Q3 Impact Report

From bud to bloom

The Bloom Wellbeing Fund was founded and launched in December 2023 with seed funding from the Alpha-Epsilon Fund.

Leveraging our combined > two decade-long experience in grantmaking and effective giving, we – Lily and Peter – became joint fund managers in order to spearhead the initial design and piloting of the fund, initially as a project incubated within the Happier Lives Institute, a think tank which researches the most cost-effective opportunities for increasing subjective wellbeing.

During this pilot phase, we set out to understand several core questions that could help us to design a fund that could accelerate global happiness and wellbeing, including:

• Could we design an efficient and equitable process to identify and support the most exciting and impactful charities and researchers working on global mental health and wellbeing?
• Could we create a product to help busy philanthropists make impactful, tax-efficient donations to reduce global suffering?
• Could we help funders to gain regular insights into how their donations make a difference in the world through evidence-informed impact estimations and evaluations?
• Can we add value to the global health and wellbeing ecosystem to accelerate progress towards greater human flourishing, especially for under-served and neglected communities?

Bloom is creating value for grantees and philanthropists to move the needle towards more evidence-informed philanthropy in global wellbeing and mental health.

Over the past few months, speaking with and gaining advice from a wide range of charities, funders, and ecosystem builders, we have answers to the above that indicate that Bloom is creating value for grantees and philanthropists to move the needle towards more evidence-informed philanthropy in global wellbeing and mental health.

With this information, as of 1st September, we have decided to spin-out Bloom as an independent philanthropic organisation that supports funders, philanthropists, and charities to accelerate progress in global wellbeing and mental health.

Many philanthropists want to reduce suffering and help create flourishing lives with their wealth, but figuring out how is a real challenge. Bloom is a unique philanthropic fund that leverages the best available evidence throughout our grantmaking decisions. With a mission to improve global wellbeing and mental health by supporting cost-effective charities and interventions, we use the Wellbeing Life Year, or WELLBY, as the metric for the majority of our impact evaluations. It’s a simple idea: if we ask you how you’re feeling about your life on a 0-10 scale, and we can improve your answer to that question by 1 point for 1 year, we’ve created a Wellbeing Life Year.

Estimating the impact of charitable interventions using the WELLBY allows us to better understand how much wellbeing each grant creates. For more established organisations, that will be by way of rigorous evidence (such as meta-analyses, randomised controlled trials and other forms of charity-specific data). For younger projects, it may be grounded in impact estimation models based on theories of change and cost-effectiveness, strong teams, and potential for scale.

We’re working towards a world in which people have better wellbeing, improved mental health, less suffering, and live happier lives.

Bloom’s theory of change outlines that through grantmaking to support charities and research, through partnerships and ecosystem building, we can advance the field of wellbeing philanthropy and support organisations serving the communities most in need.

We’re working towards a world in which people have better wellbeing, improved mental health, less suffering, and live happier lives.

We would love to work with more like-minded partners to accelerate progress towards a happier world, together.