Thanks for your nice post Annika! It was a pleasure having you here, and you are definitely right that this internship would not have happened had you not gone out of the way to pitch yourself to us.

One of the reasons we were keen to have you was that you are an EA student group leader. This is probably relevant for other students seeking internships or jobs as well: Being an EA student leader often means something to recruiters at EA organizations. For instance, I know that one of the reasons I was accepted into the Charity Entrepreneurship Incubation Program was that I had been an EA student group leader myself.

Much love from all of us here in Eluru. You are always welcome with us :)


And to anyone else interested in interning with FWI: We are likely to do more of these internships in the future, although they will likely be of a similar format in that they will be both a) unfunded (at least for non-local people), and b) require you to both pitch yourself and get yourself to our site.

We'll probably publish more on this on our careers page in the coming weeks, but if anyone's interested now they should feel free to message me.

Thanks for your comment. A few points/pushback:

1 - The animal movement has grown a lot, but that doesn't mean it has grown enough. I think about this in the same way I think about efforts to eradicate extreme poverty: Such poverty has diminished significantly over the past few decades, but it still probably needs more (and cleverer) allocation of resources to truly be eradicated. Animal welfare, IMO, is in a much earlier stage still (but that's not to say we haven't made progress!).

2 - Various orgs do offer student internships (which is great), but I don't think this is at all sufficient to build the much larger movement of active NGO staffers, donors, etc. that we need. As discussed above, I also think there aren't enough in-person opportunities, and that that is a problem.

All makes sense!

>>But maybe this brings about a larger, more diverse pool of talented advocates that attract people in their cities and countries, and more local hubs grow? 

Some truth to this I'd say, but it's just tradeoffs. Obviously the best thing is for there to be lots of fully remote roles, AND lots of in-person roles and, especially, in-person communities. 

>>Do we have examples from other movements in the past that grew geographically disconnected through small communities and achieved their goals or managed to change the game?

This is why I'm skeptical of remotely driven movements haha. Because it seems to me like we don't have many examples of this. The very modern age does provide some though—in particular, I'm thinking of Black Lives Matter and other more viral forms of activism in the US recently. However, I think a lot of these, including BLM, were more like a rapid upswell that quickly died off, without achieving many lasting results. And I expect a large part of this lack of results is because you really do need sustained, in-person community organizing in order to build lasting and cohesive public support that is able to change culture and institutions.

>>Additionally: what about offering this to jobless people, over 25, or people taking a career gap? As someone close to say bye to her 35th lap around the sun I start noticing ageism.

Could be a good idea. My intuition is still that the bigger gap here is engaged college students dropping out of the movement, as opposed to professionals who can't find a job for whatever reason. But I could be wrong! And would love to see data one way or the other. 

And as usual, of course it'd be good to have both programs: We should have programs more programs targeting students, and we should also have more programs engaging working professionals and people at basically every other life and career stage. We're going to need a much bigger, more dynamic, and more comprehensive movement if we're going to bring about the fundamental change we seek!

>>A hybrid of your approach (that could be logistically easier to implement) could be (for example): running a hiring round to select highly agentic and motivated scrappy generalist students, placing them in a non-profit that needs them to work online (because that's where most of the work is), and then placing them in hubs for socialising in the movement and participating in the actions that are happening. They could take on a lead role in organising protests/Revolutionist nights and the like, while they are in the hub, while working 9-5 in an effective online charity. They don't necessarily need to switch hubs due to cost and inconvenience. 

I like this suggestion! Also seems like a good way to MVP this idea more. Let's think more about this

Fair thoughts, thanks for the input! A few responses here:

>>I was a bit surprised by the "steep dropoff after graduation" claim. I think this is very likely to be true, but this could give the - very false - impression that there are many motivated students in the movement, which is not what I've observed.

I do think there are a lot of motivated students in the movement though, particularly in the US and UK (I'm less sure about other countries). Though perhaps to your point, even in these countries I think these students tend not to actually be getting out there that much, e.g. probably not attending protests, and are probably instead doing more insular activities on their campuses like discussion groups and vegan cooking. This was the case at least for my own student group.

Definitely would be helpful to have more data here! I'm just speaking off of impressions right now.

>>However, perhaps its implementation might be... too early?

Possibly. To push back on this though, I do think that sometimes a given campaign will always just seem too difficult/too early until it is done, and that we might as well just start working on it now.


Thanks for your organizing work! The network you describe sounds cool and I hope it's going really well. I think you should consider writing more about it in an EA Forum post or something (or please link me to one if you've already done this!). I hadn't heard of it before, and I think it'd be helpful for more people to be thinking about this sort of thing.

Thanks for your input!

>>I would add public institutions to the mix. Internships in regional / federal governments, or international organisations. They tend to have already good systems to run internships. 

Seems like a good idea! I'd particularly be keen to see interns placed with some animal-sympathetic politician for one of their placements, as that could build some pretty useful skills. Are there other potential placements here in the realm of public institutions that you see making sense?

>>I wonder, where does this hunch (or knowledge) about organisations being remote come from?

It'd be helpful for us to have data on this. When I did some quick GPT research here (link), particularly basing it off orgs recommended by ACE and additionally orgs whose openings are posted by Animal Advocacy Careers, it seems like about 75% of roles in the more EA side of the movement are now remote. Presumably you're already looking at these openings though?

