WaitList Zero — General Support

[Global Health & Wellbeing] WaitList Zero staff reviewed this page prior to publication. Note: This page was created using content published by Good Ventures and GiveWell, the organizations that created the Open Philanthropy Project, before this website was launched. Uses of “we” and “our” on this page may therefore refer to Good Ventures or GiveWell, but they still represent the work of the Open Philanthropy Project. WaitList Zero advocates for policies that promote living kidney donation. We see living kidney donation as a neglected field relative to its importance, and made an earlier planning grant to WaitList Zero. The organization has since completed the planning process and launched some initial activities. We were generally pleased with the results of the planning period. WaitList Zero’s planned activities include promoting evidence-based methods to educate patients and potential donors to raise kidney donation rates, and advocating for donor support policies such as compensation for lost wages and provision of lifetime health insurance for people who donate. It is difficult to predict the likely impact of providing funds for these activities, especially given the difficulty of achieving policy change, but we believe that WaitList Zero’s planned activities are plausibly tractable and cost-effective ways to substantially increase living kidney donation. Based on these considerations, the Open Philanthropy Project decided to recommend a grant of $200,000 over two years to WaitList Zero. Please note our conflict of interest disclosure for this grant. The cause Although it is not currently one of our main focus areas, we view research and advocacy around increasing organ donation as an area with potentially outstanding “room for more philanthropy.” In particular, we see a promising niche for an organization devoted to finding and promoting ethical, safe, and politically tractable ways to provide benefits for kidney donors, which could have sizable health benefits while saving the healthcare system money. The grant The organization WaitList Zero (waitlistzero.org), founded in 2014 by Josh Morrison and Thomas Kelly, is a US-registered 501(c)(3) advocacy organization dedicated to promoting living kidney donation.1 Mr. Morrison works full-time on WaitList Zero; Mr. Kelly returned to grad school and works on WaitList Zero on a quarter-time basis.2 In 2014, Good Ventures provided WaitList Zero a $50,000 planning grant to develop a detailed strategic plan. While the initial purpose of the planning grant was simply to support WaitList Zero in developing a strategic plan, WaitList Zero eventually decided (with our approval) that beginning to execute some pilot activities would be more informative than continuing the planning process. WaitList Zero initially planned to promote incentives for living kidney donors, as described in our writeup of the planning grant. However, based on consultations with a variety of players in the transplantation field during the planning process, WaitList Zero decided to instead pursue a suite of “transplant support” policies that it sees as more politically achievable and ethically uncontroversial while also being likely to address much of the kidney shortage:3 Increasing living kidney donation by educating potential recipients about transplantation and living donation. Some dialysis patients know very little about their options, and many potentially eligible recipients are not on the waiting list to receive a kidney.4 Two randomized controlled trials have found that educational home visits to renal disease patients and their families increase living kidney donation substantially (on the order of 20 percentage points).5 WaitList Zero intends to promote effective interventions by helping organizations involved with kidney patients or potential kidney donors share information about best practices, and by persuading government agencies to allocate more funding to such programs.6 We have not vetted the underlyi