Transitioning the Community Building Grants Program

The Community Building Grants (CBG) program, run by the Groups team at CEA since 2018, is undergoing substantial changes. 

Through the CBG program, we fund a set of professional city and national EA groups^[1] and support their leaders through retreats, regular check-ins and calls, a Slack space, and resources for running groups.

CBG groups have achieved exciting things, such as helping EAs navigate (policy) hubs, supporting hundreds of community members in taking next steps, and incubating new organisations. 

In this post, we want to share what's changing and the reasoning behind it. In 2026, two things are changing:

• CBG grant evaluation is moving from the Groups team to EA Funds (which became part of CEA in the summer of 2025), where it will be managed alongside, but remain distinct from, the EA Infrastructure Fund.
• CBG non-monetary support has been transitioned, integrated with other offers, or phased out.

Why we are making these changes

In 2025, we reviewed how the CBG program fits into CEA's broader strategy. As CEA aims to reach and raise EA's ceiling, we are shifting internal focus more towards scalable products that can support this ambition. After a long strategic process, we concluded that the current CBG program structure does not scale in a way that aligns with this goal. This wasn't a decision we took lightly. However, a focused strategy requires hard trade-offs, including restructuring valuable programs that people care about. 

Some CEA programs, like EAGx, have scaled well because they follow a standardised model that can be replicated across locations. We explored drafting a standardized playbook for the CBG program, but two factors make this difficult: the best groups take different approaches to programming, which means we haven't been able to extract a clean model that could be replicated, and a group's impact is strongly contingent on the quality of its leadership.  

We have found that the large majority of the CBG program's impact comes through grantmaking. We believe we can preserve most of the program's value by continuing to fund groups while phasing out the programmatic support, which has required substantial time and focus from a small team. We continue to believe that CBG groups have the potential for a large positive impact and should continue to exist.

We still think a scalable model is possible, especially for city groups, and CEA is interested in exploring this in the future. One option we've considered is incubating a city group in-house to test a replicable approach, though this is in early development and not something we expect to act on soon.

What’s changing

Grantmaking

The most important thing to know is that funding for CBG groups continues. Grant evaluation will be taken over by EA Funds later this year, and we've taken steps to ensure this transition doesn't disrupt current grantees. 

We have moved all 2026 CBG evaluations to the beginning of the year to create time for the transition of the grantmaking portfolio. Right now, all 2026 group evaluations are done or in their final stages. 

Aside from early evaluations, there have been no changes to our grantmaking process.

Once the transition is complete, CBG grantmaking will most likely be managed by the future leader of the EA Infrastructure Fund (EAIF), as EAIF already supports similar initiatives. EA Funds will soon open applications for this role. Though EAIF grantmakers will evaluate CBG grants, the funding we've received from Coefficient Giving for CBG grantmaking will remain separate and will not be counted towards EAIF's funds raised.

After moving the grant evaluations to EA Funds, we may also introduce a new name for the Community Building Grants portfolio to reflect the updated model.

We expect to finalize and communicate the long-term structure later in 2026 or at the beginning of 2027. 

Non-monetary support

Over the past few months, we have phased out or transitioned CBG's non-funding support. Where possible, we've tried to make sure the most valuable offers continue in some form.

Some of these efforts have been picked up by the grantees; for example, they have taken ownership of the coordination calls and Slack space. Other offers, such as the grantee check-ins or production of new CBG-specific resources, have been wound down. 

The grantees' retreat is transitioning and will not continue in its current form, but a broader replacement event is in the works, organised independently from CEA. Existing playbooks will be reviewed and, where relevant, will be migrated to the EA Groups Resource Centre.

What has not changed 

We want to be clear about what isn't changing. We remain excited about the role professional city and national groups can play in advancing high-impact careers and strengthening local EA ecosystems, and much of what matters to grantees will stay the same.

A few examples of things that will not change for CBG groups:

• Grantmaking
  • We continue to disburse funding to CBG groups and are fundraising for grantmaking over the next few years.
  • We do not expect any changes to the funding bar in the foreseeable future as a result of this transition.
  • The CBG portfolio will remain closed to new applicants. Non-CBG city and national groups can continue to apply to the EAIF for funding, and to Group Support Grants for operational expenses.
• Non-monetary support
  • Groups can still reach out to the Community Health team for support with challenges in their group.
  • Groups can use the EA Resource Centre for resources, and subscribe to the EA Groups newsletter for regular updates. 

Trade-offs

We want to be transparent about some downsides and trade-offs to this change: 

• Some grantees have advocated for more guidance and support, not less. For them, this transition may mean losing support they found valuable.
• The absence of non-monetary support may make it harder to recruit and retain strong community builders. We're uncertain about the magnitude, but we expect some negative impact.
• Without regular grantee-only retreats and other shared touch points, grantees may become less connected over time, with fewer opportunities for cross-group learning and relationship-building.
• Grantees will have less interaction with their grantmaker, and therefore less insight into how decisions are made. This could mean good ideas go unfunded because of misalignment between grantees and funders, and more frustration when funding decisions come as a surprise, which we acknowledge is something groups have faced.

We considered these downsides carefully. On balance, we believe continuing to support professional city and national CBG groups through funding, while freeing up resources and focus for other initiatives, is the right long-term direction for increasing impact. We take these costs seriously and will be paying close attention to how they play out in practice. 

Finally

We are very grateful for what grantees have built through this program. The examples above only scratch the surface of the impact CBG groups and their members have created over the years. 

We are equally grateful for the many contributions that have improved the program itself, from training sessions to working groups and countless comments on each other's documents. 

We’d also like to thank everyone who contributed generously to this transition, from providing feedback on our plans to asking crucial questions and participating in our brainstorming sessions during the last grantee retreat.

1. ^{^}

   In ‘26: EA Australia, EA Netherlands, EA Norway, EA Sweden, EA Germany, EA Israel, EA NYC, EA DC, EA Switzerland, EA France, and AI Safety India