Have worries about EA? Want to chat?

Tl;dr - my (potentially flawed or misguided) attempt at a comment that provides my impression of Catherine as a particularly trustworthy and helpful person, with appropriate caveats and sensitivity to Throwaway's allegation.

Note: I haven't written this sort of comment before, and appreciate that it would be easy for this sort of comment to contribute to have a chilling effect on important allegations of wrongdoing coming to light, so would welcome feedback on this comment or any norms that would have been useful for me to adhere to in making it or deciding to make it.

First things first: I'm sorry that Throwaway had had a bad experience with Catherine! Notwithstanding the lack of further detail, I recognize that given this comment there's a reasonable chance that there was miscommunication or Catherine made mistakes around confidentiality, including some chance this was in poor faith, part of a meaningful pattern, or involved misjudgement that could call her position into question. Throwaway has my empathy and I wish them the best in their forthcoming post, which seems courageous and selfless to do given their experience. I appreciate that what I say below would be very frustrating and disheartening to read for someone in the position they mention in the comment. I'll certainly do my best to read anything further from them with my best attempt at good faith and unbiasedness, and would need to apologize to them and downgrade my confidence in my ability to judge people's trustworthiness if the picture I paint below turns out to be have been unhelpful in hindsight.

With this said, it makes me feel uncomfortable to see a fully anonymous/uncorroborated/non-specific allegation of wrongdoing prominently in the comments to this sort of post - I'm not sure I like the incentive structures where anyone can costlessly cast a significant shadow on someone's reputation, given the costs involved in dissuading people from talking to someone whose role is to provide community health support. I definitely agree with Lorenzo's impression that it would be great to have appointed independent/external person or body that someone could take these sorts of allegations to with confidence.

I feel compelled to provide my own impression of Catherine (for context, we first met 5+ years ago through the Effective Altruism community in New Zealand; my early experiences involved sharing some thoughts with Catherine based on my experience of having been involved with EA a couple of years prior to her,  and I helped her put on a Giving Game, we have subsequently continued to have conversations when we have the chance to see each other out of a mutual good feeling and an interest in EA community health). 

My impression of Catherine is that she is a particularly kind, trustworthy and  virtuous person, with an interest in doing right by people and not breaking commonly accepted ethical norms. Concretely, I'd give at least 5-to-1 in odds that a year from now, I'll continue to both recommend her as someone particularly helpful and trustworthy to talk to, and endorse her meaningfully remaining in her current role (of course, in the hypothetical where I'm telling someone this, I would out of transparency note that someone has called into question her upholding of confidentiality in one instance).

Hey - I'm Chana, currently interim head of the community health team.  I'm really sorry you had a bad experience. If you'd like to discuss concerns you have with members of the team, you're welcome to contact me via the forum, my email ([email protected]) or via anonymous form (note that with the form, I won't be able to follow up). If you'd like to express more thoughts to our team but not in public, we also have a team form that can also be anonymous. 

If you still would find it useful to talk to a contact person, you can request to talk to Julia, now or in future (conditional on her capacity).

This would be bad, if true, given that it is essentially the same complaint that was levelled against Julia Wise, of community health, by Alexey Guzey previously.