Ben West appointed as Interim Managing Director

Posted 4 April, 2023 (updated 21 April, 2023)
Ben West has been appointed as Interim Managing Director of CEA.
Ben writes:
This is a cruxy time for EA and I am honored to lead CEA as we try to navigate it.
My position doesn't have a firm end date but will last until a new Executive Director of CEA starts. Our internal CEA prediction market currently estimates that this will be between 6 months and a year from now (depending on the framing).
I attended my first EA conference in 2014. I remember discussing animal welfare with people who said things like “The modern farmed animal welfare movement has existed for 40 years and hasn’t accomplished much. The March for the Animals was arguably the most popular animal rights demonstration in history, and it was in 1990. The movement for vegetarianism might be dying.”
Since then, meat alternatives have entered the mainstream, with Beyond and Impossible products being available at almost every chain restaurant. Chicken Watch lists over 3,000 corporate commitments for chicken welfare, and Metaculus currently predicts a 61% chance that the EU will ban all types of caged housing for egg laying hens in the next 18 months.
What’s more remarkable is that the random 23-year-olds in my small EA group directly contributed to this. There were only ~10 core members, but some of them have gone on to:
  • Work directly on corporate welfare campaigns at Mercy for Animals
  • Work on meat alternatives at Impossible and Rethink Priorities
  • Work for funders like OpenPhil and ACE
EA seems to have gathered an impressive set of talented, mostly young people who genuinely want to make the world a better place, and provided an alternative to traditional templates of doing good. The people in my EA group weren’t “thinking globally and acting locally” — they were engaging with global problems as though they could actually solve them, and, remarkably, they seem to be doing so.
I think CEA should have an executive director who can commit to being in the position for 4+ years, and I don’t currently feel like I could make that commitment. But I’m excited about the EA community, and honored to help support CEA until we can find that long-term ED.
You can read Ben's full post on the EA Forum.