Announcing Effective Altruism Community Building Grants

I’m announcing a new project from the Centre for Effective Altruism: Effective Altruism Community Building Grants. This program will provide grants of between $5,000 and $100,000 to individuals and groups doing local effective altruism community building work. We expect to have a particular emphasis on funding groups aiming to transition from being run by volunteers to being run by full-time, paid organizers. We are currently in talks with LEAN about how we will collaborate on administering/implementing grants.

The aim of this project is to build the capacity of the effective altruism community to produce value, by strengthening a small number of high-potential effective altruism groups. We believe that community building grants will help achieve this aim for the following reasons:

• Providing these grants will enable the people with the most expertise and personal fit for local community building to significantly increase the time they can dedicate to building the highest potential effective altruism groups.

• Increasing the groups’ organizational capacity in this way will significantly increase the number of highly talented people dedicated to working on the most important problems, as a result of understanding the ideas and methodology of effective altruism (furthering CEAs charitable object No. 2).

Providing grants for effective altruism community builders promises to be a scalable way of using funding to increase the talent pool available to the effective altruism community. Upon completing the first round of effective altruism community building grants, we expect to further increase our understanding of both the specific contribution that effective altruism groups can make to the aims of the community, and the role that additional funding can play in strengthening effective altruism groups.

Though we expect the typical application to be for a grant to cover full-time or part-time work organizing an effective altruism group, we are open to grant applications which are outside of this scope but are focused on the aim of creating successful local effective altruism communities.

Current Landscape

CEA’s mission is to improve humanity’s long-term trajectory by building a community that can work together to solve humanity’s biggest problems. Right now, there are three main mechanisms by which individual EAs can come together as a community: online (e.g. EA Forum, Facebook), yearly conferences (e.g. EA Global) and local groups (e.g. university groups like Harvard EA and community groups like EA London).

Local groups provide the only option for regular, in-person interaction within the EA community. We think this is likely to be essential to a thriving EA community for at least three reasons:

• Regular in-person interactions are essential to establishing informal information networks, which are particularly useful as a way to learn things you didn’t know you needed to know.
• Regular in-person interactions facilitate strong connections within community, and these connections are likely to be essential to helping many people remain stably motivated to work on improving the world.
• Regular in-person interaction is a good method for introducing new people to the community.
  
  

The impact of local groups appears to follow a heavy-tailed distribution, with some of the larger, more established groups producing substantially more value than the average local group. Historically, much of the local group support provided by CEA, Rethink Charity, EAF and others has focused on either seeding local groups or providing a small amount of support to a large number of different groups. EA Community Building Grants are an experiment in shifting our focus towards making some of the most promising local groups even better.

In the past, CEA has considered similar plans, but ultimately decided not to push forward for three reasons:

• EA community size

• The effective altruism community used to be much smaller than it is now, both in terms of the number of people who identified with the aims of the community, and the reach of the ideas of effective altruism.

• Local groups need to be able to reach a critical mass of regular attendees to succeed. As the number of people in the community has grown, reaching critical mass has become easier, resulting in more groups gaining significant traction.

• High opportunity cost for group leaders

• The best way for group leaders to attract excellent people to their group is for them to be personally excellent themselves.

• However, this means that the best group leaders are also likely to have the highest opportunity costs. We weren’t sure that we knew enough about the overall value of local groups to know when a group leader should focus on their local group full time instead of pursuing other options.

• Entrenchment

• When a stable local group forms, it’s typically the case that no one else attempts to form a competing local group. This is generally quite positive and represents good norms of cooperation rather than defection.

• However, this creates a lock-in effect whereby the first stable local group crowds out the possibility of different groups forming in the future. Funding full-time organizers exacerbates this effect.

• As the EA community grows, the importance of local groups will grow as will the quality of the local organizer talent pool.

• This means that funding a local group today could mean that we can’t fund a better instantiation of that group in the future.

A few things have changed such that we think now is a good time to provide funding for local groups that want to professionalize.

First, the size of the EA community has grown. Local groups serve as an early contact point for people who learn about EA. Therefore as the reach of the ideas of effective altruism grows larger, more people are learning about EA and the more valuable it is for local groups to serve as a first point of contact with the community.

Second, we’ve been increasingly impressed with the productive output of some of the local groups we’ve talked to. This makes it more likely that running a local group is better than the alternative.

Third, we’ve gained a better understanding of what constitutes a promising local group and how local groups can produce value. For example, we’ve come to believe that a major comparative advantage of effective altruism groups is in supporting group members to develop high-value future plans, and that groups can achieve this aim more effectively by building strong (rather than simply large) communities.

Fourth, the available funding in the EA community has increased whereas important talent gaps remain. This project may be able to turn money into talent which makes it especially promising.