Of course, and thank you for the kind words Sarah!

Hey, just chiming in here on behalf of the organization I co-founded (Fish Welfare Initiative). We went through AIM’s charity incubation program in 2019—their first formal cohort.

The following are a couple points I had:

1 - Echoing requests for evidence

As some people have already commented above, insofar as you have serious criticisms about various charities (CE or otherwise) it’d be helpful for you to provide some evidence for them.

In particular, it’d be interesting to learn more why you think AAC is “okay”, why Animal Ask “hasn’t had much impact”, and/or why FWI “hasn’t worked very well.”

I really think I would be happy to consider these arguments, but I first want to understand them.

I would personally wager that CE leading giving in the animal space would be net-negative for the space compared to the status quo (which, to be fair, is very bad already)

It’d also be helpful to know why you think the animal space, or maybe just giving in the animal space, is “very bad already”. (I know that in particular might be a lot for you to respond to though.) This brings me to my second point.

2 - Just because animal/CE charities are flawed doesn’t mean they’re not worth supporting.

One thread of your comments is one I really resonate with: The animal movement is not good enough. Our evidence is often subpar, decisions are made hastily, we don’t have the right people, etc. Unfortunately, I think this is all true.

But what should we really do differently? If, as you suggest, CE produces not super great animal charities, but it’s still (as you say) “the best bet in the animal space for future new high impact orgs”, then should we just resign ourselves to not launching and running any new animal-focused charities?

My point here is that just because something isn’t as good as we would like (e.g. IMO the best animal charities don’t have even 10% the evidence base of GiveWell’s top charities), that doesn’t mean they’re not worth doing or supporting. Sometimes I think we do ourselves a disservice by always comparing ourselves to human health/poverty alleviation charities: These human-focused orgs literally have decades or even a century more of an evidence base built up than we do. They don’t have an entrenched opposition. And they aren’t trying to change something people derive pleasure from 3 times a day.

We need to build a large and effective movement for reducing animal suffering and ending factory farming. That is going to require starting somewhere, no doubt with lots of early mistakes in the early days.

Of course, I don’t mean to say that anything goes—some ideas are still certainly too dumb to start and some charities too poorly-run to continue. However, I think we need to appreciate that we’re in the very early days of animal advocacy and we need to think about our approaches as such.

3 - On taking the advice of the EA Funds and OpenPhil over CE

This seems to be an important actionable takeaway you’d like people to have:

>>I don't think donors should take much guidance from them, compared to OpenPhil or the EA Animal Welfare Fund

Just wanted to point this out in case you’re not already aware, but these two granting bodies already heavily grant to CE-incubated animal orgs.

For instance:

• FWI has received about 5 grants from the EA AW fund over the years, and 1 grant from Open Philanthropy.
• Animal Ask has received at least 1 grant from the EA AW fund and 2 grants from OpenPhil.

And I believe SWP and AAC have also received money from one or both of these funders.

So it seems like either you should think that a) CE animal orgs are actually more promising than you claimed, b) the EA AW Fund and OpenPhil are actually less promising than you implied, or c) these funds are just scraping the bottom of the barrel and grant to CE orgs for lack of better options.

Fwiw, and after talking a reasonable amount with these funders, I’m fairly of the opinion that correct answer is mostly A here.

4 - About Fish Welfare Initiative (FWI) specifically

It’s worth noting that FWI has varied a fair bit from the original idea (see the short published report here) that CE had made when we first launched. Broadly though, CE didn’t give us that certain of a direction—rather, we understood that there are serious problems with how humans raise farmed fish, dissolved oxygen is one of them, and we should do further research to design a specific intervention to help them. Of course it would have been better if there was better research or a more concrete direction for us to go in, but again: We are in the early days of the animal movement and there’s still not enough of an evidence base for most things.

I also agree with Karolina above that it’s not necessarily bad that charities pivot from the original idea (provided that they pivot to something useful).

As for how promising FWI is today, I’d be interested to hear (as I stated in Point 1 above) why you think FWI “hasn’t worked very well”. As I state in Point 2, I think we have certainly made loads of mistakes, but that we’re also having a moderate impact right now and investing in tackling a very important and very neglected problem. You can learn more specifically about all this in our last year in review, or also by seeing our current projects.

Also as mentioned in Point 3, we have received grants from OpenPhil and the EA AW Funds, and are a recommended charity by ACE. Perhaps you think that these organizations have made some mistake in recommending FWI, but then I think you’re in a position of doubt on the entire animal movement (which, to be fair, seems like that might be the position you are in). To that, I would say see my Point 2—these are the early days, and even though no org is perfect we need to start somewhere.

5 - Feel free to dm me

I think it’d be interesting to hear your response to some or all of these points publicly as other people seem to have similar questions, but if you feel uncomfortable doing that feel free to dm or email me. I think there’s a good chance we already know each other, in which case I’d be especially interested to chat more to come to some shared truth here.

Sorry again all for the novel of a comment!

Thanks Joel! And same to you—hope the research is going well

Thanks Ben! Yeah, I think we are often focusing more on the 1.1M we feel like we should have added to that, but definitely feels good to have had that impact still :)