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It seems that part of the reason communism is so widely discredited is the clear contrast between neighboring countries that pursued more free-market policies. This makes me wonder— practicality aside, what would happen if effective altruists concentrated all their global health and development efforts into a single country, using similar neighboring countries as the comparison group?
Given that EA-driven philanthropy accounts for only about 0.02% of total global aid, perhaps the influence EA's approach could have by definitively proving its impact would be greater than trying to maximise the good it does directly.
We're sadly no longer accepting sign-ups for our founder's programme. We've had an influx of demand and we're now fully at capacity for the foreseeable future. Its funding situation is precarious and I've sadly got to focus on that now. Results are nuts, but mental health funders are focussed on LMICs, meta funders don't like mental health interventions, so it's a challenging category to even survive in.
For now, I've got to focus on doing a good job for our existing clients. I'm sorry!
I opened your profile and website and couldn't tell what this referred to? I'm intrigued, even if it's no longer accepting sign ups!
We don't have a public page for it; people sign-up via word-of-mouth and invite via incubators. We handpick and train mental health coaches for EA founders from the people who got the best results for regular EAs. The thesis was that people who're founding or scaling an EA charity founders face a ton of mental health challenges and that can be resolved quickly and help them and their charity succeed.
I figured getting the results would be the hard part, or convincing founders you could, but no. Within ~2 years, over half of AIM incubated charities have had one or more founders successfully resolve one mental health problem with us. ~90% of people who do the first session complete the programme and ~50% decide to keep going after it ends to work on their next most pressing problem. This is waaaaaaaay better than our stats for regular EAs and regular people - Founders underinvest in themselves so hard, and are so focussed on making their organisation succeed, that tons of low hanging fruit remain.
The problem is getting someone to fund it long-term:
- Early stage founders are broke, irrationally self-sacrificial, and time-poor
- Mental health funders, for good reason, care mostly just for LMICs
- Meta funders, for good reason, don't want to choose for others what service would work best for them / their incubatees.
So, while finding seed funding to demonstrate POC was really easy, getting something durable isn't. Donors think incubators should fund it. Incubators think donors should, after all, it's an ecosystem wide service.
It only costs ~$80k a year to run, I'll figure out a way to do it, it's whether I can do that in time to avoid losing talent I can't replace. I have one coach with a ~90% success rate, who only costs ~$33k a year, considering quitting because they don't believe the job will exist in 2 years. The founders she supports collectively have a budget in the tens of millions and several are widely used as examples as EA's most successful ever charities. We can't replace her: she's dramatically better than anyone else we employ, miles better than me, and neither she nor I understand how she does it.
I don't really want a grant. I want some mechanism whereby we can be paid by results or just compete in an open-market that isn't so distorted by the expectation that donors will cover everything.
Blimey. Did you check with CE about offering it as part of their incubation program (funded by them, maybe paid by results as you say)? And/or other incubators like Catalyze, or fellowship programs (not founders per se) like Constellation? (IIRC they have an affiliated executive coach already)
I'm surprised by "I don't really want a grant" though. E.g. the usual process is basically seed funding grant to check/demonstrate progress --> if you achieve that (or seem on track to), you get renewed funding. The mechanism isn't perfect (maybe you can BS your way to success or you aren't funded without good reasons), but it's at least ideally fairly results based.
(I'd be inclined to agree that ideally the founders/participants themselves would pay, but if you have evidence that they are "irrationally self-sacrificial" and will continue to underpay for the service relative to what they'd endorse themselves with hindsight etc, then that seems like a decent case for grant funding.)
Are the services available to founders (or other EAs that might be interested) for a fee?