Hi everyone! I’m CEA’s new Chief of Staff. I also serve as our Board Liaison, and I’m posting to introduce you to CEA’s new independent board. I’m happy to be a point of contact for any questions you have about them, or the recruiting process we ran to find and select them!
TL;DR: As of October 1, 2026, CEA is an independent organization, with our first independent board.
Why we spun out
When we announced our spinout in 2024, we said that bringing our operations in-house and setting up our own legal entities would help us pursue our mission better. EV is winding down, and we wanted governance and operations built for what CEA is today. That’s now in place: our own operations team, our own entities, and a board accountable to CEA specifically.
Meet our new board
Stien van der Ploeg (Board Chair) is the executive director of Animal Charity Evaluators. Before joining ACE, Stien worked 20 years supporting various causes in multiple countries. They now use their leadership, strategy, and philanthropy skills to help more people help more animals.
Jacob Eliosoff is a computer programmer from Montreal who lives in NYC. He started out in tech startups and has since worked in finance, crypto, and long ago as a teacher. He’s been involved in many projects related to effective altruism, including being on the boards of EA NYC, The Humane League, and Collider.nyc (an AI safety/impact coworking hub).
Andrés Jiménez Zorrilla is a former private equity professional turned entrepreneur (both for- and not-for-profit). He is an active member of the EA community, the co-founder and former CEO of Shrimp Welfare Project, and a trustee of Ambitious Impact. He is currently working on navigating the transition to a world with artificial super intelligence.
Each of these three combines values alignment with board experience and impressive results in their own field. The search was a lot like an executive search, but where we needed three leaders instead of one. We weren’t sure we could find even one person who matched the spec we wrote, so finding three was far from a given. We started with 250+ referrals and ended up with our top choices, all of them busy people with plenty of other options for how they spend their time. We take their decision to commit significant personal time to CEA as a vote of confidence in our mission and future direction.
For this first board we prioritized independence, board experience, and experience outside EA, and the new board is planning a second round of recruitment in 2027 to expand membership and round out their skill sets to provide effective oversight to CEA.
What changes
Honestly, not much for our day-to-day work. Our teams, managers, and strategic direction are largely the same!
What does change is how CEA operates. Under EV’s structure, the legal separation between the US and UK entities made it hard to run a single organization (for example, our UK-based COO couldn’t make certain decisions for the US side, and our US-based CEO couldn’t make them for the UK side). Now that CEA has its own entities and its own Operations Team, the people accountable for CEA’s work can make the decisions that affect it, and we can build on what we learned in the EV era, including stronger compliance across the organization.
The spinout was largely (and intentionally) a boring operational process, but it matters to us. It removed administrative hurdles that took up time and attention, and it lets us focus on our mission.
Thank you
This was a major operational undertaking. We’re very grateful to the staff and board members at CEA and EV, past and present, whose work made it possible, alongside everything else they do.
Wow I like this board ! Congrats CEA