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by Elli
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Building effective altruismCommunityAltruistic coordinationCommunity projectsEntrepreneurship
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I have a background in Innovation & Business Information Management and a consuming need to take action and drive social change. I believe that a small group of highly motivated people can identify problems and solve them in collaborative ways.

Lately, I've seen this happening several times in my circle: people having a good idea which was discussed a couple of times, but then abandoned due to lack of commitment, structure, and needed expertise. I also know of early-stage NGOs struggling to find the right fit in terms of skills and to form core teams in order to push their projects forward. 

So I'm now exploring whether there's appetite for something I haven't quite found elsewhere: a space where people with early-stage social impact ideas can form small, cross-functional teams to actually develop and potentially launch them together - not just discuss them.

The gap I see: if you have an idea but lack certain skills (technical, operational, domain expertise), it's hard to find collaborators to pressure-test feasibility and build it out. You also need an infrastructure that helps you commit to it, collaborate effectively, and actually move forward. Most platforms are either discussion forums, job boards, or formal accelerators.

I'm thinking of running a pilot session - a virtual meetup where:

  • People briefly share very early-stage ideas they would like to explore
  • Others share input and skills/expertise they could contribute
  • We form small working groups around the most promising ideas
  • Teams decide if they want to continue collaborating

Would this interest you? Either as someone with an idea, or someone wanting to contribute skills to social impact work?

Curious for honest feedback - does this fill a real need or am I solving a problem that doesn't exist? If you don't like the idea, please briefly explain why in the comments.

Would really appreciate receiving critical input (whether positive or negative) rather than down/upvotes only. Thank you!

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Benevolent_Rain

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Have you read AIM (formerly Charity Entrepreneurship) material? They have a book out on starting a non-profit. If you read that and present this idea either absorbing lessons from that or clearly arguing why this idea is still good, I think that might make it easier for readers here to assess your idea and potentially consider joining. As well as some more detail on your background perhaps. I am a bit sad that you get downvoted as a newcomer - we want people to join and be agentic which is exactly what you are doing.

Elli1
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Dear Benevolent_Rain, thank you very much for your valuable feedback. I already incorporated some of your points in my post and will definitely consider making bigger changes after reading the book you suggested. At the same time, this post is also meant to test whether this high-level concept can potentially have traction at all before I deep dive into the details. If I get mostly downvotes and none shows interest, that's also feedback for me as it might mean that this idea is not viable as it is currently. 

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Benevolent_Rain
As Brad points out, even now, and with some (high?) likelihood in the near future, EA will be begging for people to start new things. So please disregard downvotes. Instead, if you think you can pull this off and have credentials, just take tips like mine, Brad's and others' and see downvotes as "not ready yet", and do not interpret it as "a project similar to this is not worthwhile". There are tons of people right now working on starting new things, and this will only accelerate as the need for it is large. And criticism is on the EA community if we make promising entrepreneurs discouraged. Here are programs you can apply to to speed up your progress: -AIM incubation -Catalyze Impact -BlueDot -And probably many more that will put you on the path to creating new orgs, even orgs that again create new orgs (this makes me thing that an overview of EA opportunities for builders/entrepreneurs might be helpful)
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Elli
Hi Benevolent_Rain, thanks again for diving deep into the advice and for showing support, I really appreciate it! I do see your point and I agree that sometimes people have a hard time engaging with new ideas or recognizing what they need. I will look up the programs you mentioned, but I guess they will probably require a much more defined idea compared to my current 'pilot' version, so I'll need some extra time to figure things out. I might also try to post in the EA reddit page, maybe I will find some more traction there. Thank you again for your insights and encouragement!
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Brad West🔸3
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This is a worthwhile idea and I appreciate you putting it out there. Team formation and skills matching are real bottlenecks. That said, for ideas that fall outside established EA cause areas or existing frameworks, the bigger bottleneck is often upstream of team formation: getting even modest funding to explore feasibility in a rigorous way. Volunteer energy and cross-functional collaboration are valuable, but they tend to dissipate without some resource runway. Your model might be even stronger if it included a pathway for connecting promising early-stage ideas to funders willing to back basic exploration, not just to collaborators.

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Elli1
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Dear Brad, 

Thank you so much for the feedback! 

I think that your addition is indeed a great way to incentivize teams and further encourage/facilitate action. This brings other questions I'd like to have your input on: 1) Would you suggest to start right away with a 'full-on' model that includes different parts or to build the idea piece by piece (e.g. start with cross-functional collaboration only, then add pathways to funding, then maybe something else..) as you go? 2) How would you test for market-fit before committing to an idea? Statistics show that around 34% of new initiatives fail because of that. 

Thanks again for your support :)

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