UPDATE: Peter Singer’s Best Charities for 2018

We are happy to announce The Life You Can Save's 2015 recommended charities (see list below). You can read about our selection methodology here. As you know, there are many great charities effectively reducing suffering and premature death among the poorest people in the world. We are confident that the ones we recommend are among the most effective and they are ones we personally feel great about donating to ourselves.

We hope you'll generously support these charities, as each of them can use your gift to profoundly improve, or even save, the lives of people suffering in the grips of extreme poverty. Like us, these individuals have hopes and dreams, friends and families. Through our donations, we have the opportunity to make a tremendous difference in their lives.

We continue to recommend many of the charities we've supported in the past, but we've also made several important changes to our list.

We've added Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA), replacing the Proven Impact Fund (a sub-project of IPA). IPA conducts vital research, particularly Randomized Controlled Trials (RCT's), to identify interventions that are effective, and those that are not. Many of our recommended charities use interventions that IPA's research has helped assess.

We've also added four charities (with asterisks below) that have recently been recommended as standouts by the respected charity evaluator, GiveWell, which focuses on identifying outstanding giving opportunities serving the world's poor. We hope you'll take the time to learn more about these organizations, and the wonderful work that they do.

This year we have removed the numerical rankings from our list. Our team made this decision because the rankings suggested more precision in our internal assessment of the relative merits of the charities than is actually the case. Further, it failed to acknowledge the importance of subjective value judgments in establishing a rank. I discuss these issues in more detail in our "Selection Methodology."

Our expanded methodology description is an example of how The Life You Can Save's staff has been hard at work to make our website a more valuable and transparent resource for you. We have also added functionality to our Where to Donate page to make it easier to find charities doing the kind of work you care most about, and that you can give to tax-deductibly where you live.

Later this month, we'll be releasing our Impact Calculator, an exciting new tool that estimates how much bang-for-the-buck our recommended charities provide.

On behalf of everyone at The Life You Can Save, I wish all of you a healthy, joyous and productive New Year. I sincerely hope that you will donate to one or more of our recommended charities so others may experience a life-sustaining year for themselves and their families.