“I” refers to Zach, the Centre for Effective Altruism's CEO. Oscar is CEA’s Chief of Staff. We are grateful to all the CEA staff and community members who have contributed insightful input and feedback (directly and indirectly) during the development of our strategy and over many years. Mistakes are of course our own.

Exec summary

As one CEA, we are taking a principles-first approach to stewardship of the EA community.

During the search for a new CEO, the board and search committee were open to alternative strategic directions, but from the beginning of my tenure, we’ve committed to a strategy under which we will:

• Operate as one CEA, rather than winding down, breaking up or renaming the organization. Instead of optimizing for each of our team’s programs, we’ll be optimizing for EA as a whole.
• Take a principles-first approach to EA, rather than becoming an AI org or otherwise re-orienting ourselves to specific causes.
• Take greater responsibility for stewardship of the EA community, rather than restricting ourselves to passively providing infrastructure and support. This post explores stewardship in greater detail.

Stewardship is about actors taking more responsibility for reaching and raising EA’s ceiling, and we believe CEA should play a leading role in steering, supporting and coordinating the community. Importantly, however, stewardship of EA is not ownership of EA: we don’t want to be the only leaders, and we do want a close collaboration with the community.

During 2024 we focussed on building strong foundations that CEA will require to succeed at stewarding the community, including making over 20 hires (having started the year with 34 staff) while cutting a quarter of our costs, and developing our strategy for 2025 and 2026, including by listening to and learning from members of the EA community during visits I made to over half a dozen countries and in more than 200 one-on-one meetings. I feel good about the foundations we built and having prioritized building them, but that came with a notable trade-off: during 2024, we explicitly deprioritized trying to grow the EA community.

That’s changing: our stewardship strategy for 2025 and 2026 is focused on building sustainable momentum for EA.

The cornerstone of momentum will be growth: this is Community Building 101, but our renewed focus on it will represent the first concerted effort to grow EA post-FTX. We aren’t aiming to maximize growth at all costs, but to build momentum and demonstrate that EA is back and on track for a flourishing future.

Making growth sustainable will depend on improving the EA brand, diversifying EA funding and strengthening CEA, including by establishing ourselves independently of Effective Ventures and further increasing our capacity. The brand and funding concentration are two of the biggest bottlenecks EAs face, two of the most obvious opportunities to improve our collective trajectory, and two of the greatest risks to the community’s long-term resilience. Getting them right will both help build momentum by contributing to growth and crucially make that momentum sustainable.

We know this won’t be easy, and good results are not guaranteed. We are taking on new and bigger challenges, which represents a strategic shift for CEA. That’s a major motivation for doing strategic planning on a two-year timeframe: we recognize we’ll need to build new infrastructure and iterate on our strategy, so we expect that some of our work may not bear fruit until the end of 2026. Nevertheless, we believe that investment is worth it. We are betting on EA to become an enduring force for good, and backing ourselves to provide the stewardship required to make our vision a reality.

What does stewardship mean for CEA?

Stewardship is about taking more responsibility for reaching and raising EA’s ceiling. We believe that without actors taking responsibility for setting and steering towards common goals (e.g. growing the community), providing public goods (e.g. improving the brand), and facilitating community-wide coordination (e.g. diversifying funding), EA won't live up to its potential  - and we’re not alone in thinking this. We also believe CEA is as well-placed as anyone to be among the leading actors.

The way we’re thinking about stewardship is a significant change from CEA’s most recent era before I joined, when CEA focussed more on providing infrastructure and support. To be clear though, we don’t now intend to do away with any of our signature programs like the EA Forum or EA Global, and our re-commitment to a principles-first approach is a doubling down on the status quo.

The word “stewardship” is chosen carefully:

• It’s purposefully distinct from “ownership.” I don’t think we’re owners in the sense that we’re the sole people with responsibility, or that we get to make decisions that everyone else has to follow.
• We don’t want to be the only leaders in EA. We want to encourage others to take up the mantle with us, and allocate some of our resources to helping elevate and support potential leaders.
• We want a close collaboration with the EA community, and we will continue to solicit and engage with input and feedback from you.
• We want other competent actors to feel like they can hold important balls for EA. It’s ok for people to operate in the same spaces we’re in and “compete” with us: we will celebrate other people running forums and events and so on that are well run and highly impactful! But we won’t assume others are going to act and deliver. If we think something should be done to enable the EA community to live up to its potential, we want people who work at CEA to feel a sense of heroic responsibility to ensure that happens, whether that’s us doing it directly or helping others assume that responsibility instead.
• Impact is our north star, and we exist to serve the world, not the EA community. We will be willing to embrace friction with others in the community if we think it’s in service of the greater good. We won’t be afraid to step up to the plate if we think we can do better than someone who is already there. Nevertheless, we still expect that the vast majority of the time helping the community will be our best mechanism for doing good, and that building trust with the community is an essential aspect of stewardship.

