Comments
Shaping effective altruism: Lightning talks on community and field building
24 min readOct 31, 2024
18
In this series of lightning talks at EAG: London 2024, we outlined our recent work building the effective altruism community across the world. Sam shared resources for group organizers, Naomi reviewed funding opportunities, while Jamie, Marieke, Kathryn, Jemima, and Aditya shared best practices and success stories. We hope you find this transcript of our talks useful.
Sam works for the CEA university groups team whilst pursuing his degree in philosophy. He's focused mostly on community building; but also has interests in animal welfare, and global priorities research.
Good afternoon. The key takeaway I want you to have from this talk is that using the EA Groups Resource Centre will make group organizing half as difficult, or twice as easy, depending on whether you're a glass-half-full or half-empty kind of person.
To prove it, I've put a quote from a group organizer who described it as their Bible.
So what is it? Very simply, the EA Groups Resource Centre is a website that has roughly everything you need to know to organize an EA group.
We’ve spent over 500 hours on its redesign, we’ve done over 40 user interviews, 50 pages have been updated, and 20 of them are brand new.
Next I’m going to highlight some useful pages.
I recognize there's a lot of text on this slide, I've listed quite a few pages in the hope that one of them will stick out to you, making you go and visit it at some point in the future.
Again I encourage you to check out for yourself how simple and easy the Group’s Resource Centre is to use.
Jamie is Managing Director at Leaf, a nonprofit that supports exceptional teenagers in exploring how they best can help others. Recently, Leaf has focused on scalable online fellowships, supporting top school-age students in the UK to explore how they can maximize their positive impact.
This is a talk I (Jamie) gave in early 2024 which reflected the state of Leaf at the time. Since then, we’ve run another cohort with more than twice as many applications, many more completed fellows, and various other updates. I’m excited about Leaf’s potential, but due to fundraising difficulties, its future is in jeopardy; please do reach out if you’d be excited to support us financially.
Hi, I'm Jamie Harris. I'm managing director of Leaf, which supports exceptional teenagers to explore how they can best save lives, help others, change the course of history; all those good things that we care about at this conference.
In 2022, when I first started working on Leaf, I ran a residential program, which had 174 applicants; 61 of which we accepted, and 60 of which actually showed up and completed the thing. Fast forward two years later, and I am running something completely different; online fellowships where the focus is helping participants explore how they can do good in the world using the subjects that they already know and love.
For example, we have one called the Mathematics of Morality, and another one called History to Shape History for the Better. In the cohort we ran earlier this year, we had 1,563 applicants, which led to 107 completed fellows.
As you can see, there's a nice roughly 10x multiplier on our number of applicants, which is a big improvement at least on that metric. You might be wondering, “Why the switch, and how did we get this improvement?” There are a lot of things that contributed; one key part of what's going on was that I was intentionally experimenting with different kinds of formats and different things that we could do during the programs. We were also tracking progress on how those changes were going across a bunch of metrics.
This is a simplified version of Leaf’s theory of change, which is on the website:
We want to improve this, but obviously there are lots of different ways I could achieve these goals, and I wanted to try out some different options and also keep track of whether the changes were actually helping or not. To that end, I have measurements for each different stage of the theory of change.
For instance, the application process for each of our different programs included a kind of intelligence test. I could use that to track whether the accepted participants improved on that test on average, and to see whether or not the application process actually says anything meaningful about the participants. I can score those different components of the application process individually, and I can see whether they correlate with some outcome metrics that I care about.
To check if the participants want to actually keep engaging with the question of how they can do the most good, I can offer them different kinds of follow up opportunities, and see what proportion of people sign up for those opportunities.
And then to get a sense of whether I'm actually increasing the expected value of their future actions and the path they're planning to take, I can see if their career plans change as a result of participating.
To clarify, these are just a few examples of the different metrics that I track to see if we are indeed on track. This also isn't the full list of things, either, there's a big long list of things that you can check to see if these different changes that you're making actually make a difference to the value of the program that you're offering.
The whole reason for this experimentation in the first place was to see if I could make progress on three buckets of targets. Basically, these are:
Each of these had been pretty solid in the 2022 residential program that I've done, but I had a very strong suspicion that I could do better on some or all of them, and I wanted to see if I could actually make that happen. For instance, the residential program was expensive; mine had a cost of over £2000 per participant, and I wasn't sure if the results I was seeing were strong enough to justify these costs. So these are the targets I was aiming to improve, but to make the improvements, I had to test a bunch of different options.
Again, I tried a bunch of things. Many were variations of an online fellowship format, because if you get good results from that, it seems likely that a program in that vein could be cheap and scalable.
