lauren_mee 🔸
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I agree this is an overlooked career path, and one that many advising orgs (including historically my own) haven’t given consistent treatment.
My impression is that more EAs are working in government than we realise, and that many advising organisations do consider it highly impactful. The challenge is that government roles come with expectations of impartiality, so there’s a real limit to how openly funders or career groups can promote specific pathways without undermining credibility.
That said, I think we could do much more to bring policy conversations into spaces like EAGs. The community would benefit from normalising government service as a long-term route to influence, not just as an “adjacent” option.
For those interested, Impactful Policy Careers has done excellent work in the European context, though even we face restrictions on how openly they can be promoted.
I don't have anything to add beyond the below and my anecdotal evidence that campaigning roles (particularly more senior ones) outside of (ICAW- who just seem to get everyone!) are hard to hire for, curious to hear what Kieran thinks:
https://animaladvocacycareers.org/talent-survey-2024/
https://animaladvocacycareers.org/post/animal-advocacy-bottleneck-survey-2022/
https://animaladvocacycareers.org/post/animal-advocacy-bottleneck-survey-2021/
https://animaladvocacycareers.org/post/animal-advocacy-bottleneck-survey-2020/
Thank you!!
We have already published the NGO bottlenecks for 2024 here: https://animaladvocacycareers.org/talent-survey-2024/
https://animaladvocacycareers.org/post/animal-advocacy-bottleneck-survey-2022/
https://animaladvocacycareers.org/post/animal-advocacy-bottleneck-survey-2021/
https://animaladvocacycareers.org/post/animal-advocacy-bottleneck-survey-2020/
Thank you, this is really useful.
From what I’ve seen, it’s partly job-market driven, partly from feedback we get from placed candidates and hiring organisations, and partly from talking to people in impactful roles outside the nonprofit sector.
There’s simply a natural ceiling on the number of truly high-impact jobs within nonprofits. The more top talent we attract, the more competitive those roles become, and the harder it is to find placements where the marginal hire is making a significant difference. My best estimate is that globally there may be fewer than 20 such roles per year (some might argue up to 50), which is far less than we’d like.
One response could be to start more high-impact charities. That can work, but only to a point. Funding is only available for a small number of ideas, and many new organisations end up having little impact while still diverting talent and funding from stronger opportunities.
This is why I think we need to move the conversation away from concentrating talent inside a relatively small number of NGOs, and towards distributing it wherever it can have the most systemic leverage. There is a huge range of opportunities in areas like retailers, food companies, government, media, and policy, where skilled, mission-aligned people can have a transformative effect for animals. These routes are much less well mapped out, but the more I look into them, the more convinced I am that some of the most significant wins for animals are happening in these spaces. Often, the people making them happen are the only mission-aligned person in the room, and without them nothing would have moved forward at all.
This links to the idea of community capital. Our community’s value is not limited to who works for NGOs, although I think for most people that is not the case and that's a narrative i would like to challenge.
That said, there is still a strong case for getting more talented people into nonprofit roles that are consistently hard to fill, where the marginal hire can have an outsized impact. If an organisation cannot fill a role, it may end up hiring someone who is not ready for the responsibility or having to run another lengthy recruitment process, both of which carry real costs.
Finally, a more uncomfortable point. Simply putting a talented person into a high-impact NGO role does not guarantee meaningful change. The reality is that there is a lot of variation. Some people genuinely transform the organisations they join. Others are absorbed into bureaucratic systems and find it difficult to make any major shifts. We tend to assume the first outcome will be the norm, but in practice the variation is greater than we like to admit.
So yes, part of the problem is a ceiling in nonprofit opportunities. But an equally important factor is that high-impact work is not confined to the nonprofit sector at all. We should be thinking about where our skills, networks, and influence can be deployed for the greatest possible effect, wherever those opportunities might be :)
<<Because of this, while the nonprofit sector may indeed be approaching saturation in some areas, there are still pockets where additional high-quality talent could be really impactful.>>
I completely agree with this, which is why AAC continues to highlight and work on this issue. My earlier comment may have come across more bluntly than intended. I feel we’ve perhaps overcorrected toward the idea that non-profit roles are the main or even the only path to driving meaningful impact for animals (both within AAC and more broadly I have observed in the EAA space). In doing so, we’ve often overlooked other promising career opportunities, such as roles directly within the system, that could potentially have an even greater impact, particularly because at least right now, they’re so neglected. Too often, I hear these alternative paths framed mainly as ways to build career capital before pivoting back into the non-profit sector, rather than recognising that they can be impactful in their own right (unless they’re earning-to-give roles).
Why I No Longer Believe the Nonprofit Sector Is the Best Place to Drive Change for Animals
Six years ago, I started a capacity-building organisation based on a clear hypothesis: that recruiting great people into high-impact nonprofits was one of the best ways to help animals.
I no longer think that’s true.
After spending years working directly with nonprofit leaders, trying to fill critical roles, and analysing the broader job market, I’ve come to believe that the nonprofit sector at least within farmed animal advocacy is no longer the most neglected or scalable path to impact. If anything, it may be approaching saturation. Several new meta talent/community organisations have emerged, but the number of roles available for talented, mission-driven people remains small and isn't growing fast enough to absorb the supply of people who want to help, nor the diversity of their skills.
That’s why, over the past two years, we’ve started shifting our focus. We’ve explored two adjacent levers: (1) policy, which influences institutional change far beyond the limits of nonprofit execution capacity, and (2) donations, which brings in capital from people in higher- earning roles outside the movement and helps them start their journey of engagement.
But more importantly, I’m starting to believe that some of the highest-impact opportunities for animals lie outside the nonprofit sector entirely, in industry, government, retailers and media. These are the places where talent is most needed, most neglected, and most capable of shifting societal baselines.
The animal advocacy movement is still largely structured around a nonprofit-centric model. But if we want to unlock serious capacity gains, it’s time we start helping people build impactful careers in places with much more leverage.
We are in the process of researching more into this and gaining case studies, but I'd be excited to receive push back from people who think I'm wrong here.
I would just like to say, that if the movement pivoted towards network based hiring we would heavily benefit from this. So me arguing against is a genuine belief not coming from my own benefit.
I do agree with you that the talent density of the EA AR movement has increased in the last few years and there aren’t enough high impact roles to absorb all the talented people. Which is why we have shifted away from just promoting non profit roles to ETG, giving more broadly and policy work.
I just don’t think the solution is open hiring rounds.
And why we also continue to do the skill bottleneck survey every year despite working consistently with organizations to have more objective data on where they are struggling to find people and I do think talent density is a different problem than skill gaps.
Anyhow thanks for engaging and it’s an interesting post to read and the comments are great.
Thanks for this write up and highlighting AACs work.
I do believe career advising is one of our most successful programmes but I just want to clarify a few things, and apologies if these were not clear in the 2024 review.
1. Last year career advising only led to 8 career changes that we know of so far. Although they were quite high impact transitions with a noteable role from AAC.
2. <<Other notable achievements as a result of the advising:
100 1:1 calls achieved, with a goal of 200 for 2025>>
The pledges were not as a result of the advising calls, they were achieved through a specific ad campaign and were a seperate programme completely. It would be great if you could update this in the original post to avoid confusion.