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Lessons learned from founding and leading a uni EA group in Poland
17 min read · Feb 26
This post is a summary of my lessons and thoughts from founding and leading the uni EA group at Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland. I hope to share some useful ideas and observations with other community builders, in particular organisers of university groups.
Tl; dr: As an ex-founder and organizer of a uni EA group, I recommend that potential founders:
I recommend that leaders:
Special thanks to Chris Szulc for his suggestions and feedback to this post. And even more special thanks to Ania, Gosia, and Werka, who are the new board of our group.
(please feel free to skip this part)
I first started working on setting up the Jagiellonian University EA group in June 2024. However, I was quite confident that I wanted to set it up as a formal student organisation at the university, and therefore the group did not take off until the lengthy administrative processes finished in mid-November 2024, over a month after the new academic year started. This delay had a profound impact on the group, as despite doing all possible outreach both online and offline, we did not really succeed in attracting new members, and there were just 6 of us until the end of our first semester. To make things worse, most of the members quite clearly did not have enough time to truly engage in the group.
Even before this first semester, I received funding from Open Philanthropy (currently: Coefficient Giving), which included a stipend for me to work on the group for 10 h each week, and while I did commit this amount of time to the group, there was no truly effective way to use it with only 5 other, moderately engaged members.
Therefore, I did less important work, like improving our reach and visual communication in social media. This time was quite emotionally difficult for me, since I felt that I was failing and I just could not figure out how to make the group produce impact. I am eternally grateful to my OSP mentor Izzy Taylor for supporting me throughout these first month of leadership.
Happily, in our second semester many new members joined and things finally took off. Four of those new members went with me to the EAGx in Prague, and two of them later became organisers. The group became way more active, we did some open events and I could finally see the group members deepening their engagement with EA meaningfully (e.g. reading EA books, planning high-impact careers).
New members started joining us throughout the semester, attracted mostly through networking. In October 2025, after an outreach campaign, 10 new members joined, out of which almost all have later finished the intro program, and 6 have stayed with us until now. The new members immediately started to engage actively in EA and now we truly have a community of people reading, networking, planning high-impact careers, donating to effective charities, and engaging with the wider EA network. I am quite confident that in the last 3 months of 2025 we generated more impact than throughout the whole previous year.
I feel like a huge factor that shaped my group leadership experience is the EA context in my region. The EA community in Poland is relatively small, and the context of leading the group there is very different to what it is in countries like the UK / USA. My group was only the second uni group in the whole country, and the first one was based 300 kilometers away from us. There was a local EA community in Kraków, but it was not very active and over time it has entirely stopped operating. There are no fellowships or other entry-level opportunities in Poland for engagement in high-impact organisations in any cause area, except maybe volunteering in Otwarte Klatki (the Polish branch of Anima International) or EA community building. There are also no courses or programs available in Polish other than the introductory EA course. However, the situation is slowly improving, as EA Poland has published The Life You Can Save and 80 000 Hours in Polish, and they now provide a career advisory service. They have also started an effective giving platform Więcej Dobra. Recently, the AI Safety community in Poland has been growing very quickly, and it now organises regular open events, which is a fantastic new opportunity.
Last month (December, 2025) I have left the Jagiellonian University group as an organiser, and while I have moved abroad to start my journey in AIS fieldbuilding, I am currently supporting the new board as a mentor. Therefore, I have decided to share my thoughts, lessons, and tips related to founding and leading a university EA group.
I have split this post into two sections: one about founding, and the other one about leading a group. While a few of my points will only be useful for uni group organisers, others are also applicable to city groups and local EA communities. Some of those tips and ideas might be quite new, while others are more obvious and can even be found in the EA Groups Resource Centre. In the latter case, I chose to speak about them to highlight how much they matter or add some background behind them that may not be obvious for new organisers.
Without further ado, here are my best tips.
Setting up a group of your own is a very exciting idea, and once you come up with it, it might be tempting to jump straight into action without actually thinking whether that’s what you really want. If you’re an aspiring EA group founder, you might want to stop for a moment and ask yourself a few important questions.