What does CEA’s stewardship mean in practice?

CEA’s ultimate goal is to radically improve the world. We continue to believe there is no other set of principles that has the same transformative potential to address the world’s most pressing problems as EA principles. And so at this moment in time, the best way for CEA to make progress towards our ultimate goal is by building sustainable momentum for EA through our stewardship.

In 2025 and 2026 our stewardship strategy will be focussed on:

• Growing the EA community, and
• Making the growth of the EA community sustainable by:
  • Improving the EA brand,
  • Diversifying EA funding, and
  • Strengthening CEA

An important note on what this strategy is and isn’t:

• It’s a work in progress, not the finished product. Our thinking will likely evolve in response to new information, as we build out our teams, and as we make more concrete plans.
• It’s not addressing everything we think is important for EA’s future. Even with CEA’s broader stewardship scope, focus is still important. We haven’t had and still won’t have capacity to do everything required for EA to succeed. We will need to deprioritize some valuable projects, and we want to strongly encourage and support others to join us in strengthening the ecosystem.
• It’s a high-level description of our goals, not a detailed action plan. The devil will of course be in those details.

Growing the EA community

EA has been in a defensive crouch for much of the past two-plus years. We have defied predictions that the collapse of FTX would cause the collapse of EA, but our momentum stalled. We’re not content with EA merely surviving; we want EA to thrive.

There are multiple reasons why growing the number of people engaged with the EA community is important. Most directly, there’s the impact people have through their careers or donations when they put EA principles into practice. And more indirectly, achieving growth would be strong evidence that EA is bouncing back from the damage done by FTX. It would be among the clearest possible signals to our stakeholders – funders, community builders, the community itself, potential community members, and the world at large – that EA is worth listening to, committing to, and investing in.

Growth has long been at the core of our mission. If our principles are the best we know of to improve the world, then we want more people to be using them. Growth is about making that happen, which really means growth is about getting back to basics. This idea isn’t new or fancy: it’s Community Building 101.

Growth also seems tractable and neglected: there has not yet been a concerted effort to grow the EA community post-FTX, and it is notable that despite having deprioritized growth and making significant spending cuts, many of our programs have seen only modest decreases in participant size and not the significant negative impacts that we might have assumed would occur amid the FTX fallout. Nevertheless, any notion that EA was on a perpetual upswing has been dispelled, and so our efforts are now directed towards regaining momentum by changing EA’s growth trajectory.

While some may be pessimistic based on declining metrics, the data alone also makes it hard to rule out the possibility of a return to rapid growth if concerted efforts are made. Moreover, while the community might have shrunk relative to peak-FTX times, our work-in-progress data collection indicates that EA is still larger in 2025 than it was in 2021 before the rapid community growth caused by FTX funding and SBF fame. One failure mode we want to avoid is anchoring too much to the direction of recent momentum as opposed to longer-term trends, and therefore under-rating EA’s overall size and potential.

We are already seeing positive signs: EA Global Bay Area 2025 was the biggest EAG in the US since 2022, and every one of the EA groups at our Pilot Universities received more applications for their intro fellowships in Fall ‘24 than in Fall ‘23. (We’re hiring a Head of Pilot Universities to build on this momentum, apply now!)

We’re not alone in thinking it’s time to grow. Last year, we launched an initiative to investigate descriptive trends and set normative targets for EA growth. Two key parts of this project were a series of interviews conducted with key stakeholders and discussions about growth before and at the Meta Coordination Forum. The consensus was that higher growth is good: people are ready for us to be bold, and to be bold with us.

