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Katie previously worked at CEA and left in 2022.

Katie Glass Headshot

Katie Glass

*This post was originally published on the [EA Forum](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ZFavJNiSgvTEqYy7e/update-on-cea-s-group-support-and-effective-altruism-1).*

In this post, I want to share a brief update about additions to the Groups team at the Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA), what we are working on, and the support currently available for effective altruism groups.

[Historically](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/iBvmKaqb7YE32W5EK/local-group-support-overview-cea-eaf-and-lean), support for EA groups has been available from CEA, the Local Effective Altruism Network (LEAN), and the Effective Altruism Foundation (EAF). However, CEA has recently invested more in EA groups, and both [LEAN](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Cvi7hnTYMk5qutkDg/local-effective-altruism-network-s-new-focus-for-2019) and [EAF](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/DkQyGkPBb9yePuPjQ/effective-altruism-foundation-plans-for-2019) have moved away from direct support of group organisers in order to focus on other priorities.

Today, the Groups team consists of [Alex Barry](https://www.centreforeffectivealtruism.org/team/alex-barry/) (Groups Associate), [Harri Besceli](https://www.centreforeffectivealtruism.org/team/harri/) (Community Building Grants Specialist) and [myself](https://www.centreforeffectivealtruism.org/team/katie-glass/), Katie Glass (Head of Groups).

Our current priorities are:

**1) EA Groups Support**

We provide general support to all EA group organisers, primarily via:

- [Online resources](https://app.effectivealtruism.org/groups/resources/resources-and-support) on group strategy
- Support calls and online seminars
- Groups for organisers on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/groups/956362287803174/) and [Slack](https://join.slack.com/t/eagroups/shared_invite/enQtMzA2NDQ1NzMxOTA3LThjOGNkZTU3NTc0OTc4NmY5YjFmNjRiZmI2ZGZiNTgyYzc1NjY2N2QwYzFmNmEzNjI3NTRkNDI0ZjcyNGM3Y2I)
- [Funding](https://app.effectivealtruism.org/groups/resources/mentorship-and-funding) to cover group running expenses and projects
- Retreats, meetups at EA Global conferences, and other events
- A collection of online resources (including a [speaker list](https://drive.google.com/open?id=15nMCewsmYbBH0_e9Kc-XyLqaSkoHsAYi05Jc4tv_H80) and [retreat guide](https://drive.google.com/open?id=1tm3RaA88Pn3CsU8mM-Rh12K3gk84WvAX))
- The (now monthly!) [EA Groups newsletter](http://eepurl.com/gjm0qL), in collaboration with David Nash

We also coordinate with LEAN on projects relating to the EA Hub, such as ensuring documents from our Google Drive are added to the EA Hub’s [resources section](https://resources.eahub.org/), and maintaining an up-to-date list of groups for the [Groups Directory](https://eahub.org/groups/).

[Alex Barry](https://www.centreforeffectivealtruism.org/team/alex-barry/) is our primary point of contact for the responsibilities above. If you have questions or ideas about the support we currently offer or would like to book a call to discuss strategy or tactics for your group, feel free to reach out to him via [groups@effectivealtruism.org.](mailto:groups@effectivealtruism.org)

We also collaborate regularly with CEA’s Community Health team to provide specialised advice, support, or resources for [sensitive issues](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/hYh6jKBsKXH8mWwtc/a-contact-person-for-the-ea-community) that may come up in your group. If you’re unsure which member of staff to contact, you are always welcome to contact any member of our teams and we can direct you to the staff member who is best able to help.

**2) EA Community Building Grants**

Some EA groups are run by organisers who volunteer their time, and the Groups team is happy to support those people with the resources above. For other groups, organisers are interested in transitioning to paid community building work on a part-time or full-time basis. CEA has funds to support such transitions via the [Community Building Grants](https://www.effectivealtruism.org/community-building-grants/) programme.