Do you have the capacity to start a group? Can you really dedicate many hours of your time each week to organising it over the next year? Do you have reliable co-founders with whom you could share the work, or can you manage all the work yourself until you find good co-organisers?
And finally: what are the counterfactuals? Do you have any exciting alternative plans that could produce more impact than community building? I highly encourage doing a Fermi estimate of your options. While setting up university groups is quite an impactful thing to do, particularly at top universities, you may still find even more impactful options in some circumstances. For example, if you are a student of data science planning a career in AI safety research, you may produce more impact through focusing on building your career path and taking opportunities to engage in research (though you may also want to set up an AIS group at your uni - there are many ways to approach this!).
The above list of questions is not exhaustive, but I think it’s a good starting point. You can also talk to other university group founders and organisers - you can find plenty of them at EAG(x) events or at the EA Groups Slack workspace. Read some EA forum posts about organising EA groups, and go through the EA Groups Resource Center. Remember that setting up and leading a group will consume countless hours of your work over a long period of time. It is definitely worth spending a day or two considering whether engaging in this project is the best thing you can do.
Having said that, I absolutely encourage action bias. Even if the group does not work out well, you will probably still learn a lot of valuable skills on the way, and the experience might help you land a high-impact job in the future.
If you are founding a group for the first time, I don’t recommend starting a group as the only organiser: it means a lot of time, work, responsibility, emotional burden, and a huge challenge for your motivation. Mistakes will happen, unsuccessful events will happen, and all sorts of unexpected difficulties will happen. If you’re alone with managing the group, you may find yourself exhausted and burnt out faster than you think (been there, done that).
It is also very hard to establish the EA culture in your group if you’re the only person familiar with EA. And it gets even harder if there aren’t many EAs in your city, with whom the group members can socialise and from whom they can learn the rationality and effectiveness mindset. Learning to encourage other members to adopt the EA approach without coming across as pushy is a process.
Additionally, if you are the only founder, the group will be entirely dependent on you for at least the first few months. It will likely fail in the case of any personal situation that forces you to step down from leading the group too early. So if you want to set up a group yourself, you need to really be confident that you will be able to keep up your work for a while.
If, despite all the difficulties, you decide to set up a group as the only organiser, please be aware that you will likely need more than a year, maybe even more than two years, to ensure it continues after your graduation. This is even more important if it is your first time as a leader and founder (you will be making mistakes, and that’s alright! But you will likely need more time to recover from your mistakes than an experienced organiser). And again, this might be more important in regions with little EA infrastructure, where finding new members and potential new leaders is challenging. Having said that, you might still be successful as the only organizer and even in these conditions, founding a group is likely worth a shot.
Before you set up a uni group as the only organiser, particularly if it is your first time organising, I highly recommend building many EA connections in your region, so that you can get the necessary support whenever you need it. Think ahead how you plan to build and maintain EA values and standards, such as ownership, transparency, critical thinking etc. Estimate how much funding you need and explore opportunities to land it (both from the EA environment and from external sources). I also highly recommend enrolling in OSP, which provides you with workshops and mentorship that will help you lead your group successfully.
If you find a potential co-founder, it is critical that they understand exactly what the group will be about. Make sure they are aware that this is not a volunteering group. Be clear that it will be more about learning and building high-impact careers than about producing impact instantly. Be transparent about how the group will produce impact, and what implications it has for how the group will work. And if the person has a very different vision from yours, you may want to seek a different co-founder.
Events organised by other EA groups and organisations, opportunities to connect and engage in the wider EA network, make leading a group significantly easier. It would probably have helped me a lot if there had been more EA activity in Kraków when I started the group. The few events that some of our members participated in, such as the EAGx in Prague or a high-impact career event in Warsaw, boosted their engagement and helped them build valuable connections.
If there aren’t many EA-related initiatives taking place in your city and/or country, you may want to spend some extra time exploring remote opportunities, such as courses or fellowships. Talking to people working on diverse issues might also be helpful.
If you have the funding to buy a few books for your group, they may also become a fantastic resource for your members to dive into the cause areas they want to explore. From my experience, people read them most eagerly if you show each book at a meeting and talk briefly about it, or if you recommend the relevant books to your members during 1:1 meetings. You can request a few free books here.