To assess progress towards growth, we will set goals for increasing the number of people at different tiers of engagement with EA. We’ve begun by setting internal goals for CEA program growth in 2025, and we plan to eventually zoom out to EA as a whole. We will aim to meet these goals using four different approaches:

1. Scaling some of our existing programs that we believe have achieved strong product-market fit, like EAG and EAGx events
2. Refining and improving some of our programs that we think are still meaningfully far away from realizing their full potential, like courses (currently known as Virtual Programs; we plan to expand the program and update the branding)
3. Pursuing new programs, in areas like communications
4. Collaborating with and empowering others who are working to achieve growth

There are some important constraints, and we are not aiming to grow as quickly as possible. Our goal is to build and sustain momentum, not to boom and bust. So there are some things that this growth strategy is not:

• It’s not growth at all costs. We aren’t leaving behind our focus on quality, cost-effectiveness or marginal returns. We ultimately care about impact, not proxy metrics, and we are wary of goodharting. Moreover, being good stewards of our resources is required to earn the faith of the community, collaborators and funders, which we’ll need more than ever if we’re to grow alongside the community, and will put us in a better position to justify our expenses in future if there are downturns in the funding ecosystem.
• It’s not ignoring trade-offs or downside risks. We are considering and trying to minimize downsides related to things like increased risk associated with bad actors or scandals, changes in community culture or epistemics that reduce EA’s impact, and introducing people to EA who end up having a bad experience.
• It’s not CEA acting alone. Building momentum by growing EA will require a concerted effort not only across CEA teams but across organizations. We won’t be able to drive this exclusively via our own programming, and we expect CEA’s programs often won’t be the best bets to double down on. We’ll be continuing to engage other stakeholders and organizations, because we believe that as stewards of EA we are best positioned to champion and coordinate community-wide growth efforts.
• It’s not our only goal. We need to ensure we’re making the right trade-offs. We shouldn’t be reckless, overly aggressive or dogmatic. We need to demonstrate that even as we’re ambitious, we’re also responsible. As a result, we don’t expect the growth targets we set to be ones that represent CEA or EA’s maximum growth potential, and we think that’s a good thing. Making growth sustainable depends on improving the EA brand, diversifying EA funding, and strengthening CEA.

Improving the EA brand

I expect CEA taking responsibility for proactively stewarding the EA brand and reorienting towards an external audience to be one of the biggest shifts in our organizational strategy relative to the status quo before I joined.

Taking this on is motivated partly by growth itself, because it’s such an important part of increasing awareness and understanding of EA among potential recruits. But it’s also about sustainability, because investing in the brand and communications can not only improve our reputation but make it more stable over time. The contrast with a purely growth maximizing lens is that we aren’t just looking at factors like brand awareness, but also at factors like brand sentiment.

That stability is critical for maintaining many of the things we care about. It underpins EA’s value as a way of reaching and influencing donors and talent. It underpins the ability of EAs to do high-impact work outside EA settings, without needing to hide or disguise their ideas or associations. And it underpins community morale.

The EA community - including CEA - has historically under-invested in external communications and telling our own stories. By not actively advocating for or defending ourselves, we’ve let critics define us and lost ground in public discourse. Despite the enormous good we have done, we haven’t been able to prevent the brand being damaged by association with FTX and other negative media coverage.

In 2024, as CEA prioritized communications more highly, we initially invested a large proportion of our effort in communicating with the EA community: we re-committed to principles-first community building, introduced stewardship at EAG London, reflected on lessons learned from EV, and expanded on how we can build EA’s enduring impact at EAG Boston.

We are now reorienting ourselves and expanding our scope to communicate more with a wider audience, where there are huge potential gains to be made. According to research by Rethink Priorities and others, awareness and understanding of EA remains low across the board, which suggests sentiment towards EA is not well-established, much less set in stone.

We want revitalized EA communications to be:

• Proactively driven by people aligned with EA principles, resulting in
• Honest and positive messaging that
• Resonates with external and internal audiences and
• Enables EA-aligned actors to have a positive impact

Success will look like increased recognition and understanding of EA, improved public perceptions, higher community morale and willingness to associate with EA, and more favourable (social) media coverage.

While I think we have gained some momentum, our progress here has been much slower than we would have liked given the importance of EA communications and the headwinds the brand has faced. In particular, our Communications team has had dramatically insufficient capacity, and I think I made important mistakes related to comms hiring last year. We’ve since updated and made more progress – we recently made the first new hire since revamping our hiring process. We are building a larger team covering multiple functions – including media relations, marketing, and content development. If our vision for improving the EA brand inspires you, please consider applying!

Diversifying EA funding

Prioritizing fundraising at the ecosystem level is also motivated partly by growth (alleviating funding constraints in the near-term) and partly by sustainability (addressing risks and resilience in the longer-term):

• Many highly-impactful projects are under-funded, and the competition for funding is getting more intense as promising new projects emerge (a symptom of success!).
• More efficient ecosystem-wide funding allocations might be achievable with a greater degree of diversification and coordination.
• We are beyond fortunate that Good Ventures and Open Philanthropy exist and are willing to play such a dominant role in EA funding, but single points of failure pose huge risks to the sustainability of the community, its organizations, and all your impactful work.

