Effective altruism culture and community
Effective altruism (EA) is a multifaceted movement, and the culture varies across different spaces. For example, an EA conference in Chile, a talk for charity founders in London, and a student group in California will each have different styles and cultures.
But there are common themes you’ll find across many EA spaces:
- Inquiry and questioning. You’ll often find people asking, “Why is it done this way? Should we be trying something different instead?” People also often question their own reasoning, seek out feedback, and look for their own blind spots so they can improve their views and thinking.
- Taking ideas seriously. Even if something sounds unconventional, people are willing to dig into it and examine whether there’s something worthwhile there. For example, how much moral weight should we give to distant strangers, animals, future generations, or even digital minds? Of course, many weird-sounding ideas do turn out to be wrong, but a few turn out to be importantly right.
- Moral commitment. People often take seriously the idea that they can and should help others, even those they have no pre-existing connection to and will never meet.
- Taking personal action in response to ideas. You’ll often meet people who have taken substantial actions due to EA principles and research, like changing their career, not eating animal products, or donating a significant portion of their income to the charities they believe are most effective.
- Using numbers as a tool. People are often willing to try to quantify and estimate things, even in more subjective domains. However, this doesn’t mean that people in the EA movement only care about others in an abstract way. There are always real experiences and real lives behind the numbers, and that richness is what people actually care about.
- Cooperation despite disagreement. You might be surprised by the diversity of views on really important questions, from which problems matter, to how to interpret current evidence, to foundational moral principles. Despite this, you'll often see people with fundamental worldview disagreements working together on shared projects.
- A willingness to critique the movement, and to receive critique. Many of the top-rated posts on EA’s main discussion forum are criticisms of organizations, trends, or ideas within the movement.
A resource, a professional field, and a community
For some people, effective altruism provides useful resources. A donor who wants to make their dollars go further may check out GiveWell’s recommendations once a year but not engage further.
For others, effective altruism is a professional space where they can move into careers that let them help others. Resources like career advising and support on changing careers allow motivated people to have more positive impact through their work.
And for some, effective altruism is also a space where they’ve made important friendships with like-minded people.
We care about building a good culture
If you want to do a lot of good in the world, you need an environment where people can do good work and be treated fairly.
Since 2015, the Community Health team at the Centre for Effective Altruism has worked to build a healthy community. This team advises community members who are experiencing interpersonal problems in the EA space, and supports group organizers and organization staff to build healthy spaces where people can do their best work.
Other community-building efforts include Magnify Mentoring, which supports people from underrepresented groups pursuing altruistic projects, and Rethink Wellbeing, which offers mental health resources for people aiming to have a positive impact. At EA Global conferences, community contact people are always available to help attendees and take action in case of misconduct or other problems.
Organizations in EA, including CEA, have made serious mistakes in handling some past problems. We aim to learn from experience, and have worked to improve our practices.
A decentralized space
Effective altruism does not have any centralized governance. Rather, it’s a network of different organizations, projects, and individuals.
However, some organizations play significant roles in shaping some aspects of effective altruism. The Centre for Effective Altruism provides resources and infrastructure like conferences, grantmaking, and courses. Coefficient Giving is a major funder of many EA projects.
There are also many other types of initiatives, including research organizations, career advising, charity evaluators that provide recommendations to donors, project incubators, and of course the charities doing direct work in fields like global health. Individuals who draw on the ideas of effective altruism might interface with several of these, or none of them.
EA is a growing movement
More people are attending EA conferences; as of September 2026, the largest EA Global conference was in June 2026, with over 2,000 attendees. 25 effective altruism conferences will be held during 2026, in cities including London, Mexico City, San Francisco, Washington DC, Singapore, Nairobi, and Buenos Aires, and organizers around the world are running effective altruism groups in their cities and universities.
In effective altruism’s major focus areas, concrete progress also continues. For example, GiveWell made its largest grant ever in 2026, which will provide millions of mosquito nets to protect people from malaria. This is expected to prevent around 67,000 deaths, largely of young children. Animal welfare work is increasing in impact and funding, with many new projects aiming to mitigate the cruel living conditions of farmed animals. More than 11,000 people have taken the 10% pledge to donate at least 10% of their income to the most effective charities they can find.
The field of AI safety is also growing. Students, professionals, and policymakers are thinking about how to make this emerging technology go well for humanity, and how to avoid serious risks. Effective altruism has supported technical AI safety research, work to evaluate the safety of AI models, and policy work.
The world’s problems can feel overwhelming, but we think effective altruism is a space where people can find valuable connections and ideas, and support and motivate each other to work on important problems together.
Last updated: September 2026