Always great to hear more about the Incubation Program - and would highly recommend people apply if they're interested!
A quick plug: at Probably Good, we've written a career profile on nonprofit entrepreneurship (heavily inspired by CE's approach) that covers other considerations around personal fit - it might be of interest to people who found this post useful.
I'm excited to curate this Career Conversations Week post. It's an easy read and seems helpful in evaluating a very high upside career path.
I am reading to tag-team. My -> Linkedin
Thank you for posting!
TLDR: This post is part of a sequence we’ve prepared for the Career Conversations Week on the EA Forum. This article provides a concise overview of the traits that Charity Entrepreneurship deems most valuable for a career in nonprofit entrepreneurship. We intend to provide you with a deeper understanding of our criteria when evaluating applications for our Incubation Program. Additionally, we hope this post assists you in self-assessing whether this career path aligns with your aspirations and abilities.
It’s been five years since we started our Incubation Program. We’ve since incubated 27 charities, some of which are now GiveWell incubated or ACE recommended, with many others on a path to becoming leaders in their fields. This would be impossible without dedicated, smart, resilient, and ambitiously altruistic individuals like you. Of course, not everyone is suited to be a successful nonprofit entrepreneur, and so we’ve spent the last few years refining our vetting process to identify people for whom this career would be an especially good fit.
There is no single blueprint for successful founders. Many of our alumni hadn't even considered this career path until someone encouraged them to explore it! What surprises many people is the incredible diversity among our successful charity founders in terms of age, educational background, and experience.
So far, people from 28 different countries joined our program. We've had many participants come directly from bachelor's or master's programs, as well as welcomed individuals with PhDs from recognized institutions like Cambridge, Oxford, and Harvard. They’ve specialized in fields as diverse as philosophy, geology, machine learning, and engineering. Some have chosen entrepreneurship over formal education, like our youngest participant, who, at the age of 19, left university to join our program!
Our program has also attracted individuals who boldly chose to transition from lucrative, secure, or high-status careers such as consulting, real estate, engineering at NASA or medicine. We've seen passionate street activists and seasoned nonprofit professionals alike join the program, each bringing their unique perspectives and skills to the table.
More than specific experience or expertise, they have each brought in an open mind and focused desire to launch a high-impact nonprofit.
If it’s not credentials, age, or specialized experience that make you a great fit for nonprofit entrepreneurship, what is it? Here is what we’ve learned in the last five years and who we are looking for to join our Incubation Programs.
It's crucial to keep in mind that not all of the traits mentioned above need to be fully developed from the outset. There are two key reasons for this:
1) First, you'll often launch your nonprofit alongside a co-founder with complementary traits or skills. For instance, one of you may excel in quantitative skills while the other excels in communication. One may be a proficient operations manager, while the other is a passionate researcher. One person might exhibit more extroverted and enthusiastic qualities, whereas the other leans towards conscientiousness and attention to detail. This is one reason we firmly believe that having a co-founder is paramount. A strong co-founder foundation facilitates better decision-making, accelerates project progress, and boosts overall motivation and morale. The first half of our Incubation Program is dedicated to this aim, enabling you to collaborate with various ambitious individuals and discover the best fit for launching your charity.
2) Second, you will upskill as you progress in your entrepreneurship journey. At CE, we leverage our Incubation Program to provide valuable knowledge and a practical training ground through applied projects and feedback, all designed to help you launch a successful nonprofit. Our mentorship and support extend beyond the initial program. We help you secure funding, establish your operational foundations, and provide continuous, tailored guidance as your organization grows. We foster a supportive community that readily shares knowledge, templates, solutions, and productivity tools. Our community illustrates why an unwavering willingness to learn, collaborate, and explore is invaluable for a startup founder. Skills and tools can be acquired, but you must bring a flexible attitude and commitment to impact.
Applications are still open for our 2024 Incubation Programs. If you think you have some of the skills or traits mentioned above and are looking for a highly impactful career, we really encourage you to apply. We have designed the process to help you learn more about what is important for founding a high-impact charity and weigh it against other career options and pathways to impact. To protect your valuable time, we will only invite you to the next stage if we think you have a good chance of success. The entire application process will take no more than 10 hours of your time from start to finish.
Learn more about our Incubation Program and apply here.
Interesting read, thanks for sharing!
Out of interest, have CE looked into more specific testing of which of those traits best predict success? For instance, by reviewing which of the CE incubated charities have been most successful and if there were personality traits (I assume recorded at the time of co-founder recruitment) that were disproportiately present?
I respect 27 charities is still too small of a sample size to be reliable as a data set, but it could be analysis which could be built upon as the numbers of charities that were incubated grew and matured.
Hello James! We are testing a few of our intuitions here but it's tricky to compare across charities because their environments and interventions are so different. That said, the personality characteristics listed above were found through a series of interviews and case studies. That evidence has it's limitations, and we have plans to test these relationships more empirically in the future.