CEA update, July 2018

Hi everyone,

In summary: *June was a hectic month for CEA due to Effective Altruism Global: San Francisco and other events, so we’ve skipped our June update in favour of an earlier July email. This month, we set our priorities for Q3, received a £2 million grant from Open Phil and advertised some open roles — if you know anyone who might be a good fit for CEA, please get in touch, or direct them to the application process. Applications close on Monday 16 July.  *

CEA priorities this quarter We’re now halfway through the year, so at our recent team retreat, we looked ahead to what we need to achieve for the rest of 2018. So far this year we’ve been focusing more at the bottom of the marketing funnel and on contributors and core members of the EA community. We want to understand what people in the community need and how we can help individuals have an impact. At our team retreat, we started to think about what we need to get done community-organised expand our support to a broader group of people coming into the EA community.

For this reason in the next quarter we will be focusing on:

We will also be building our capacity internally by hiring new people onto the team and finalising the metrics for a lot of our projects.

Open roles at CEA CEA is hiring! We’re looking for people who care deeply about improving the world and are excited to be part an organisation that is building a community of people to do just that.

We’re looking for candidates to help us run events to build collaboration in EA, support the local EA groups across the world, discover promising projects to fund as a Grant Evaluator and help us manage and grow CEA itself as operations specialists in the UK and US.

We would also love to hear from candidates that are excited by our mission and feel like they would be an excellent fit for our team but are unsure about any of the current positions. You can apply using our “open application” option. Read more about the roles and apply here.

Grant from Open Philanthropy Project Last week the Open Philanthropy Project announced a renewed grant of £2 million to CEA. We are incredibly grateful to the Open Philanthropy Project for continuing to support our work, as well as the work of many other organisations in the effective altruism community.

This grant will support all of our work: events, individual outreach, local group support, and online. In particular, it will support our more capital-intensive projects, EA Grants and community building grants. It will also help us to increase our salaries to levels that are more in line with comparable organisations in the Bay area.

If you want to read more about our strategy, please see the strategy tab of our website. You might also be interested in this December summary of our plans for 2018. (Please note that the grant investigator, Nick Beckstead, is also a Trustee of CEA).

Effective Altruism Global On 8-10 June we hosted 550 people at EA Global: San Francisco. We will be releasing videos from the sessions over the next few months, so please subscribe to our YouTube channel or like the EA Global page on Facebook for updates. The next EA Global takes place in London between 26-28 October. Apply now.

Leaders Forum The Leaders Forum, hosted by CEA immediately after EA Global, was the third annual event aimed at building collaboration and connections between EA organisations. We discussed key challenges facing effective altruism community such as how to avoid groupthink. We also shared best practices between organisations, for instance on hiring and metrics, and looked for ways to help each other out with talent gaps and other bottlenecks that organisations faced.

EA Global X Effective Altruism Netherlands hosted their first EAGx Netherlands between 29 June — 1 July featuring keynotes from William MacAskill, Natalie Cargill and Michael Plant. The next EAGx takes place in Melbourne this weekend (13—15 July). EAGx Australia is the final community-organised Effective Altruism Global conference of 2018, so in Q3 we will assess the impact of this year’s programme.

EA Handbook After helpful feedback from the community, we're making some changes to our Effective Altruism Handbook. We've already made some design changes, and we plan to add 80,000 Hours' Problem Framework, a forthcoming piece from 80,000 Hours on coordination as a community (including the portfolio approach), Sentience Institute's foundational question summaries, and David Roodman's research for GiveWell on the worm wars.

We've reached out to some of the original commenters, and some of the leading research/community building organisations in the space, asking for further comments. Thanks again to everyone who took the time to share their feedback and suggestions to improve the handbook.