Our 8-week fellowship supports you in actually putting your ideas into practice:
We connect you with a community of passionate people to help you improve and implement your ideas.
We teach interdisciplinary ideas and concepts to help you evaluate where you can have the most impact.
We provide funding, scholarships, and experience to set you apart and help you pursue a meaningful career.
Non-Trivial's founder Peter spent 7 years preparing to be a doctor before he came to the conclusion he could have more impact outside of treating patients. This insight led him to co-found a non-profit that has raised over $10 million for global health charities, and advise hundreds of top university graduates on impactful careers.
Non-Trivial emerged from this experience, founded on Peter's belief that you don't need to wait to start changing the world. Young people–especially if they’re talented and work hard at it–can make a difference. Since our first fellowship in December 2022, we've received over 35,000 applications, making our community of ~300 fellows one of the most selective communities for teenagers globally.
We are partnering with these organizations to support the development of gifted teenagers, promote an analytical approach to solving the world’s problems, and get the word out about our fellowship.
Since our founding in 2022, we’ve awarded more than $400,000 in scholarships and prizes to talented young people and organizations that support them. The largest funder of our work has been Open Philanthropy (OP), whose main funders are Cari Tuna and Dustin Moskovitz, a co-founder of Facebook and Asana. Open Philanthropy funds work to improve global health and development, animal welfare, prevent pandemics, and reduce risks from artificial intelligence. No funder makes decisions about our curriculum, selection of fellows, judging of their projects, or anything else that we do.
We combine tools from economics, science, and philosophy to help you tackle global challenges. Non-Trivial draws inspiration from various sources, including effective altruism (EA), a research field and social movement aimed at finding the best ways to help others. While we incorporate some concepts commonly used in the EA community, we maintain our own unique approach to empowering individuals to make a positive difference.
However, the movement is not without its valid criticisms. For example: critics say that EA neglects systemic change; that EA shifted focus away from present-day issues (archive); that philanthropy can undermine democracy; and that EA’s focus on maximizing good may cause its adherents to feel overwhelmed. We think there’s something to each of these critiques.
The movement is also not a single entity and there are many open questions and active disagreements within it. Should society fund only evidence-based charities? How can the suffering of chickens and cows be compared? How much do future people matter? There are no straightforward answers to these questions, and sometimes, it feels like the effective altruism community disagrees more than they agree.
Nonetheless, Non-Trivial believes the effective altruism community has expressed some beneficial ideas that can help guide people who want to have a positive impact on the world. But considering oneself a member of any particular community is not a requirement to make a difference. Regardless of your philosophy or even if you don’t feel like you have one, Non-Trivial wants to help you make the world a better place.
