Summary
This post shares my personal experience with CEA's Community Health team, focusing on how they helped me navigate a difficult situation in 2021. I aim to provide others with a concrete example of when and how to reach out to Community Health, supplementing the information on their website with a first-hand account. I also share why their work has helped me remain engaged with the EA community. Further, I try to highlight why a centralised Community Health team is crucial for identifying patterns of concerning behaviour.
Introduction
The Community Health team at the Centre for Effective Altruism has been an important source of support throughout my EA journey. As stated on their website, they “aim to strengthen the effective altruism community’s ability to fulfil its potential for impact, and to address problems that could prevent that.” I don’t know the details of their day-to-day, but I understand that it’s a wide mish-mash of problem-solving and risk management.
There are many community members who have never interacted with the Community Health team. As a result, they may be missing both a vague sense of the team’s work and some grounding, human anecdotes.
Community Health’s new page, Contact our team, does a really fantastic job of explaining when and how you can talk to them. It also outlines concrete examples of situations they’ve helped with.
My goals with this post are...
- To explain why I personally consider the Community Health team’s work to be important—their existence makes me happier to be in EA.
- To outline one of my early experiences contacting Community Health.
- I imagine, in addition to their website, some may find it helpful to hear a first-hand account of contacting them. I hope this can provide a more emotionally-grounded sense of the impact their team can have. I also hope it might help those considering reaching out.
My experience in 2021
(Note: The following is anonymised, apart from Julia Wise and myself)
Back in 2021, I attended EA Global: London (EAG)—it was my first in-person EA event and, in general, my first conference. I was 21 and had recently graduated from university. EAG itself was incredible, I gained all my first professional connections in EA and I was finally discussing some of my favourite ideas in rooms full of people. I was quite literally buzzing with excitement. Later, I went to an afterparty with an active community member and his friends. I’d met them at EAG—my partner was too tired to go out and I was too nervous to go alone, so they encouraged me to tag along.
While sitting around, chatting normally, he slowly started touching me inappropriately. I froze, I was flooded with confusion. I quietly said that I wasn’t comfortable, but he persisted. Eventually, I said I had to go to the bathroom, taxi’d back to my hotel instead (where my partner was), and immediately started sobbing. This was many years ago now, but at the time, it was deeply upsetting for both myself and my partner (who, god bless her, also immediately started crying when I explained). We had no idea what to do. We called her brother, who suggested we email Julia Wise, a liaison for the Community Health team.
At first, I refused. I didn’t know Julia or what Community Health was—I just knew that I heard her name often and she was mentioned in the book, Strangers Drowning. My partner and I had listened to it on the plane ride over. I didn’t want Julia to think I was an idiot who went to a party with people I just met, got hurt, and then made a big deal out of it. I knew that was an absurd framing, but I was anxious and embarrassed. In the end, my partner emailed Julia on my behalf. Her response was great: quick, reassuring, empathetic, professional, and action-oriented. Julia took steps that reduced the chances he could hurt others and clearly outlined her thinking; we were relieved. Many months later (I don’t remember how many), I found out that two more women had reported an issue of a similar-ish nature. I was beyond glad that my report could help track a pattern.
I don’t know what would have happened if my partner hadn’t emailed Julia. At this point, it’s hard to remember my emotional state in detail, but I was certainly shaken and reporting calmed me down immensely. I was able to recover quickly and stay happily engaged with EA. I think this incident could have been a serious deterrent to my partner and I, especially because at that time, we weren’t particularly embedded in the EA space. It would have been easy to leave. But I was taken seriously—I felt protected, we both felt like we had options. I continued attending EA Globals and was comfortable doing so. As it went, I now work on the EA Global team at CEA.
