Since I started in my position of Community Building Grants (CBG) manager at CEA, a program focused on a subset of city and national EA groups, I noticed that not everybody has an understanding of what city and national groups are doing, and how they could be impactful.
With this post I would like to highlight a few examples of successful city and national groups (from the CBG program, as I am most familiar with these groups), hoping that this will shine more light on what these kinds of groups do, and how this might lead to impact.
How city and national groups produce value
In general, we think city and national EA groups can have impact through different theories of change:
- Supporting talent to work on top causes
- Incubating and accelerating local/university groups and other EA projects
- Building local infrastructure (such as operational support for local grantees)
We currently believe that most impact of city and national groups comes through the first mechanism, and that ultimately the third route to value feeds into the first theory of change. For building local infrastructure, we think city and national groups are very well placed, but also that the amount of activities that can be highly impactful in this area diminishes quickly.
We think that the second theory of change is high variance and heavy-tailed, and that success probably depends on the local group leaders.
There are a few other ways how city and national groups can create value, the most notable being moving donations to effective charities. Currently we think that this can sometimes make sense as a secondary priority, but that there are probably initiatives that are better placed to have an impact here than city and national groups. Some of the efforts under 2. & 3. do focus on supporting effective giving, for example groups that play a role in incubating effective giving initiatives, or that create local infrastructure to support donations by providing the possibility of tax deduction.
Success stories
Below are a few success stories for each of these three theory of changes:
Supporting talent
Generally, city and national groups spend most of their time on activities that are aimed towards supporting talent to work on the most pressing problems.
Examples of these activities are: individual career consultations, fellowships, retreats, actively making introductions between members, meetups and events. In some of the groups, the group leaders organise these activities themselves, while in other instances they engage volunteers to execute them.
Some success stories related to this theory of change:
For example, Andy Jones (member of technical staff at Anthropic) said: “It’s hard to characterise how EA London accelerated me. Safety wasn't on my radar at all before getting involved. EA London provided a community of folk I respected who thought this was important. I came for the friends, stayed for the impact.”
Another example, from an EA DC member:
EA DC is the main reason that I think working in US policy is a long-term viable option for me. Without EA DC in my life, I would not have planned to stay in DC for more than a few years. I would have thought of my time in DC as a tour-of-duty in US AI policy, basically buying a lottery ticket to get something impactful done in this neglected area. Because EA DC lets me live in the community I want while pursuing this career path, I am much more likely to make a long-term career in US policy.
When we did an analysis of the past impact of the CBG program, we also noticed that some of the program’s value seems to have come from accelerating the group leaders themselves (rather than their members). It’s unclear to us what the direction of the effect is (i.e. do organizers become more well-positioned for promising work, or do promising people become organizers more often?) but I nevertheless wanted to share a story to illustrate this route to value:
For example, Eirin Evjen (former CBG grantee and former Chief of Staff at Forethought) said: “Working at EA Norway from 2018-2021 was crucial in me taking a longtermist role. The three-year role provided me with very relevant operational, management, and leadership experience, as well as a great network of people in EA and at longtermist organisations. I also think working at an EA national org increased my interest in working at other EA orgs”.
Incubating EA groups and projects
As a second theory of change, many city and national groups engage in starting and supporting local EA groups and work on incubating new, local, EA projects.
Two incubation stories from national groups:
- EA Netherlands seeded 10 EA university groups in 6 months, by finding (co)founders through various channels and by working together with them on the first steps. EA Netherlands worked on this two years ago, and at the moment 8 out of the 10 groups that were seeded back then are still active. In the meantime, three more university groups have been started.
- The Simon Institute for Longterm Governance, which works on the mitigation of global catastrophic risks through future-oriented policymaking, seems to have been downstream of EA Geneva/EA Switzerland.
Konrad Seifert (co-founder & co-CEO of the Simon Institute): “From 2017 through 2019 EA Switzerland's existence and support allowed sustaining a working group on policymaking in Geneva that essentially incubated the Simon Institute for Longterm Governance.”
Building local infrastructure
In addition to the activities above, many city and national groups engage in building local infrastructure, from launching translation projects, to hosting local co-working offices and providing operational support, for example employer of record services and fiscal sponsorship. These initiatives are often highly appreciated, as it allows local grantees (for example from OP, LTTF, SFF, etc.) to have formal employment and to focus on their work.
Two examples of impact stories:
EA Sweden has during the past 12 months supported 6 people through their employer of record service and fiscal sponsorship. One of the recipients is Stefan Schubert, a researcher in philosophy and psychology who studies EA topics:“Thanks to EA Sweden's operational support, I was able to secure grants for research on epistemic rationality.”
Another example, this time about a coworking office that is hosted by EA Netherlands.
Stan van Wingerden (co-founder of Timaeus, a new AI safety organisation) said:“The office played a major role in starting the collaboration with Jesse and Alexander [two other core team members]. I met Jesse Hoogland at EAG London, after which he came to Amsterdam. The coworking office made it a natural place to cowork together and meet up in the evenings to talk more about collaborating and founding an AI safety organisation.”
With this post, I hope to have provided you with some illustration of how city and national groups can be successful. As I mentioned in the introduction, this is mostly intended as a ‘sneak-peak’ instead of a thorough review, but I hope that it nevertheless has shone some light on the potential value of city and national community building.
I would like to thank Huw Thomas for his work on, and our discussions about, how city & national groups produce value.
Also, Apollo Research and Leap Labs grew out of the MATS London Office (what later became LISA). I realize this was an AI safety office, not an EA office, but it feels significant.