CEA update, March 2018

Posted on Thursday, March 1st 2018
(last updated Thursday, January 14th 2021)

Hi everyone,

As part of my responsibilities in my new role as COO, I am taking ownership of some of the high-level operational tasks at CEA. As such, I will now be sending CEA’s monthly updates. If you have any questions or suggestions for content, feel free to email me via larissa@centreforeeffectivealtruism.org. — Larissa

In summary: We’ve had a busy month; we hosted our first Individual Outreach retreat, opened applications for EA Global: San Francisco, and launched EA Community Building Grants along with our Summer Internship Program and updated Involvement Guide.

Recent & Upcoming Events

1. Individual Outreach February Retreat

In February, CEA’s Individual Outreach Team ran the Individual Outreach Forum. The event brought together ~20 members of the EA community who are, or who might consider doing work involving targeted outreach and training to EAs working on the world’s most pressing problems. We attempted to serve as an impact multiplier for the attendees by empowering them with a network of EAs working in this area, syncing up on strategy, and providing rationality and productivity training.

So far, the feedback has been positive so a big thanks to CFAR, 80K, LessWrong 2.0, and our attendees for helping with some of the content.

Our rough plan for the rest of the year is to do one Retreat or Forum a month of different types, these may include: an Operations Managers Forum, the Leaders Forum, Post-EAG and Post-EAGx Forums, and another Individual Outreach Forum. If you would like to recommend Forum themes that might address important talent gaps in the EA community, or highly-engaged and skilled EAs who might make good attendees, please email Amy at amy@centreforeffectivealtruism.org.

2. Applications open for EA Global: San Francisco

Whilst the Individual Outreach team is working to better understand our most engaged community members via monthly retreats, the focus for the EA Global conference series this year is to effectively transmit our current understanding of EA core concepts to the large number of community members who have the potential to become even more engaged.

Content for both EA Global events will be aimed at existing EAs who already have a solid understanding of effective altruism, but would like to gain skills, network, master more complex problems, or move into new roles.

We will host two conferences this year:

  • San Francisco: 8-10 June

  • London: End of October

Applications are now open for EA Global: San Francisco — apply now. You can suggest content or recommend speakers for both conferences (including yourself!) here.

EA Community Building Grants

One of our priorities for 2018 is to improve how our other projects empower our most engaged community members. As such, we’ve launched Effective Altruism Community Building Grants, to build the capacity of the EA community to produce value by strengthening a small number of high-potential effective altruism groups.

We believe that community building grants will help drive engagement within the community by helping groups currently run by volunteers to transition to full-time, paid organizers.

In making funding decisions, we’re looking for two main things; exceptional organizers and high-potential groups. A key consideration for us is that organizers have a thorough, nuanced understanding of the core EA ideas, so that they can effectively communicate them to others. If you are interested in applying for a grant, you can read more about our heuristics for evaluating applications here.

Applications are open now and close on March 21st 2018. If an application is particularly urgent, or you have any queries, please contact groups@effectivealtruism.org.

Summer internships

We’ve opened applications for our Summer Internship Program, which will include community building internships and research fellowships. The main reasons for running this program are:

  1. to develop the skills of people in the EA community,

  2. give promising people the opportunity to see if direct work is a good fit for them

  3. interns tend to do valuable work that can contribute towards CEA’s overall impact.

The application deadline is Sunday 25th March. Please pass on these opportunities to others you think would be interested. If you have any questions about the roles, please email harri.besceli@centreforeffectivealtruism.org.

New Involvement Guide

Finally, we’ve just updated our Involvement Guide which is a comprehensive list of the ways in which you can engage with effective altruism. The first recommendation of the guide is to ‘Learn more’, which may not seem like a practical first step, but reflects our belief that figuring out how to contribute can be complex and that learning more can be the most useful place to start. If you or people you know are looking to get more involved, we hope this will be a helpful place to start.