In our most recent funding round of winter/spring 2019, we awarded grants to the following groups:

__New Grants:__

![New grants](//images.ctfassets.net/es8pp29e1wp8/666NwedblbojeI0S3RP2rk/c974cb2b85803b30b7f41dfe1a22082a/New_grants.png)

__Renewed Grants:__

![Renewed grants](//images.ctfassets.net/es8pp29e1wp8/6XnYauWdchHpl95BQamDRp/1325d96f63b6fddffc15a92f6ba6c8e1/Renewed_grants.png)

Our last update from January 2019 on Community Building Grants is available [here](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/HJaw4JXyyL9RDp2oy/ea-community-building-grants-applications-open). In recent months, we’ve been focused primarily on fundraising for the programme; this quarter, we will be focused on evaluating existing year-long grants for possible renewals.

We aim to open applications for new grants in Q4, though this isn’t yet confirmed and will depend in part on the outcome of our fundraising efforts. We also expect to complete a deeper review of the programme’s progress by the end of this year.

[Harri Besceli](https://www.centreforeffectivealtruism.org/team/harri/) is the project lead for Community Building Grants — if you have questions or would like to discuss whether you’d be a good fit for a community building grant, you can contact him at [harri.besceli@centreforeffectivealtruism.org](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ZFavJNiSgvTEqYy7e/harri.besceli@centreforeffectivealtruism.org).

As a team, our main goal is to ensure that our current priorities (above) are executed well. I also want to ensure that we’re gathering information to help inform our plans and engaging with the broader community about what we’re working on.

In the past month, we have collaborated with LEAN to run the [EA Groups Survey](https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/EAgroupsurvey) to help us more deeply understand the current groups landscape and ensure that we can refer people to the right place when they ask us for help connecting with effective altruists in their local communities. We had nearly 200 responses! If you’re involved in organising an EA group and haven’t already filled this in, we would still like to know more about your group — please ensure you [complete the survey](https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/EAgroupsurvey) ASAP.

As we gather more information and learn more about the needs of EA group organisers, I expect our priorities may shift, and the support the Groups team offers may evolve as a result. If you have ideas or suggestions for how we might better support EA groups, please share them [here](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSe8_v5hnCQkPA-j_ebTViT0n0XOwcEBRqLlCM2QiGVIioQYHw/viewform). I look forward to hearing from you!

Update on CEA’s group support and EA Community Building Grants

*__In summary:__ We’ve made many small operational improvements to our programs. We also reached 4,000 Giving What We Can members, passed our US audit, and received a grant from the Open Philanthropy Project.*

### CEO search

The CEO search committee is in the process of creating a short list of top CEO candidates. We expect one or more people to begin in-person trials over the next 1-2 months. If you have any questions, concerns, or feedback to share, you can email [ceosearch](mailto:ceosearch@centreforeffectivealtruism.org)[@centreforeffectivealtruism.org](mailto:ceosearch@centreforeffectivealtruism.org). 

### Hiring

We are hiring for a technical operations contractor to help with automating some of our processes (e.g. for EA Global admissions). If you know anyone suitable, please encourage them to apply.

### CEA’s current goals

During the CEO search, we’re focused on putting the new CEO in a strong position. For the most part, this means improving our projects’ core operations - automation, compliance, planning, and system-building.

For the past quarter, we have prioritised remedying existing issues with our projects. In the coming quarter, many teams are moving to a more proactive phase, focused on making improvements to our projects.

__Grants:__
-  Nicole Ross has focused on wrapping up issues related to decisions she inherited from previous rounds, as well as improving documentation and due diligence systems for EA Grants.
-  Nicole is now working to revamp internal systems and processes for EA Grants, which we hope will fix a number of issues that occurred with past grant rounds.
-  Nicole is also beginning to evaluate some new grants that are especially time-sensitive. 

