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 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.
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We have partnered with these organizations and others 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. Our primary funder is Carina Initiatives, whose mission is to "send more kids from more communities to the frontiers of science and technology." 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 the moral ambition (MA) movement and 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 MA and EA communities, we maintain our own unique approach to empowering individuals to make a positive difference.
These sets of ideas and those like them are not without their valid criticisms. For example: critics say that they may neglect systemic change; that philanthropy can undermine democracy; or that a focus on maximizing good may cause us to feel overwhelmed. We think there’s something to each of these critiques.
Neither the EA nor MA movements are a single entity or a well-defined set of ideas and people, and there are many open questions and active disagreements within each. 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.
Nonetheless, Non-Trivial believes that various modern social movements like effective altruism have 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 - or believing any particular ideas - is not a requirement to make a difference. Regardless of your philosophies and beliefs, or even if you don’t feel like you have any, Non-Trivial wants to help you make the world a better place!