But it doesn’t have to be this way! The EA ecosystem has systematically underinvested in development and fundraising. Often organizations didn’t build these muscles because they could always go to OP (or FTX) - and that includes CEA. Effective giving declined in prominence and prestige within the community, in part because of FTX-era memes that money was functionally infinite so marginal funding didn’t matter.

Funding diversification isn’t just about avoiding downside scenarios, but capturing upside as well. I believe EA is the best tool in the world to answer two questions: “How do I do the most good with my time?” and “How do I do the most good with my money?” And so I believe that effective giving should play a central cultural role in EA. We should be doing more to support and empower our donors (many of whom I know have felt undervalued in recent years), and to reach people not yet ready to switch careers but for whom effective giving is an immediately available way to increase their impact.

The community has pivoted back towards effective giving post-FTX: organizations with long and impressive track records have switched strategies to focus on fundraising, and new orgs and programs have been launched. CEA has a role to play here as a facilitator and force multiplier: no one else holds responsibility for diversifying or coordinating funding at the level of the ecosystem as a whole, which makes this an opportunity for stewardship.

The big questions in my mind related to funding are not about importance or neglectedness, but tractability and CEA’s comparative advantages. CEA as it exists today has relatively little institutional knowledge related to development or diversifying funding sources. We have programs ready to be deployed for this purpose - events for recruiting donors, groups for retaining them, courses for educating them, and so on - but we don’t yet have much directly relevant practice.

We are working on expanding our capacity and capabilities: we will need to build some new functions from the ground up (e.g. a dedicated development team), and we are excited about running experiments in partnership with others who have infrastructure or products that can leverage our own programs. One encouraging example of this is facilitating pledge drives at our events in partnership with Giving What We Can. During 2024, from Q2-Q4, 203 new pledges were taken at 11 of our EA Global and EAGx events, which GWWC estimate will generate $9.8 million in lifetime donations to impactful causes.^[1] 

Strengthening CEA

If we want to achieve sustainable momentum for the EA community, and the EA community’s trajectory is dependent on CEA, then as responsible stewards we must continue to invest in the sustainable growth of CEA.

In 2025 and 2026 we’ll be continuing to build on the foundations we’ve laid internally in 2024:

• We cut our spending by $5.9m (24%), while avoiding proportional declines in our key metrics and improving our cost-effectiveness
• We made more than 20 hires
• We launched our spinout process to become legally and operationally independent from Effective Ventures

The following activities will continue to take substantial time and resources alongside our outward-facing stewardship activities:

• Developing our internal infrastructure
  • Spinning out of EV and establishing ourselves as an independent organization
  • Building an in-house Operations team
• Improving our monitoring and evaluation
  • Enhancing our ability to identify, invest in and communicate about our most cost-effective projects
• Diversifying our own funding
• Hiring more staff to deliver our growing project portfolio
  • We have multiple open roles
  • We expect to hire across most of our existing functions this year, while also adding new ones, so if you are excited about stewarding EA with us, even if you don’t see a currently open role that is a good fit, you can submit an expression of interest

Why bother?

A large part of why I chose to take on the role of CEO of CEA is that I believed and continue to believe:

• EA principles are the best tools anyone has ever found to answer the questions:
  • “How do I do the most good with my time?” and
  • “How do I do the most good with my money?”
• Many more people should be using EA principles to address the world’s most pressing problems
• For that to happen and for the EA community to reach its full potential, the community will require stewardship
• CEA is uniquely well-positioned to provide that stewardship

Doing hard things is hard. But there are people who need us - and we catalyzed $100M in funding for lead exposure. There are animals who need us - and we helped free hundreds of millions of hens from cages. There’s a future that needs us - and we were years ahead of the curve warning about the risks associated with pandemics and artificial intelligence.

Good results are not guaranteed. We will make mistakes. We've survived some serious setbacks, and in the process we've demonstrated the grit, humility and courage we’ll need to achieve our goals. CEA is betting on EA to become an enduring force for good, and backing ourselves to provide the stewardship required to make our vision a reality.

Writing this and sharing it, I am as excited and motivated as I have ever been to work with this remarkable community to not only reach our current ceiling but to raise and keep on raising it over time, so that together we can contribute to a radically better world.