Tom is based in New Zealand and does a range of things within the NZ and Australasia (Australia + NZ) EA communities under the broad umbrella of Community Building; their major projects for 2026 include being Team Lead for EAGxAustralasia and for EA Summit NZ. They have a background in Youth Development, Personal Development, and Outdoor Education and also volunteer in these spaces.
Tom has taken the GWWC Pledge, and is broadly cause agnostic, though is personally passionate about Improved Institutional Decision Making.
We've actually had 8 (eight!) EAGx events in Australia, starting in 2016 and missing 2020/21. Plus an EA Global back in 2015.
Which is why this year we're celebrating 10-years-of-EAGx-in-Australia / our-10th-EA-event-in-Australia / don't-think-about-it-too-much---it's-our-tenth-anniversary!.
If you want to join us to mark the occasion (and our biggest EAGxAus ever?!) on 27-29 November 2026 you can sign up to our mailing list to be notified when applications open!
Thanks for posting. This inspired me to share a call to action with my (mostly non-EA) community!
Strong agree! My working title for this was "Tell people/orgs when they influence your impact" but that didn't scan as well.
"If you zoom out, the EA ecosystem starts to look less like a group of people arguing about which cause matters most, and more like a portfolio of people caring deeply about different parts of the problem of creating a better world."
I really like this framing. Thanks for sharing!
You're welcome!
I agree it would be more readable as you suggest. This was a product of using the google doc import function, and not wanting to spend too much time re-editing. I already had to fix all the tables manually as the import function broke them in a bunch of ways, and fix the contents in general as it didn't copy over nested.
Strong upvote for a thought provoking read, thanks David.
I'm not entirely sold on the argument as stated, in part due to a different experience with city group attendance - a guess (with no data to support) would say my local group has <25% of attendees attend only one event in a given year, compared to EA London's 75%; and impact - we've had a significant number of regular attendees switch to EA aligned careers in ways that seem less likely had there not been a strong community.
I agree with a weaker form of the argument, that "National EA groups shouldn’t (primarily) focus on city groups" and as a result of reading this will likely think more about how to add value for non group-members in the future.
I strongly agree that community builders thinking/operating on a National level should think about ways to engage with and support EA aligned people who are not part of regularly convening groups (for preference, geography, or other reasons).
This looks interesting and I'm excited to see updates down the track!
I'm a bit late on the discord link and it's expired. Would you be able to reply/DM me with a new one!
Thanks!
Is the CH Coordinator introduction event live (and if so can you point me towards it)? I can't see it in Swapcard or on the Forum.
The updated time (10-11) clashes with the Community Builders meetup (09:30-10:25) and I imagine there's a lot of overlap in potential attendees.
Despite being an example of "giving is more common" I broadly agree with this post.
I'd conceptualize it as a spectrum, with "Giving books - no strings attached" at one end and "Loaning with a register and stated return timeframe" at the other end. As with most spectrums the healthy spot is likely the middle and context dependent.
For our tabling we ended up giving the books to people who had initiated a display of interest, with a conversation with the recipient about reading it and then passing it on to someone else who would read it. Which allows for sharing of the ideas, even if people weren't able to make it to our events in the future. For people who are already regular attendees, or are likely to become them, I'd advocate for closer to the loan end of the spectrum.