Rice Impactful Careers and Giving founded the Rice Summer Giving Pledge in the Summer of 2023. This pledge is a commitment for members of the Rice community to commit to donating at least 1% of their summer earnings to charity. Our 2024 Summer Giving Pledge is open here!

In its inaugural year, the 2023 Rice Summer Giving Pledge participants donated a remarkable $4,187 to charity. The participants listed below fulfilled their pledge and demonstrated a commitment to doing good by donating a portion of their earnings.

2023 Rice Summer Giving Pledge Participants

Mason Howell

Vivian Ellis

Maria M. Valera

Sean Cartwright

Wanqi Yuan

Sai Mallannagari

Gazi Fuad

Caroline Hashimoto

Evan Jasica

Christina Chen

Ndidiamaka Nwosu

Giving Pledge

This semester, ICG is running a campaign for students to pledge to donate at least 1% of their summer income (or first 3 months of income, if they’re graduating) to a charity of their choice. Our campaign is open to take the 2024 Summer Giving Pledge.

Students can donate to any charity, but we especially recommend charities supported by strong empirical evidence, such as Malaria Consortium, which provides anti-malarial medicine to children, and GiveDirectly, which provides cash transfers to the world’s poorest people. More information about both charities is below.

Rice students have an enormous opportunity to do good through their donations, even if it doesn’t feel like the most intuitive way to make an impact. Learn more below, or check out this article as a presentation here.

More Information about the 2023 Summer Giving Pledge

Most Rice students want to do good, and we think one of the most impactful ways they can do that is by donating a percentage of their income. The ICG 2023 Summer Giving Pledge allows students a way to do that. The pledge is only a commitment for this summer, but it’s a way to start considering your impact for the future too.

What does this do?

Pledgers are invited to our Giving Pledge Picnic in fall of 2023.
Pledgers are recognized as a pledge participant on our website.
Pledgers receive a monthly summer newsletter on effective charities and other pledgers from Rice.
And it saves lives. Potentially lots.

1. You are in an incredibly fortunate position

If you’re reading this right now, there’s a good chance that you have an enormous amount of privilege. Just having a yearly household income of $50,000 puts you in the top 1.5% of earners in the world, and 17x the global median income (How Rich Am I?). The cost of living in America is much higher, but these numbers are already adjusted for price of living.

This is especially true if you’re a Rice student. The median Rice graduate’s income at age 34 was $76,000 as of 2017, which puts them in the richest 1% in the world.

2. Doing good requires careful reasoning

Consider the following experiment. Your goal is to increase school attendance in impoverished communities. There are five different charities with different solutions to this problem. Which of the following interventions do you think would be the most effective at improving school attendance, particularly in rural Kenya?

Unconditional cash transfers to families
Merit-based scholarships
Informing parents about the benefits of education
Deworming (treating a parasitic disease)
Free uniforms

Take a moment to actually think about it – it’s harder than you think!

Based on research done from 1998 to 2011, the study Worms at Work, conducted from 1998 – 2011, merit based scholarships are slightly more effective than unconditional cash transfers in terms of how many additional years of schooling they lead to.

Surprisingly, though, both these are dwarfed by giving students free uniforms to wear.

However, these are absolutely dwarfed by providing students with deworming services, which remove a damaging parasite.

And informing parents about the benefits of education is even more effective.

If you’re like most people (including the officers of this club), you guessed these results wrong.

Why does this matter?

Many areas have this similar structure, where the very best way to help is drastically better than the second or third best way. And the best solutions often aren’t the most intuitive ones. It’s very hard for most people to guess which interventions were gonna be the most effective before looking at the study. This makes a careful analysis of all possible actions especially important.

3. What can we do about it?

Many Rice students feel like they have to choose between helping others and helping their career. But if we stop and think about it, no matter what career or internship we choose, we can save a lot of lives with our donations.

We are in the global rich, and most of us will get well-paying jobs, and so donating 1% isn’t a big sacrifice. The other side is that the pros of donating, especially to the right charity, can be huge. If you saved someone’s life from a burning building, that might be the crowning achievement of your decade. Donating every year to the right charity would be like rescuing someone from a burning building every few years.

We mentioned earlier that the very best ways to help people can often be much better than other solutions, and these solutions often aren’t very intuitive. We can’t say for sure that Malaria Consortium and GiveDirectly (below), will help the most people per dollar, but given the evidence behind them, we think that they’re a pretty good bet.

Malaria Consortium

One such charity we strongly recommend is Malaria Consortium. Malaria Consortium distributes antimalarial drugs to children 3 months to 5 years old to prevent illness and death from malaria. The charity evaluator website GiveWell (a third-party organization) estimates that every additional $5,000 will save a life, which is far more effective than almost every other charity they study.

(This looks different from the study we cited earlier, since that study focused purely on educational outcomes and concluded in 2011.)

GiveDirectly

GiveDirectly sends money directly to the world’s poorest people. We like the idea of letting the world’s poorest people use cash transfers to invest in what’s best for themselves, because after all, they know what’s best for themselves, and GiveDirectly.

GiveDirectly experiments with different types of cash transfer programs, and one such program provides ~$40/month to the poorest adults in Kenya, Malawi, and Liberia – enough to lift them out of abject poverty. Programs like this can change people’s lives, their community’s lives, and their descendants’ lives. Check out their evidence.

The benefits can be huge… personally

Joining a community of other givers feels really valuable.
Taking a giving pledge demonstrates to yourself that you’re serious about helping others.
If you feel like your internship this summer or your job isn’t as impactful as you’d like, if you take a giving pledge, your future self is probably more likely to keep donating down the road, and probably more likely to choose an impactful career.

Consider pledging more than 1%

If you’re really excited by this idea and excited to give more, you can consider pledging to donate more than 1%, now or later. We think 10% is a number worth considering because:

Donating 10% of $50,000 will leave you $45,000 which would leave you in the richest 1.5% of the world,
Donating 10% will help 10 times as many people as 1%,
And there’s a long history of donating 10% (across many religions), dating back to at least the 5th century BCE in the Old Testament!

And if 10% is too much now or in the future, you can scale up how much you donate gradually. Lots of people start by donating 1 or 2% in college, and then scale up to 5% or 10% a couple years later.

If you take this pledge, you’re in good Rice company!

Lots of Rice alumni have taken a giving pledge, including John Yan, who was profiled in the BBC about it!

So given our fortune to be in the global rich, the fact that the most impactful choices don’t feel the most intuitive, and the huge potential to save lives through Malaria Consortium or GiveDirectly…