Three personal takeaways
After this experience, I was left with three personal takeaways about why the Community Health team is important:
- When I look back at the 21-year-old versions of myself and my partner, my first thought is, my god, we were so little. This is not meant to infantilise our adult selves. It’s simply my gut reaction. I know how much we’ve grown and I can feel it so profoundly. Seriously, what a world of a difference four years can make. I feel sad that someone acted poorly towards the version of me who was new, trusting, uncertain, and eager to work in the EA space. I feel incredibly relieved that the Community Health team was an option. It was a necessary intervention; it signalled that my participation in EA was important and that the incident shouldn’t have happened. And it implemented protections for others.
- Community Health concerns do not just affect those directly involved in an incident, they affect those close to that person: the friends they tell, the friends their friends tell, and so on. They affect the community. It’s upsetting to be harmed. It’s upsetting to see your friend harmed. It’s upsetting to hear that someone in your professional or social circle was harmed. It's upsetting to hear about harm. One incident can reduce a sense of comfort and safety for many. This is not to take away from the importance of the harm itself, as it stands alone and as it hurts the person it happened to—it’s to point at the truth of how these harms can ripple out. And often, the ripples hit particular demographics.
- In part, Community Health is effective because it is centralised. Most people who cross clear boundaries will do so more than once, unless there is intervention. When Community Health is the go-to place for providing information, there is an opportunity to identify patterns. This provides a basis for more effective intervention.
What is the team like now?
Now, I interface with the team all the time—through my work, as a community member, as a friend. As mentioned, I work on the Events Team at CEA, so they’ve been my colleagues since 2023. This means I chat with some of the team very freely. I sincerely trust the case workers. Current-me would have never hesitated to contact them. Current-me would have also said to that guy, “what the f*ck are you doing?” and stormed out, but that’s besides the point. It’s hard to say how any one person should interact with Community Health. But at least, in my experience, I feel very comfortable encouraging people to have a low bar for reaching out to them. And there are many ways to do that, including anonymously.
My experience with the team is that: they are sharp, reasonable, empathetic, careful, and deeply thoughtful. The information you provide doesn’t necessarily need to catalyse action. You don’t need to know what you want, you don’t need to know if it’s “serious” enough—you can just talk to them and see what they say. You can also pass on information anonymously.
Having now shared my personal views, I want to explicitly note...
The Community Health team can deal with situations of incredible emotional importance for people, touching on issues of safety, consent, trauma, dignity, belonging, etc. These are fundamental aspects of our humanity. They form a basis for how we relate to ourselves and the world. Most community health cases will not be serious harms; but the serious ones will matter to some number of people an indescribable amount. This is true of all analogous work in this domain.
This means: different people have variable and strong feelings towards Community Health. Everyone’s experience is their own. I worry that might sound hand-wavy or empty, but I mean it so truly and sincerely.
It's important to note that few people will share their negative experiences with the Community Health Team because the CHT blacklists people from funding, EAG attendance, job opportunities, etc.
Also, if they cause people to leave the community, you're unlikely to hear about it because they've left the community.
This leads to a large information asymmetry.
I know many people who's lives and impact have been deeply damaged by the CHT but they won't share their experiences because they are afraid of retaliation or have given up on the EA community because of them.
I'm definitely sympathetic to this point, yep. I think it would be very difficult to write a post of this nature if you felt that your participation in EA was being wrongly affected by CH.
At the same time, I think both the negative and positive experiences are difficult to talk about, due to their sensitive nature. I felt comfortable writing this because the incident is now four years old and I'm lucky to be in an incredibly supportive environment; many who have had positive experiences will not want to write about them. Thus, I am not confident there is a "large information asymmetry" in either direction, there are deterrents to information sharing on both sides.
I think the unfortunate reality is: Community Health is not infallible, I would be very keen to hear about mistakes they've made or genuine concerns, as would the team, I'm certain. I'm also acutely aware that a lot of people who exhibit poor behaviour, and are then prevented from taking certain actions within the community, will claim to have been slighted. People who cross clear boundaries and then face consequences do not often go, "this seems right and fair to me, thank you for taking these measures against me to protect others." This is certainly not to say, "no one who says they've been blacklisted or slighted can be correct." This is to say that, I am not sure how to update on claims that CH has damaged people's lives without more information.