What Survival and Flourishing Fund does
Survival and Flourishing Fund (SFF) is a grantmaking-adjacent “virtual fund” that organizes the collection and evaluation of grant applications so philanthropists can decide where to donate to organizations working on humanity’s long-term survival and flourishing. SFF describes itself as a website for hosting grant-round planning and publishing recommendations; it states it is not the grantmaking entity and that it does not distribute grants directly. Instead, SFF’s role is to run its grant-recommendation processes (notably the S-Process, plus additional mechanisms such as “Speculation Grants,” Matching Pledges, and an Initiative Committee) and to publish the resulting recommendations.
SFF’s operational centerpiece is the S-Process: SFF describes a recurring algorithmic-plus-meeting mechanism intended to support delegation-aware evaluation by multiple “Recommenders,” culminating in recommendations that Funders may adopt. SFF also describes the S-Process as “Simulation Process” because it uses a grant-making simulation app to support the evaluators’ discussions and final decisions.
While SFF itself does not distribute funds, SFF’s FAQ and program pages connect the SFF recommendation processes to Survival and Flourishing Corp (SFC), which it describes as a Public Benefit Corporation engaged in philanthropy. SFC is described as distributing non-dilutive grants to for-profit companies based on recommendations from SFF’s S-Process and Speculation Grants programs, and also doing direct philanthropic work (including OpenLetter.net as an example of a project SFC engages in).
Strategically, SFF positions its recommendation mechanisms as a way to scale philanthropic decision-making under existential-risk and AI-safety uncertainty, while also experimenting with mechanisms designed to increase speed and leverage (e.g., Speculation Grants, Matching Pledges) and adding more proactive grantmaking via an Initiative Committee. For 2026, SFF announced a set of S-Process tracks (Main, Freedom, Fairness) and added themed tracks (Climate Change, Animal Welfare, and Human Self-Enhancement and Empowerment), with published application and recommendation timelines and a stated total funding range for distribution across rounds and tracks.