Back to the comparison. Comparing the 2022 residential versus the 2024 online programs, I think this experimentation has led to a whole bunch of improvements on those top three targets that I talked about.
We got higher ratings on a bunch of application-related measures, we had a much higher proportion of people signing up for opportunities afterwards. Obviously this isn't the full range of metrics. To some extent these metrics have been cherry picked a little bit to make it sound like, “Hey, Jamie tried some stuff and it worked.” I do think there's a plausible counter-narrative, that maybe you don't need to do all this experimentation and you should just pick something that seems promising that's to your comparative advantage, and throw everything at it to try and make it work and go really well, rather than doing all this testing. Nevertheless, I'm pretty excited about the model that we landed on.
In terms of next steps and things we can do to help each other…
If you want to talk strategy about your own field building efforts or the ways to help empower other people, then I'm happy to chat. It could be a one off thing, or a longer term advising or consulting relationship if there's a good fit there.
I also wrote a 50 page document with a whole bunch of detail on these metrics, which is not public for various reasons. If you would like access to that document, please tell me and let me know why, because it needs to be somewhat private. I may hire people in the near-term future to take ownership of some of these different fellowships that we have. This might be some subject or cause specific stuff. So please get in touch if you're interested in those things, and certainly get in touch if you want to give me money to make Leaf happen at a bigger scale. Thank you.
Marieke currently serves as the co-director of EA Netherlands and a board member of the 10% club. Before joining EAN in this role, Marieke was a volunteer and board member with several foundations: EA Netherlands, Doneer Effectief and Organisation for the Prevention of Intense Suffering (OPIS), alongside her work as an implementation consultant in healthcare tech.
Good afternoon, thank you for being here. My name is Marieke, I'm the co-director of EA Netherlands, we’re part of the Community Builder Grantees program from Centre for Effective Altruism.
Today, I want to talk to you about the secret sauce of community building. I've talked to a lot of people and asked them what they love about the EA community; I got a lot of answers, but two really stood out. One of them was the idea of the value alignment within EA, and wanting to make a bigger impact. But the second also stood out, which was about encouraging and helping others.
Members of the EA community have a very low threshold for asking each other for help, and the help they get is useful for them. This helpful, supportive culture is something we can all cultivate in our own communities by making Slack groups or WhatsApp groups, and encouraging people to ask for help from each other.
At EA Netherlands, we try to build a thriving and encouraging community, and I'd like to talk to you about three people from our community who went on and did remarkable things, as well as how each of them benefited from being a member of EA Netherlands.
First, I'd like to introduce Pepijn.
Pepijn came to us two years ago with the idea of organising events where people could talk about effective giving and donating more effectively. We connected him to a dozen people and told him “yes, this seems like a very good idea. Go and do it, and we'll help with getting people to your first events.” The 10% Club is now a professional organization, with events all over the Netherlands. They have great vegan food, top speakers, and they inspire hundreds of people to donate more effectively. When I asked him what EA Netherlands did, in his own words, he said, “you all sucked me into the movement, and without you, I would most likely not have started it.”
The second person I'd like to introduce you to is Stan.
Stan started coming to our office over a year ago. That may have given him the encouragement to take the step to quit his job, and begin to consider different impactful career options. When he came to EAG London, right here where you are now, he met his two co-founders, who started Timaeus together. Timaeus is an organization in AI safety, and they are doing the important work of finding scalable ways to find out how large networks work, using singular learning theory. A few months before EAG London, the two other co-founders had already met each other at an AI safety retreat that EA Netherlands organized. After EAG London where they met, the co-working office in Amsterdam was a very natural space for them to cultivate their friendships, and get it all started. For Stan, the most useful thing about EA Netherlands was perhaps the infrastructure that we offered.
Lastly, I would like to talk to you about Celine.
I find Celine’s story really amazing, as her story is one of perseverance. She came to one of our events on global health and development a couple of years ago, and she was sold on the idea of cost-effectiveness. She wanted to work in the field, but without experience, it was difficult for her to land a position. She was rejected several times, including by Charity Entrepreneurship.
With our connections, she started volunteering at value-aligned NGOs. After two years, she did get into Charity Entrepreneurship. She co-founded an NGO that helps Nigerian women at risk of maternal deaths with safe family planning, and they're doing great. When I asked her what EA Netherlands did for her, she specifically mentioned the connections we offered, and how we brainstormed with her to help her reach her value-aligned goals.
