Brief Updates on EAIF

I’m Harri, a Fund Manager at EAIF. This post includes some brief updates on EAIF, an overview of what I'm working on there, and some reflections. 

Tl;dr

Main updates on EAIF:

• Alejandro Ortega, Jamie Harris and I have joined the team
• We’re happy with our principles-first focus, and aren’t currently planning on further clarifying this at the moment

Things that I’m working on:

• My main focus is ensuring we’re meeting deadlines for responding to applicants
• We’re conducting a retrospective evaluation of our past grants
• I’m thinking about how we can get better at evaluating applications

• I’m aiming to get a better understanding of what it is for EA to thrive

   

Alejandro Ortega, Jamie Harris and I have joined the team

In February 2024, the people working at EAIF were Caleb Parikh and Tom Barnes. Since then Alejandro Ortega, Jamie Harris and I have all joined the team. 

Caleb is the EA Funds Project Lead, and the EAIF Chair. Alejandro, Jamie and Tom are all Fund Managers. They work at ~5h/w on EAIF and largely focus on assessing incoming applications. I’m also a Fund Manager and work at EAIF at ~20h/w, and am the main person with the capacity to focus on EAIF work beyond assessing applications, though I do a bunch of that too. 

(Whilst Caleb is still currently the EAIF Chair, I’ve been taking on more of the Chair responsibilities over time. There’s a good chance that I’ll take on this role fully soon but we haven’t decided on this yet) 

We’re happy with our principles-first focus, and aren’t currently planning on further clarifying this at the moment

In December 2023 EAIF posted EA Infrastructure Fund's Plan to Focus on Principles-First EA, which included a tentative plan for next steps such as ‘Scope out vision more and define metrics more clearly’. 

We don’t have more updates on this vision at the moment, and aren’t currently prioritising further work on it. I’m a bit conflicted about this. On the one hand, I think one of the main challenges for EAIF is knowing what kind of grantmaking to focus on, and I expect having a more developed vision to help with that. I also expect it to make it clearer for people whether it’s something they want to donate to. 

On the other hand, I think that the post does a good job of describing our current focus, and I'm more excited on us spending marginal capacity on a) getting a better concrete sense of what the EA community needs and what opportunities there are, and b) doing more active grantmaking related to this. I think that doing these things will both mean that we’re making more valuable grants, and will help us more in terms of getting clarity on our focus. 

*CEA recently published a post on their “principles-first” approach to EA.  I expect there’s a lot of similarities between this and EAIF’s focus, though we’re not committed to this vision specifically. 

My main focus is ensuring we’re meeting deadlines for responding to applicants

My main aim at the moment is ensuring that we’re meeting commitments to applicants in terms of responding to them with timely decisions. This is something EAIF has struggled with historically, and something we think it’s important we’re doing well. A big focus of my work so far with EAIF has been redesigning parts of the evaluation process so that we’re meeting these commitments. 

We’re conducting a retrospective evaluation of EAIF’s past grants

Alex Barry is working with EAIF to conduct a retrospective evaluation of EAIFs grants, and we're planning on making a version of this public. We expect this to focus on answering:

• How valuable are the grants? What does the distribution of the value of the grants look like? 
• What are the concrete outcomes that have happened as a result of the grants? 
• What should EAIF be doing differently as a result? Are there particular areas of grantmaking that we should double down on? Are there implications for how we go about assessing grant applications? 

I’m thinking about how we can get better at evaluating applications

I’ve been spending some time aiming to improve our ability to evaluate grant applications and decide on which things to fund, for example:

• Creating rubrics for evaluating different kinds of applications. (I’m less excited about this than I used to be, in part because I worry about rubrics decreasing the level of autonomy Fund Managers have in assessing applications, and in part because I think it's difficult to create good rubrics, and bad rubrics can be worse than no rubrics (though my sense is that other Fund Managers are more optimistic about rubrics than I am)). 
• Talking to people with domain expertise in different areas related to our applications (rough categories of our grantmaking: EA Groups, EA Related Groups, EA Content, EA Services and Infrastructure, Individual Funding, Effective Giving). 
• Thinking about what kind of structure EAIF should have. (In particular, I feel pretty excited about ‘regrantor’ models for grantmaking, and it’s plausible to me that EAIF should move more in this direction)

I’m aiming to get a better understanding of what it is for EA to thrive

The previous EA Infrastructure Fund's Plan to Focus on Principles-First EA post includes some motivations for focusing on principles-first EA:

• “[...] EA is doing something special [...]
• Fighting for EA right now could make it meaningfully more likely to thrive long term [...]
• We could make EA much better than it currently is - particularly on the ‘beacon for thoughtful, sincere, and selfless’ front’”

This speaks to a lot of why I’m excited about working at EAIF. And I’d also like to have a much better understanding of eg. what it is for EA to thrive than I currently do. In some sense, I think that the main bottleneck for me in making valuable grants is having a good understanding of what EA most needs. I’m hoping to post more of my thoughts on this topic in the future.