Giving What We Can was founded as a giving society in 2009 by Toby Ord, an ethics researcher at Oxford, his wife Bernadette Young, a physician in training at the time, and fellow ethicist William MacAskill [2][3] with the goal of encouraging people to give 10% of their income on a regular basis to alleviate world poverty.[4] This is similar to zakat[5] or tithing but Ord said there was no religious motivation behind it.[6] Ord cited writings from Peter Singer and Thomas Pogge about one's moral duty to give to the poor as inspiration for starting the organization,[7] and personally planned to give away everything above about $28,000 a year, the median after-tax salary in the U.K.[7] His focus was on effective giving, meaning that he emphasized donations to charities which saved a maximal amount of life per donation amount.[9] GWWC was launched with 23 members.[8] People who joined signed a pledge to give away 10% of their income to any organization they thought could best address poverty in the developing world, and could pledge more; there was no penalty for quitting.[6] By the end of 2011 it had 177 members, mostly other academics, in five chapters including Oxford, Cambridge, Princeton, and Harvard.[8][10] By 2012 the group had 264 people from 17 countries,[11] and it surpassed 1,000 members in 2015.[2]