__Groups:__
-  Our Community Building Grants program was the main focus for the Groups team last quarter. We assessed dozens of applications, and we improved our due diligence processes. We gave out ten grants for a total of $463,000 in our spring round. We are now working on fundraising and planning for the summer round.
-  We met our deadlines for grant decisions in all but a few especially complex cases, but there were additional cases where we didn’t pay grants by the deadline we’d promised. Corrections we plan to make:
    -  Transferring the administration of Community Building Grants to CEA’s operations team, which already administers EA Grants and grants from EA Funds
    -  Hiring a contractor to assist with grant administration (within the operations team)
    -  Adding more time for contingencies to our planned grant schedules, so that we have more flexibility and can more easily handle cases where we need to ask for more information
-  Alex Barry joined the team full-time, and has been improving our systems for basic groups funding by reducing email response times and automating more of the funding process.
-  We held a retreat for US group leaders in January. We had highly positive feedback from participants, and participants went on to start several useful collaborations as a result — for example, a guide to running “[EA Fellowships](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/suGcEobbHZZ4Gspeh/a-guide-to-effective-altruism-fellowships)” (structured discussion groups aimed at EA newcomers). The retreat also led to multiple strong grant applications from participants.

__Community health:__
-  Sky Mayhew joined the team full-time, and now works alongside Julia Wise.
-  This team’s work over the last quarter included: 
    -  Training Sky and creating systems for Sky and Julia to divide and manage work jointly
    -  Holding workshops for group organisers (both online and at the January group leaders retreat), on the topics of handling problems in EA groups and making groups more welcoming
    -  Advising groups and organisations within EA about diversity and staff well-being
    -  Responding to accusations of inappropriate behaviour against [Jacy Reese](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/8XdAvioKZjAnzbogf/apology)
    -  Providing ongoing advising to an EA group experiencing serious conflict, and consulting with other groups about recommendations for handling such conflicts
    -  Updating the admission process for EA Global and processing more than 600 applications, as well as updating the [EA Global FAQs](https://www.eaglobal.org/faqs/) to more fully explain how the application process works
    -  Writing up [CEA’s stance on diversity and inclusion](https://www.centreforeffectivealtruism.org/diversity-and-inclusion)

__EA Global:__
-  Preparation for EA Global: San Francisco is currently our main focus. We’re on track for production, have finalised the [agenda](https://sf.eaglobal.org/2019/agenda), and have now closed applications.
-  We opened applications for EA Global: San Francisco about 10 days later than we’d said we would. We apologise for any inconvenience caused by this mistake. We will not announce a date for EA Global: London applications to open until our application processing system is fully operational.
-  We are also on track for planning the Leaders’ Forum, a smaller gathering of EA organisation leaders, which follows EA Global: San Francisco.
-  EA Global: London is scheduled for 18-20 October.
-  [EAGx Nordics](https://www.eaglobal.org/events/eagx-nordics/) and [EAGx Boston](https://www.eaglobal.org/events/eagx-boston-2019/) both took place in April, with roughly 220 attendees at each event. Tickets are still available for [EAGx Australia](https://www.eagxaustralia.com/), which is taking place in Sydney on 27-29 September.

__Giving What We Can:__
-  We reached 4,000 members, and ran an event in Oxford to celebrate.
-  Our tech team has been working on improvements to the pledge-tracking dashboard.
 
__EA Forum:__
-  We’ve made improvements to the EA Forum’s code so that we can roll out improvements more quickly in the future.
-  Users continue to post on the new Forum at more than triple the rate of the old Forum. We’ve been putting a lot of effort into encouraging high-quality posts, demonstrating strong discussion norms, and providing moderation.
-  Since the last supporters’ email, we’ve awarded prizes to the authors of nine more excellent Forum posts, chosen by a panel of voters with deep experience in the EA community. Here are links to the winning posts for [January](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/k7j7oxMcHsun2nC5H/ea-forum-prize-winners-for-january-2019), [February](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/b3oTGiMpEKY4MnAEB/ea-forum-prize-winners-for-february-2019), and [March](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/bv8QGK9uPPg5fdFhk/ea-forum-prize-winners-for-march-2019).
 
__EA Funds:__ 
-  We’ve made updates to our regranting process, in particular to improve due diligence and to clarify which organisations we can legally grant to.
-  Since January, we’ve: 
    -  Regranted $5,518,000 from the four EA Funds
    -  Regranted an additional $3,464,749 to charities chosen by Funds users
    -  Received another $543,150 in grant recommendations from Fund managers, which will be paid out soon.
-  We’ve spent some time clarifying our thinking about the tradeoffs involved in making riskier/more unusual grants, as well as improving the process for publishing grant recommendations from Fund managers.