All these people benefited in different ways from the community; besides the ideas and values of EA and support from the community, different things helped them. For Pepijn, it was more the connections and the encouragement. For Stan, it was more the infrastructure we offered and the community we built in the co-working office. For Celine, it was the events, the professional connections, and the brainstorming.
We have thought a lot about our theory of change, maybe we're even overthinking it, but community building is hard.
You can read more on our theory of change on the forum. Ultimately by supporting each other, we hopefully can do even better. Thank you.
Kathryn started her career by studying law, with a focus on international law and human rights. Before starting Magnify Mentoring, she spent her career in civil society, working in five countries on human-rights public interest litigation, legal research, and lecturing.
Thank you very much for being here. My name is Kathryn, and I am the Founder and CEO of Magnify Mentoring.
Magnify Mentoring started back in 2019. We were thinking about how to make strides in supporting people from underrepresented groups to do good with their careers. We found that mentorship was an especially effective intervention. You find fantastic people who are warm and welcoming, kind and supportive, and knowledgeable in particular fields, and connect them to people who are trying to do ambitious, effective things in the world.
Since starting in 2019, we've grown to a global network of over 500 people.
We have 250 mentors now, mostly women, non-binary, trans, and people of all genders, and recently kicked off a round for people from underrepresented groups more broadly.
Looking at data on the participants in the round for underrepresented groups most are people from low to middle-income countries. This slide shows our mentors and mentees all over the world.
We receive applications for mentorship; normally about 200 every 3 months, and run 4 rounds a year. We match people based on goals; we have somebody who says, “Hey, I'm excited about getting involved in alternative proteins, I'm excited about working in bio.” Then we connect them with a fantastic mentor or mentors in each field who can guide them. They can help build their confidence, and connect them to funding or jobs. We do community networking, training, and recruitment. Over the coming months, recruitment is going to be a key focus area; we've got all of these organizations that want to hire, and we've got a lot of data on people who are looking for work in the space.
The main things we look at are:
The quick answer to that is yes. We ask them for their goals at the beginning of the program, they let us know what they're looking to achieve, and we match them with a mentor who is skilled in providing that kind of support. Then we track whether or not they were able to fulfill their goals at the end of the program.
We have a lot of really cool use cases. People often say, “I applied for you because I was lacking in confidence.” We often see the impacts of imposter syndrome within our specific target demographics; people are wondering, “Am I good enough? Can I do this?”
We connect them to somebody who can help guide them. We also have a lot of use cases along the lines of, “I got this job” or “I got this funding opportunity, and I wouldn't otherwise have got it without Magnify Mentoring.” Then we’re also tracking whether our crew is satisfied generally, and the answer is also yes; in our post-round feedback form, the average score for the question “I recommend being a Magnify mentee” was 9.4/10.
In terms of how to get involved, we are looking for mid to senior-level professionals who are interested in mentoring. I would add a qualifier that; I’ve found that having warm, welcoming people who are genuinely invested in cultivating talent is the most important thing. Having somebody who's genuinely really invested in the progress of their mentee, and is happy to support them and knowledgeable about a particular area; just turns out to be way more important for actually being able to cultivate these kinds of relationships.
If you want to apply to be a mentor yourself, we are open now. Please go to the Join Us section of our website or get in touch with me through our website. I would encourage you to check us out and get involved. Thank you very much for your time.
Jemima is Co-President of Effective Altruism Durham. Jemima has previously interned at the Maternal Health Initiative, the Global Challenges Project, and the Family Hubs Network. Jemima has also interned for a member of the UK House of Lords.
Hi everyone, I'm Jemima. I've been organizing the EA Durham University group for 2 years at Durham University in the Northeast of England. I started in 2021 as president, and I became co-president in 2023.
I've been asked to talk to you about some of our successes, which is deeply painful to me as a British person, but here we go.
If there’s one thing that stands out from EA Durham, it would be that we get a lot of people who graduate from the Arete Fellowship. For those of you who don't know what that means, the Arete Fellowship is the correct name for the intro fellowship, and we’ve had at least 221 graduates in less than three years.
When we call someone a grad, we mean someone who came to at least 75% of sessions. To break that down a little bit, that's largely a product of getting a lot of applications.
One interesting thing is that this year, we were way more selective. We went from letting in basically everyone to letting in around half of people, but we still ended up with about the same number of graduates.
The reason why there's a range in the 2023 year is because we had three cohorts still ongoing until the end of the term. If all the people currently on track to finish actually finish, you might get a finish rate of 86%, which would be absolutely incredible.
Audience question: What did that one applicant do in 2022 to get rejected?