Finally, we think we can set clear expectations with the groups that we fund such that the project is viewed as an experiment and that part of the goal of the experiment is to determine whether the local group leaders should continue working on community-building full time.

The Ideal Candidate

In making funding decisions, we’re looking for two main things: exceptional organizers, and high-potential groups.

The Organizers

In the simplest terms, the heuristic for evaluating organizers is “Would we be excited to replicate these people 10x or 100x in the EA community?” This heuristic is inspired by YC’s advice on hiring and culture, and we think it encapsulates the importance of local community builders in setting the culture and trajectory of the EA community.

More specifically, we expect the organizers to have the following characteristics:

• EA expertise

• If you want to spread EA you should first be an expert on EA.

• This doesn’t mean that you need to be a cutting edge researcher. It does mean that you should have a thorough, nuanced understanding of the core EA ideas, and that you should be able to map out the considerations surrounding questions like what cause area to support, or what careers to consider.

• Adherence to the guiding principles of effective altruism

• We want to fund organizers who adhere to the core principles of commitment to others, scientific mindset, openness, integrity and collaborative spirit.

• Judgment

• We aim to take a relatively hands-off approach to the groups we fund. This means that we will tend to prefer organizers who we trust will tend to make reasonable, well-considered decisions and who display appropriate caution about difficult or risky decisions.

• Skill at EA community building

• We’ll also look for evidence that organizers possess skill at EA community building. The core heuristic for assessing this is “Will this person be able to attract talented, dedicated people to make major contributions on the most important problems?”

• There are many different ways of meeting this heuristic, but we expect to evaluate areas like social skill, executional competence, enthusiasm, and thoughtfulness, among others.

• Understanding of EA community building

• EA community building has the potential for being both highly valuable, but also harmful if done poorly. Organizers should have a very strong understanding of the relevant considerations determining the value of EA community building.

The Group

We’re looking for groups that are likely to have a strong potential to flourish given a significant increase in their resources.

Building on our experience at Y Combinator and their emphasis on building services for your 100 most dedicated users, we think one of the most important qualities of high-potential groups is the depth of engagement and understanding of the groups’ core members. This is intended to be a departure from assessing groups based on metrics related to size, such as event attendance or number of members.

We are looking for groups with the potential to facilitate the development of people who contribute valuable work to high-priority areas, Specifically, the features that we expect to see are:

• An inner core of well-coordinated organizers

• Successful local groups need to be able to attract a small inner core of people who can help make the group succeed. The inner core typically consists of people who aren’t working on the group full time, but attend events regularly, are willing to pitch in to help when needed and who the leaders can turn to for support and advice.

• Stable, highly-engaged group members

• This is a group of people who attend fairly regularly, don’t generally help with organizing events, but who are otherwise highly engaged and derive significant value from the group.

• A goal-oriented activity portfolio

• This will consist of activities and projects which have been chosen on the basis of a developing understanding of the goals of the effective altruism community, and how they will contribute to achieving these goals.

• A record of past success in attracting talented, dedicated people to make major contributions to the most important problems.

• This includes looking at whether people currently in the group seem like they could make such a contribution in the future.

The Grants

The grant period lasts for between three months and a year, and applicants may choose to delay the start of the grant period until the start of September 1st, 2018. By default, grants will be paid out on a quarterly basis, although there is flexibility in the payment schedule to accommodate the needs of grantees. Grant recipients will be required to write a brief quarterly report, including an itemized list of expenditures, as well as periodically checking in with CEA. Groups will also be required to write a full report at the end of the grant period.

For applications for a grant to cover full-time work organizing an effective altruism group, the default grant will be $35,000 to cover the living costs of one organizer over the course of a year, in additional to $10,000 for general expenses related to the group itself. For applications for funding below $5,000, see the effective altruism groups funding guide instead. Individual or joint applications may be submitted.

CEA will only be able to make grants which further some of its charitable objects, which are stated within the application form. CEA is not an employer of those to whom it awards grants, and reserves the right to terminate payment of the grants should they deviate from the agreed-upon terms.

Applications

Applications will open on February 21st and close on March 21st 2018. Applicants will be asked to include their CV, an overview of their group (where relevant), and a proposal for their project or group.  Applicants will receive a confirmation of submission email, and will be contacted within two weeks letting them know whether they will be invited to interview, which will take place within three further weeks. Interviewees will receive notification of the status of their application within three weeks of interview, and successful applicants will receive a grant offer specifying the terms and expectations of the grant.

If an application is particularly urgent, or you have any queries, please contact [email protected]

We're happy to answer questions from potential applicants about the process, either via email or in a call. 

Apply here

Edits:

1) 'We are currently in talks with LEAN about how we will collaborate on administering/implementing grants' added to paragraph 1. 
2) 'We're happy to answer questions from potential applicants about the process, either via email or in a call.' Added to the final paragraph