Jeffrey Kursonis built and co-built quite a number of non-profits in New York City, including The Haven, an arts and altruism collective with 300 people gathering weekly for ten years in Manhattan. A multicultural and altruistic faith community in Harlem, still going today. The New York City New Sanctuary Movement, one of two main hubs of the national network of faith communities giving sanctuary protection to undocumented families being pursued by Federal Immigration Law Enforcement. It’s a long list that formed a network of sorts.
After my work in NYC, a nascent national organization, Emergent Village, tapped me to lead their early growing network of local cohorts seeking to organize progressive religious leaders. I formed a team and we built it up to over 100 US cities, as well as many regional gatherings and other movement training and organizing (extremely similar to CEA). This “emerging church” movement changed the face of American religion by directly moving thousands of religious leaders and their congregations to the left, spawned a whole publishing genre, helped elect Obama, helped influence our Federal same sex marriage legal structure and sadly became a focal point of the conservative backlash unleashed by Trumpism. This is the second and biggest network I built.
My third network requires some discretion as it was built across a major authoritarian country and ended after a combination of Covid and government crackdowns.
As a side note, Jeffrey is no longer religious but still deeply appreciates the proven training ground religion provides. Here is a video we produced about the national cohort network, note my name as producer in the end credits: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-oaU29Z4dg
Jeffrey has been an active EA’er for over two years now, doing the Intro and Advanced Fellowships and working as a Meta-Moderator for Virtual Program trainings for new facilitators and actively posting on the forum. I recently applied to be on the CEA Virtual Programs new Advisory Board.
The very active EA Anywhere #role-film-and-tv group has been meeting weekly or biweekly with a number of subgroups working on various projects. It's become something of a mini incubator already producing a number of new org's and other smaller projects. Jeffrey has been an important organizer and momentum builder in the group. Expect to hear of a number of new inititatives arising out of the group.
Do you mean like portraits of nerds with pocket protectors full of pens and heavy guilt feelings on their face?
A few comments. EA has not been good at bringing in career veterans. So I would focus more on early or mid-career officers. I would love for you to find a niche where you could bring in Generals, but that’s a stretch culturally at this point.
The reason it is so hard to find a job in EA is that EA hasn’t expanded as much as its promise would seem. It should be rapidly expanding and creating plenty of jobs for all the new and excited joiners. The reality is they join with excitement then hit the wall of how hard it is to get a job or funding. The smallness of EA is causing this problem. Bear this in mind, you’ll be giving newcomers a pep talk right before they run off to hit the wall. Pray for reform, more openness, less applications and just throw open the gates and let everyone in (ie. the reality of how movements work).
Higher officers might be better as founders, consider that model and make funding connections.
Good luck and love the last sentence about the spelling of defence. GSTQ. (Although I don’t actually hold to that since I’m American).
“My real issue is that EA in all its forms is still so small.” …as a technical expert I couldn’t agree more.
Movements aren’t gated, like business or fundamentalism. Unspoken yet de facto elitism, applications for EAGs, all have kept the EA movement a tiny fraction of what it could be. More funding than any movement has ever known (because science nerds feel comfy here) have kept it alive. In the past the sense that, “Wow, if I wanted to do some good this group might fund me” did launch some good stuff, but far more hit all the de facto walls and shrunk off to business or trad philanthropy.
A renewal, making it great again, will only come with some new ideas and more openness. That cost effectiveness is the main thing in social entrepreneurship, the very beating heart of ascendant EA has to accommodate some new friends and be changed by them.
This is really great to see you are doing the work within EA. We could add to this that depression is now the #1 global cause of ill health & disability, more than injuries or any disease it takes people out of life and job functionality.
And it got to number one because it is rapidly increasing so much that now it’s on track within some years to become the #1 cause of death of all health issues*.
I think it’s worth saying another way. Depression disables people so they can’t go to work or take care of their family and the WHO says this disabler is the biggest one in the whole world. Depression puts people on the path to death and on the way to death it disables you first. This crept up on us and we didn’t realize it as altruists.
I feel it’s like when some teens get killed at a dangerous intersection and finally the town puts up a stop sign, and we all comment “Why did we have to wait for these kids to get killed before we acted”?
Mental Health is clearly a coming tragedy that’s been neglected more than almost any…and we have very clear tractable solutions that just haven’t been used. It’s the perfect ITN framework vector towards action. EA should get out on the front end of it like we have other cause areas. The team that wrote this post are the main ones in EA that recognize this and I hope we’ll all join them.
*note: raw google searches will find some confusion because blindness is also sometimes called the number one disability but they are different. Blindness is a functional issue you can be born with. Depression is the biggest ill health leading to disability.