I thought it was obvious that my group would benefit from being formally registered at my university. I thought we could benefit from using the university’s channels for outreach, and we could get a space for meetings, and possibly we could even get some funding from the university.
Over time, it became clear that I heavily overestimated the benefits and underestimated the drawbacks. First, it took 5 months to register the group. I definitely did not expect such a long timeline, and the delay disrupted my plans significantly. It also cost me countless hours spent on writing the statutes document, sending paperwork to the university’s office, and so on. Shortly after registering, it turned out that we still can’t have any space in the university for our meetings, since only very well-established, science-oriented groups operating in specific institutes can receive such a space. So the maths club did have a room of their own available 24/7, but our EA group could not even use a small classroom for an hour or two.
We also needed some time to join the Council of Student Organisations, which was a chance to get funding in the future. But once we joined it, it turned out that the funding was very limited and available only for very specific purposes (e.g. covering a travel to a conference, but only if you are a speaker, and only if the conference meets certain criteria). Applying to it would take insane amounts of paperwork, and our application could still be rejected for very vague reasons. Luckily, we had some funding from Coefficient Giving, and we never had to go through the process.
Finally, we could not use the most powerful university-related outreach channels (such as newsletters). Also, we had members from other universities joining us despite the group not advertising our group outside of Jagiellonian, so the outreach was not nearly as important or difficult as I expected. As the costs of being a formal student organisation outweighed the benefits, we recently made the decision to separate our club from the university, and it now exists as a city-wide informal student group.
If you’re considering setting up a formal student group at your university, I highly encourage you to talk to leaders of other groups and learn about the main perks and difficulties tied to being a formal organisation. Some factors you may want to consider include:
Funding: Do you need funding? If so, do you have a chance to get funding from your university? What constraints are there to using the funding?
Administrative burden: How much paperwork and other responsibilities are tied to registering and leading a formal group? What is the process for setting up a new group, and how much time does it take? Do the other organisers know any shortcuts?
Outreach: How are you planning to reach potential new members? Do you expect people to join you without much active effort from your side (e.g. through a local EA network)? Do you need the university's outreach channels? Will being tied to a specific university make it easier to reach potential new members? Will it limit the pool of people who can join you?
Meeting space: Do you have a place to meet? If you don’t, will the university provide a space for you that you may not be able to use otherwise? If you don’t know of any available spaces, you may want to check whether your city provides spaces for NGOs, or whether there are any (not necessarily EA-related) activism centres nearby that are open to sharing their space with you.
As mentioned before, throughout the first year of the Jagiellonian University group, I had a stipend from Coefficient Giving for organising the group for 10 h / week. It provided me with the financial security needed to survive without earning money for a year, and the group would likely not exist had I not received the funding. However, the stipend also made me fall into a trap of not sharing the workload with other members, since I felt obligated to work the given amount of time most weeks. By the end of the academic year, I was painfully aware that I did not have any potential new leaders in sight, and my graduation day was getting closer and closer. Therefore, I spoke to three members about organising the group, and luckily, two of them jumped into action. Just the fact that I started sharing the workload with them immediately boosted their engagement, and I could see both of them grow and contribute to the group ever since. Currently, these two members are co-leading the group, and while I am staying in touch with them as a mentor, I am quite confident they will deal with the challenge very well.
Looking back, I knew that I needed to give ownership to others to empower them. I failed to do it because I thought I was getting paid to work on building the group. But actually, I was getting paid to make the group work, and I would have probably been more successful if I had delegated more work to others early on.
And this does not apply to potential organisers only. Most people like being given small tasks, so don’t be afraid to ask that new person to help you with something. It will make them feel seen.
It is quite obvious that social meetings are very much needed in a group. It is fun to play some board games together, or to go climbing, or to drink coffee. But what I have observed is that even a short trip works 10x the magic of a regular social event. We’ve had two trips so far: one was a weekend in Prague during the EAGx, and the other one was our 2025 holiday travel to Latvia and Estonia. Even though only 5 members joined each of those, the boost in the group’s activity after such a trip was huge. The members immediately started spending time with each other spontaneously, and the psychological safety grew quickly. One thing I would warn about is that a similar set of members may be joining most of such trips, and it is important for them to not create a hermetic “insider” group.
