EA - Questions about OP grant to Helena by DizzyMarmot

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Questions about OP grant to Helena, published by DizzyMarmot on February 2, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.TL;DRA biosecurity & pandemic preparedness grant was made by Open Philanthropy to Helena for $500,000 in Nov 2022The grant profile raises questions about how it was justified and approvedThere is scant public information that could justify it as the best-placed and most appropriate recipient, a clear risk of nepotism inherent in the recipient organization, and what appear to be previous false representations made by the recipient organizationThis post asks OP to, in an effort to support accountability and transparency, publish further grant details and the investigation documents for the grantNotes: I apologize in advance as I am not experienced in writing using the EA syntax and structure, all errors are my own. Full disclosure, I previously applied to and was rejected for a role at Open Philanthropy. I work for an organization that in the past has been a recipient of funding from OP, as a person who has an affinity with but does not identify strongly as an EA. I think it is a good thing for accountability, transparency, and the broader governance of EA that OP listed the grant online, that I am able to question the grant in this forum and expect that OP will respond in good faith.ContentI have watched with interest as EA’s influence has grown within global health and development, in particular Open Philanthropy’s work in health security and biosecurity. Recent calls for transparency and accountability within effective altruism have thankfully been met by new initiatives like openbook.fyi. In light of this, a particular grant seems like it warrants further inspection and from OP’s perspective raises enough questions that it should have been accompanied by more information.I occasionally trawl the grants databases for philanthropic foundations working in global health & health security and found a $500,000 grant to ‘Helena’ awarded in November 2022. I didn’t think anything of it until I saw it again in the openbook log, and upon seeing it looked into the organization.I hope that my initial perception of the grant and the organization is entirely wrong, but the grant is striking in that it has scant details on what is a sizable grant to an organization with no track record in the subject matter that appears to have pretty clearly misrepresented itself in the recent past.The grant commitment and recipient organization as they stand are emblematic of the challenges in effective and equitable grantmaking for philanthropies like Open Philanthropy. Henry Elkus and Helena’s path can be summed up as:Henry’s VC dad uses his resources to support Henry’s interestsHenry drops out of school because he thinks he is exceptionally smarter and better equipped to solve 'our problems’Henry starts an obtuse org with for-profit venture capital and non-profit 501(c)3 sidesThe organization has a confusing and meandering scope of work, that appears to be a collection of personal interests at each point in timeHas no proven tangible value-add beyond ‘networking’, with previous programmatic activities summed up as funding a semi-academic sociology event and acting as a rogue PPE procurement agency during COVIDHelena then gets half a million from OP to explore ‘policy related to health security’ work that they have no track record of doing or apparent expertise inIt feels wrong when Helena (subjectively) seems like a self-aggrandizing nepotism project at best, and (objectively) gets a large grant with no details and no track record in the area of work. It is also notable that Henry and Helena have no track record of participating in EA settings. Participating in transparency and holding your grantmaking to account meaningfully are two different things. This all lea...