water was available for nothing? The Life You Can Save seek to change this paradigm. When world-renowned philosopher Peter Singer published book The Life You Can Save in 2009, he founded an organization of the same name, both with the goal of spreading the central ideas of the book and making them practical to the public in affluent countries. We at The Life You Can Save endeavor to change the culture of philanthropy by making poverty philanthropy a societal expectation. We want the idea of who you view as being in your “community,”, and therefore deserving of your help, to expand beyond your immediate family, friends and geographical region to include the entire world. And we want people to think carefully about which organizations they give to so that the world's poorest are helped as much as possible with their donations. As Peter Singer argues in his book, if everyone who can afford to contribute to reducing extreme poverty were to give a modest portion of their income to effective development charities, extreme poverty would be eliminated. In pursuit of these developments in popular thinking, we are working hard to spread our message through public outreach, philanthropy education, and a global online community. We encourage people to donate and to donate well by providing the information and technical tools to do so.. We encourage people to publicly pledge to donate a percentage of their income to highly effective aid organizations, recognizing that every person's giving will reflect their “personal best” commitment, and we support donors in striving to regularly improve upon their commitment. We hope to play a major role in moving society towards making effective giving and poverty reduction a widely embraced lifestyle choice for millions of us who were fortunate enough to have been born into far more comfortable lives than so many of our fellow humans in other parts of the globe.

The Life You Can Save
Po Box 2135
Novato, California 94948
United States
Phone 2066563510
Unique Identifier 462100400