Emerging Challenges Fund

About the ECF

Over the next decade, emerging technologies will pose significant challenges to global security. Rapid advances in AI, for example, could lower the barriers for malicious actors to carry out large-scale biological or cyber attacks, bring democratic processes under unprecedented strain, and accelerate scientific and economic progress like never before. At present, we are neither ready to face the next deadly pandemic nor equipped to navigate escalating geopolitical tensions as global superpowers build more nuclear weapons, of more types, on more platforms.

The ECF aims to prepare the world for these challenges. We prefer to support projects that meet Longview’s usual grantmaking criteria and pass two further tests:

  1. Does the project have a legible theory of impact? ECF grantees must have a compelling and transparent case in favour of their impact that a range of donors will appreciate.
  2. Will the project benefit from diverse funding? Often, support by a large number of donors, rather than a single organisation or donor, is of particular value.

In 2024, we allocated over half of the ECF to civil society organisations invited to help draft the EU AI Act’s Code of Practice. This grant round is especially well-suited for the Fund, as (i) providing expertise to those shaping the implementation of the EU AI Act is both vitally important and legible, and (ii) it is important that these civil society organisations are funded by a diversity of sources and can remain credibly independent from any single interest group, and (iii) the Fund allowed us to make the grants quickly as they were needed urgently. We aim for this to exemplify the ECF’s grantmaking strategy—quickly supporting clear opportunities that other philanthropists overlook or are not well-suited to support.

For those seeking to invest in a safer future this fund provides unique expertise across beneficial AI, biosecurity, and nuclear weapons policy and fills critical funding gaps at organisations in need of rapid financial support and a diversity of donors.

Longview also delivers additional services for larger donations:

  1. Recommendations. For donors wishing to make large gifts, we offer access to grant recommendations drawn from our top opportunities. These concise analyses help donors find and fill the most critical funding gaps.
  2. End-to-End Effective Giving. For major donors seeking to develop significant philanthropic portfolios, we provide a bespoke end-to-end service at no cost. This includes detailed analysis, expert-led learning series, residential summits, tailored strategic planning, grant recommendations, due diligence, and impact assessment. Please get in touch with our CEO, Simran Dhaliwal, at sim@longview.org.
Fund Managers
Emerging Challenges Fund
Page Hedley
AI Programme Director
 
Page is the AI Programme Director at Longview. Prior to joining Longview, he worked on AI governance at OpenAI and Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology; and co-founded the Forecasting Research Institute. A lawyer by training, he spent five years as a litigator at Williams & Connolly LLP before pivoting to philanthropy and the governance of emerging technology. He graduated magna cum laude from Cornell Law School where he was editor-in-chief of the Law Review and received the classmate-selected prize for character and overall academic achievements.
 
Emerging Challenges Fund
Carl Robichaud
Nuclear Weapons Policy Programme Director
Carl leads Longview’s programme on nuclear weapons policy and co-manages Longview’s Nuclear Weapons Policy Fund. For more than a decade, Carl led grantmaking in nuclear security at the Carnegie Corporation of New York, a philanthropic fund which grants over $30 million annually to strengthen international peace and security. Carl previously worked with The Century Foundation and the Global Security Institute, where his extensive research spanned arms control, international security policy, and nonproliferation.
Emerging Challenges Fund
Simran Dhaliwal
CEO
Simran coordinates Longview Philanthropy’s research, grantmaking, and advising work. Prior to joining, she was a research analyst at Goldman Sachs, working on a two-person team recognised as the best sell-side stockpickers in London in 2018. While there, she also became a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) charterholder and was donating to high-impact charities. Simran read philosophy, politics, and economics at the University of Oxford, where she first came across the concept of using evidence and reason to do the most good at a Giving What We Can talk.