Making a Difference Ⅰ: Evidence-based Impact

Millions of children die each year due to easily preventable diseases. Hundreds of millions of people earn less than $2 a day. Billions of animals spend most of their life in pain. Many of us want to help but don’t know how. Can one person make a difference that’s not just a drop in the bucket?

This interdisciplinary course will provide you with a collection of practical tools from economics, public health, behavioral science, ethics, exact sciences, and more to help you achieve a positive and significant impact. From the small decisions we make every day, through the initiatives we choose to support, to our most significant life choices, such as what career to pursue, relying on existing evidence and well established tools in decision making can help you drive a change you believe in.

In this course, the first of two parts of the Making a Difference program, you will learn some of the most foundational ideas and tools for achieving a positive impact. In parallel, each lesson will introduce you to a new cause area with plenty of concrete and actionable opportunities for making a difference.

This course focuses on the foundations of cost-effectiveness, measurement, and evaluation, key questions around who to extend our compassion and concern towards, and the opportunities with the strongest evidence for impact.

The second course in this program, Making a Difference Ⅱ: High Stakes, builds on the ideas presented in this course and explores tools for prioritization and assessment when there’s limited information and the stakes are extremely high - including risks to the survival and prosperity of human civilization.