There have been several recent changes to the EV US board.
Rebecca Kagan has resigned from the board of EV US. She decided to resign in light of her disagreements with the EV boards’ strategy and approach during the past few months. We would welcome her to share more of her thoughts publicly, and she plans to do so. In the meantime, Becca is happy for people with questions to reach out to her directly. We are very grateful for everything which Becca has given to EV US during her time as a trustee, particularly for her dedication and insights over the past few months.
The board has also elected Zach Robinson and Eli Rose to the board as new trustees. They join current trustees Nicole Ross and Nick Beckstead.
Zach Robinson has been Interim CEO of EV US since January. Previously, he was Chief of Staff at Open Philanthropy and had experience in consulting and at a start-up.
Eli Rose is currently a Senior Program Associate at Open Philanthropy, where he has worked on the longtermist EA community-building team since 2020. Previously, he was Director of Engineering at an educational technology company.
Both EV US and EV UK are still working to bring additional trustees onto the boards, and we hope to share further updates shortly.
I’d also like to see “the board be more diverse and representative of the wider EA community.” In addition to adding more members without ties to OpenPhil, I’d favor more diversity in the cause preferences of board members. Many of the members of the EV US and EV UK board have clear preferences for longtermism, while none are clearly neartermist. The same can said of the projects EV runs. This raises the question of whether EV sees its role as “a central hub for the effective altruism community, [balancing] the interests of different stakeholders” or if EV is instead trying to steer the community in specific directions. I hope EV offers more transparency around this going forward.
Hopefully, EV will be expanding its boards, which would be an opportunity to address these issues. Expanding the US board seems particularly important, since two of the four board members (Zach and Nicole) are staff members of EV (a pretty unusual structure) and as such would need to recuse themselves from some votes. This dynamic, combined with Nick (in the US and UK) and Will (in the UK) recusing themselves from FTX related issues, means the effective board sizes will be quite small for some important decisions.