Jemima: [laughing] I wasn't president then. So I'm not sure. We get a lot of ChatGPT now, but probably not back then, so I don’t know. When we’re deciding who to accept or not, we owe it entirely to EA Cambridge; it's basically getting people to read On Caring by Nate Soares, which is mainly talking about EA principles, especially scope sensitivity, and write a response to that. Then we analyze that and see to what extent they vibe with EA principles.
So I showed this table to my boyfriend, and he had three questions.
He was wondering:
So I thought, these are good questions that I could explore with you.
At Durham we’re really, really lucky. Most of our applications come from department mailing lists.
At Durham, department staff are just happy to send an email about the Arete fellowship to all the students in the department. Other societies don't do this, but students read our message, take it seriously and apply.
This doesn't always work - sometimes it isn’t possible, sometimes students receive too many similar emails, but I would say to definitely try this. Generally, I’d recommend trying all the outreach avenues you can and then double down on what works.
In case you were wondering if the people who apply through department mailing lists are less likely to complete the program, the number of grads who come from mailing lists is just about the same, it’s at least 50%.
So, how do we have so much capacity?
Dedicated facilitators. At the start, it was a lot of investment; I did 5 cohorts, my vice president did 4 cohorts. After that it kind of snowballs, because you get people who finish the fellowship who want to facilitate, and it all works out nicely. We also have an organized Arete coordinator, who ensures that the process is as frictionless as possible for the fellows and facilitators. Shout out to Amir who is at this conference.
So, final question; why is the number of Arete grads a good metric?
Ultimately, what we care about is people going out into the world and doing good, and that's not the same as graduating from the Arete fellowship. Unfortunately, impact as a university group president is kind of a slow burn. Often the people who get most involved are young, they’ve got a few years until they graduate and find a job.
So, the number of grads seems like a fairly good proxy, since we can only really go on proxies. About 16% go on to do the in-depth EA fellowship, which we call IDEA because that's just a better name. About a quarter go to an EAG or EAGx. We have an AI safety society, Theo is in this room, go Theo! Sam Archer is also in this room, he's been running IDEA.
Even though we're relying on proxies, this year my co-president and I have been focusing on what we can do to lead to more people getting into high impact careers.
There's basically two things; career programs and having an Opportunities Officer. Shout out to Alex Vellins, he ran our career program and is also the opportunities officer.
To close, I think a well run university group can be a great way to have a lot of impact. I'm excited to see what people in this room will go on to do, and thank you very much for listening.
Aditya is a Ph.D. student at the Computational Data Science Department, IISc Bangalore. He has received a Community Building grant from CEA to coordinate AI Safety field building efforts in India. Aditya has previously helped Turing Prize, now called AI Alignment Awards with their hackathons and retreats in India.
Since giving this talk earlier in 2024, Aditya helped produce a hackathon on Live Interfaces (part of Live Theory agenda). Aditya runs AI Alignment Bangalore; if you’d like to connect with them or attend a meetup, join their groups on WhatsApp and Telegram.
Thanks a lot for coming. Today, I'd like to talk to you about what I've been doing in India for AI safety field building.
The last few days have been really intense here at the conference with a lot of one on ones. I've been excited to have this conversation, so it means a lot that all of you have turned up for these lightning talks.
What I want to cover in these 5 minutes is the journey of how I got to the Community Builders Grant and ended up working on AI safety field building in India.
India is quite a large country, geographically speaking, and back then I didn't have a lot of bandwidth. A couple of high-context EA individuals had come to India to launch the Turing prize, AW, and Olivia, and that's when I first got to know about what's happening in the EA space. I realized I could be doing more than just lurking on LessWrong or the Alignment Forum; instead of just reading about what's going on, I could actually make a difference here.
It was hard for me to commit a lot of time and resources to community building, because I was in the middle of a PhD Program at the Indian Institute of Science. But then Jesse, who was the person handling my contract back then, was very nice and helpful. They understood and told me, “whatever you can contribute would be great.” I found that I could do a lot with just a few hours a week or a month.
I managed to travel to most universities in India, I met students and tried to understand what was preventing them from making a transition in their trajectory towards AI safety. What I really realized in my visits to these universities, and holding talks and mentoring students, was that a lot of them don't get a lot from just a single call from 80,000 hours. They often need more sustained mentoring over a period of time, maybe regular check ins. The terminologies used to describe the alignment agenda and the landscape, it was quite opaque to them. So having someone who can talk the technical language and show them the open problems, really does help make people finish the final jump of applying for MATS or applying for a LTFF grant. It was really great for me to see their faces glow up and tell me, “I got the grant from LTFF,” or “I’m moving to a new team to actually work on safety.”
