This is an article from the Atlantic from a few days ago. The writer takes on an EA lens, and seems to understand it well. Includes an interview with Pablo Melchor, co-founder and president of Ayuda Efectiva (in Spain). I'd recommend it, and it seems like a good thing to send to non-EA friends.
Some excerpts:
When I asked Pablo Melchor, the president of an effective-altruism nonprofit in Spain called Ayuda Efectiva, if he’d altered his usual giving in response to the war, he said he hadn’t. “This has nothing to do with how much I care (a lot!) but rather with how much I think my donation could achieve,” he wrote to me in an email. “I know the Ukrainian crisis is going to receive a huge amount of resources and any additional amounts will make a much greater difference in now forgotten tragedies,” such as the hundreds of thousands of children who die from malaria each year.
This is not to pit one tragedy against another, but just to note that the donations a cause receives are strongly dictated by media coverage. An effective altruist might also try to identify less publicized effects of the war itself. For instance, Chris Szulc, a member of Effective Altruism Poland, told me that he was interested in finding ways to provide Ukrainian refugees with mental-health services. Still other donors might take a bigger-picture perspective and fund initiatives that aim to reduce the risk of nuclear war and of large-scale conflicts.
But say you want to do something to try to help Ukrainians in this moment. What’s the best thing to do? For starters, donate your money and time, not physical stuff. “It’s better to send money to trusted organizations, because they can buy blankets or coats or whatever is needed at much cheaper prices,” Melinda Haring, the deputy director of the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center, told me. “They can get a brand-new coat for less than it costs for you to ship the coat to Ukraine.”
And
(For additional ideas, you could check out suggestions from Effective Altruism Poland and from Vox’s Kelsey Piper, who highlights, among other organizations, independent Russian media outlets.)
Cool! Beyond the value of the article itself, this is one of the first examples I've seen of mainstream media coverage of EA that really normalizes it instead of treating it as this alternative and/or new thing. Thanks for drawing our attention to it.