Anyway, our new organisers are already working on a winter break trip, and I highly encourage you to do the same.
I’ve found conducting 1:1s to be the single most productive action the leader can do, and I highly recommend dedicating a lot of time to such meetings. Make sure that the group member has a very clear action point after the meeting - e.g. you may ask them to send a message with the action point to you in Messenger, Slack, WhatsApp, or whatever channel you use to communicate with each other. This way, it will be clear that both sides understand the next step for the person. Some action points for a member might include:
Take notes from your 1:1s, as in a few weeks you will definitely not remember what you spoke about with each person.
It is important to lower the bar for your group members to take opportunities for engagement. If the way to finding an opportunity leads through asking you, it means your members will take fewer opportunities than they could (and yes, that applies even if you have a good relationship with them). Therefore, you may want to make a list of opportunities and places where opportunities can be found, and make it available for all your members 24/7. If you operate in an area with a robust EA community, chances are that someone has already created such a list, so it is worth asking other EAs for it.
The way I approached it was to build a Notion workspace. It includes information about EA events, high-impact oriented job boards, virtual programs and courses, blogs, podcasts, communities, pages dedicated to advising on where to donate, organisations offering career advisory service, and others. We also have a table with all paper books that the group owns, with information about their content, language and author.
The Notion also includes information about our theory of change, knowledge we’ve gained as a group, a guide to our visual communication, etc. While this is also useful, I consider it way less important than the lists of opportunities and materials.
Set up that separate group chat for offtop and spam, even if not a single person has ever sent an offtop message to your main chat. Just the fact of the offtop chat existing will encourage people to at least send a meme from time to time. Also, again - organising a trip will result in more casual conversations than any standard social event could ever bring.
When I first started the Jagiellonian group, I thought that outreach would mostly matter at the very beginning of each semester, when we want to attract a new member. That was only partially true: it turned out that simple, passive ways of attracting people throughout the semester work just as well as active outreach.
In June 2024, I put up a few posters in some faculties and dormitories. I did not have much money to print them, so the posters were small, simple and black-and-white. They said that I was looking for some students to set up an EA group at my university together, and they had a QR code to an introductory article about EA. I did not bother to take the posters down after the group was set up, and to my surprise, they kept working. For the past 1.5 years, new people joining us or talking to us at fairs have been commonly saying that they googled our group after they saw the posters, or that reading the posters was the very first time they had ever heard of EA.
Needless to say, stickers also work the magic. People love stickers. If you have the money to print some pretty stickers with a logo of your group or the name of your Instagram profile, handing them out to people is a super easy way to boost your visibility. I know from some of my colleagues that stickers of my group placed on their notebooks or laptops act as a conversation starter to talk about EA to people who have never heard of it. Apparently, even some friends of mine who have the stickers but are not engaged in EA have been discussing the topic with their friends.
Finally, very simple actions might make your active outreach more effective. In early October 2025, we were invited to join club fairs at one of the faculties. A day before that, we asked the Student Council of this faculty (who organised the fairs) to share our Instagram stories, which as a result reached 1700+ views. When we showed up at the fairs, many students recognized us immediately, and approached our stall to talk about our group, which they had already read about online. They had many specific questions about EA or how we work, and some of them were interested in joining our group.
Founding and leading a university group is a huge challenge - perhaps much bigger than you expect. However, it is also a fantastic opportunity to grow in EA, gain valuable experience and produce some impact. And if I could go back in time to summer 2024, I would absolutely jump into founding my group again.
Unfortunately, one EA Forum post is not nearly enough to cover all topics related to leading a group. If you have any any questions about the topic, or you just want to talk, you can contact me through the EA Groups / EA Anywhere slack workspaces or via my email address [email protected]. Please have a very low bar for reaching out. I am always happy to talk to other organisers, including those who are yet to begin their journey with founding an EA group.