I've also organized a lot of book giveaways. For example HPMOR, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, has gotten a lot of people really interested in the narrative form of thinking clearly. Replacing Guilt by Nate Soares, all these books have really formed a key part of getting people interested in rationality, EA principles and AI safety.
Now, Impact Academy has come to India and they are doing Axiom futures, helping people who are having troubles getting visas to come to the UK or the US. They're having a fellowship program starting mid-June, and we've already gotten 600 applicants for around 50 spots right now. We're having online courses that are going to run for two months and help connect people in the industry and in academia with topics, and hopefully we'll see their current career trajectory change.
Another cool thing I'm really excited about in the next few months; I've gotten a roughly $1,000 grant raised from Manifund, so I'm going to be distributing more HPMOR copies in Bangalore. I also hope to get a physical space for a hub in Bangalore, the tech city of India to have coworking space for people. I'm really excited about the future, thanks a lot.
Naomi leads grant evaluations and provides support for the Community Building Grants Program at CEA. Prior, she founded the Swiss Existential Risk Initiative, was the director of EA Switzerland and EA Geneva and worked for various non-profits.
Note : this talk was given in June 2024. Certain details may have changed since then.
Hi everybody, I'm Naomi.
I'm gonna talk very shortly about what to do if you want to get some funding for your community building project. I think there are a lot of projects that are being run by volunteers, which is awesome. But what if you need some funding to cover some expenses? Or maybe you have ambitious plans within community building; we try to get funding for that.
There are basically three big organizations that would be interesting.
As a caveat, I'm not focusing on cause-specific community building here, so I'm only quickly listing the ones that are broadly applicable.
The first organization is EA Funds, and probably for the majority of you, the EA Infrastructure Fund is the most interesting one. So the EA Infrastructure Fund focuses on projects that are focused on EA principles, which is very broad.
The second relevant organization for you is probably CEA, where I work. I listed two funding programs, the Groups Support Funding and the Community Building Grants Program. The Community Building Grants Program is currently closed for new applications, so the only one that is interesting for you is probably the Groups Support Funding, which focuses on covering expenses for things like running a meetup, for organizing your retreat, but also to cover like some costs that you might take on when you're running your groups such as like Gmail subscriptions.
The third organization is Open Philanthropy. The most interesting one is probably the University Organizer Fellowship, especially if you’re a university organizer. They cover both time for people, but also the expenses that are involved in running your group. Open Phil also has two programs that are a bit more specific.
Fourth, there are other funders in this space. So the Meta Charity Funding Circle is a network of donors that, if I'm correct, has open rounds around twice a year. I expect them to announce them on the Forum if they are opening. There's also the Survival and Flourishing Fund, which focuses on projects that promote the flourishing of the long term future, but they also consider EA groups. And there are local donors. There are groups, especially the larger city and national groups, that have had some success with attracting local donors.
So how to get funding?
These are questions that I get, people are wondering “how do I get funding to cover my time to run my group?” Probably the main 2 ones that you want to look at are the EA Infrastructure Fund, or if you're running a university group, Open Phil’s Uni Group Organizer Fellowship. You can also have a look at the Survival and Flourishing Fund. And, like I said before, there are sometimes local donors or people who are earning to give that might be willing to cover an organizer’s time.
What if you want to organize a meetup or retreat? First, think about local donors, maybe there are members that could chip in and cover costs for other members. Otherwise, I would have a look at CEA Groups Support funding, there are also guidelines on the website where you can see how much is being funded for which kind of activities. You can write to the EA Infrastructure Fund. And again, if your uni group organizer, go to the uni Group Organiser Fellowship.
People also ask me “Hey, I have a specific project. Where should I go?” That's very dependent on your project, of course. If it's Global Catastrophic Risk relevant, you could look at Open Phil’s call for Global Catastrophic Risk projects, or maybe also look at the Survival and Flourishing Fund. Open Phil also has a granting program focused on translation projects. And the EA Infrastructure Fund covers many different kinds of projects, similarly for the Meta Charity Funding Circle.
I quickly wanted to finish with an overview of how the funding landscape has changed.
As you probably are all aware, FTX collapsed. And that you can also see in the graph, that there's currently a lot less money than 2022, and we're basically back on 2021 levels.
Executive summary: This series of lightning talks highlights recent efforts to build the effective altruism community worldwide, covering topics like group resources, impact acceleration programs, community building case studies, mentoring initiatives, and the current funding landscape for EA projects.
Key points:
This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, and contact us if you have feedback.