(Poor) Altruist - To help or not to help when we have limited resources, and how do we know?

A Brazilian educator published an essay on LessWrong yesterday exploring how resource-poor organizations can apply effective altruism to help vulnerable youth. He argues that the effective altruism movement focuses too much on wealthy-to-poor aid, overlooking the challenge of poor-to-poor helping. His specific problem: finding low-cost interventions that compete against the short-term rewards of theft and drugs for at-risk minors. His proposal is to build a scientific protocol that tests which small, inexpensive investments build long-term trust and shift youth toward delayed gratification. It's altruism under real constraints—when every dollar represents a week's worth of meals, every choice must prove its worth.

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