This looks awesome guys. I spent a year in Vietnam about half of it in Da Nang. Much better air than Saigon! Most people rent a moped, which I think they call a motorbike or scooter. Plenty of young expats around trying to find themselves, a great chance to evangelize altruism. My dad lost a leg there in the American War, so I felt a weird bond over our shared history. I found the Vietnamese warm and hospitable at first, but hard to crack getting closer to, to do so I think would take years and fluency. So keep expectations in line.
Another interesting thing and a potential project is that as a communist country they’ve never had a history of Civil Society, that "third sector" (same with China), so the idea of people banding together to address social ills just isn't a thing, that's the job of the government, and doing so in the past could get you killed or jailed because it would be offensive to the government, you're essentially saying, "Hey loser gov since you're not doing a good job we'll do it", something you just couldn't do in the past.
When I was there in 2018 the government was more chill and seemed to be slowly evolving...but they still hadn't gotten around to creating laws to support Civil Society, like making donations tax deductible...something we so take for granted, but it's an actual thing a society has to decide to do. So it makes it hard on nonprofits because its much harder to fundraise without that very helpful tax deduction law. And just in general the population doesn't understand the idea of giving to charity. But I hear now, in mirroring China's moves toward harder authoritarianism (Something Vietnam is known for doing, following the lead of China), they have begun cracking down some on nonprofits, jailing some leaders, making life harder in general...so sad to hear.
When I was there I spent time with some charities and life was hard for them, but now I hear it's getting worse. So my suggestion is to just have conversations with locals you feel some trust with about that whole thing, it will probably be a new thing to many of them, you can share the long tradition of charity work in most of the world and just educate them on it. I'd just be a bit careful on only bringing that up if you have trust...some people might be more nationalist and not want to talk about that, but probably those people wouldn't tend to want to talk to you as a foreigner anyways.
Don't mistake the warm hospitality up front for openness to Western ideas, the Vietnamese are a very proud people, as you'll agree seeing their hard work and commitment to their homeland, so communicate new ideas knowing they exist in a competition for merit, not automagically correct because you're Western forbears told you so. When it comes to altruism, which is a form of love for strangers, the highest of human acts, it does win the competition over using power to control people, but you have to play the game with full offense and defense, not just expecting them to fold easily.
Have a great winter.
Congrats to all of you for accomplishing a hard thing. Excited to see someone who's done it all at AIM become the best choice, so much easier to hit the ground running. Seems like your impact will be getting ever more ambitious, and your charity more entrepreneurable, or your entrepreneuring more charitable, as well as your science oh so charitable (and healthy).
Currently depression is the number one health disability globally and on track to be the number one killer in the near future, killing more than cancer, heart attacks, hunger, etc. Now is the time to get ahead of it. Also diminishment of individuals and their communities and productivity on the path to death. For example, a depressed mother stops taking care of her family well…if they have to walk miles to take the kids to a health clinic, now that doesn’t happen and the children’s health goes down. Many of us weren’t paying attention as depression grew to now rival the top human killers.
I hope you have a billion years to evolve your Welfareans. Since humans already have that behind us and our evolution has been going pretty good and faster in the last 200 years maybe in a hundred or so we’ll be getting pretty close to your imagination of Welfareans.
My thesis is that the core driving bit of humans is love, but that most of what love is, has not fully unfolded yet, like a flower not yet fully blossomed. So we just keep pushing forward, especially on benefitting others (like EA) and the unfolding will continue.
This is a heartening reply. I’m also glad you put yours in and got in. Let me ask you from your observations, when you say diverse, could you expand on that. Is it really all mixed up or is it mostly 25 year olds and one 37 year old. Was there anyone post 45? Your point about it being more doable for younger people is a good one, but I think we mostly are known about by young people. There’s plenty of 35-55 year olds in career transitions that if they knew would apply, and often they have some security so the transition is affordable. I’d love to hear more about how actively AIM pursues them. I’d be glad to update.
Yes in publishing stories there’s plenty of suspect motives. But really I’m basing this on my own personal experience in seeing so many not obvious leaders blow everyone away and the obvious winners not at all so guaranteed to succeed. So many get into high level schools for reasons beyond their personal talent, and so many others blossom late. The pool of people enabled by society/parents to get into elite schools is much smaller than the huge pool of average grade, lower income people who didn’t give a shite about school when they’re were 18 and later blossom with their tough background giving them huge grit and ambition. EA tends to fail to see this to their diminishment. Spreadsheet criteria doesn’t capture grit and ambition. Mentoring pipelines do.