__Internal operations:__
-  We passed our US audit, made several improvements to our HR policies, held our Annual General Meeting with CEA’s trustees, and improved our grantmaking processes.
-  We have rewritten our UK staff handbook and continued to push forward moving to a new office in Oxford. We also began to outsource more of our UK bookkeeping.
-  We are in the process of hiring for a new finance lead.
-  Ops’ main focus now is on making further improvements to our grantmaking process.

### Finances

We are very grateful for a [$2.8m grant from the Open Philanthropy Project](https://www.openphilanthropy.org/giving/grants/centre-effective-altruism-general-support-2019).

We currently have runway through roughly the end of the year. We plan to fundraise for our core projects around the time that a new CEO joins CEA. We expect that a new CEO will have a lot of impact on the direction of CEA's future, and that potential donors will want to know who the new CEO is before making donation decisions.

We are currently fundraising for our [Community Building Grants](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/RZrikMAuTwt4e9Fs4/ea-community-building-grants-update) program, primarily by reaching out to past donors and others recommended to us. If you might be interested in funding this program, please email me at [max@centreforeffectivealtruism.org](mailto:max@centreforeffectivealtruism.org).

CEA update, June 2019

*__In summary:__ A committee has been formed to find CEA’s next CEO. All of our teams are currently focused on gathering user feedback and improving execution. You can apply now to attend EA Global: San Francisco and EAGx Nordics.*

## Update on the CEO search
CEA’s Trustees have appointed a committee to search for a new CEO, following the [departure](https://www.centreforeffectivealtruism.org/blog/announcing-a-change-of-leadership-at-cea/) of our previous CEO, Larissa Hesketh-Rowe. The committee currently consists of Owen Cotton-Barratt, Julia Wise, Will MacAskill, Nick Beckstead, and Jenna Peters, with Owen leading the search and Jenna serving as the project manager. Right now, they’re working on setting up the search process, consulting people with additional executive experience, and creating a list of potential candidates.

If you have any questions, concerns, or suggestions to share with the committee, please email [ceosearch@centreforeffectivealtruism.org](mailto:ceosearch@centreforeffectivealtruism.org).

## Our goals for the interim period
We don’t plan to make any major changes to CEA’s strategy during the interim period, because we want to give the new CEO the freedom to set their own priorities. We are therefore currently focusing on executing well on our current projects and commitments so that the new CEO is able to focus on strategic vision.

Here are some updates on what everyone at CEA has been working on: 

### Managers
- Developing scoreboards to track progress on our projects
- Working to improve the way we give feedback, especially by increasing its frequency and regularity

### Teams
- __All teams__ have been collecting feedback from community members involved in our various projects (e.g., the leaders of EA groups we advise, speakers at EA Global, and top contributors on the EA Forum). Staff have created detailed notes on more than 120 user conversations since the beginning of February.
- The __Community Health__ team is working to systematize Julia Wise’s work and onboard Sky Mayhew, our new Community Liaison. 
- The __Events__ team is focusing on EA Global, with a particular focus on facilitating high-value 1-on-1 conversations at the event.
- The __Groups__ team is assessing applications for [Community Building Grants](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/RZrikMAuTwt4e9Fs4/ea-community-building-grants-update).
- For __Grants__, Nicole Ross is working to improve operations, fix problems from previous rounds, and write up internal assessments of recent applications.

## General updates

- You can now read archived editions of the EA Groups Newsletter online.
- To encourage the development and sharing of good ideas, we’ve begun to award monthly cash prizes for excellent posts on the EA Forum. You can see February's winners, and links to winners from previous months, [here](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/b3oTGiMpEKY4MnAEB/ea-forum-prize-winners-for-february-2019).


CEA update, March 2019

The Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) is posting to announce that Larissa Hesketh-Rowe has agreed to step down as the CEO of CEA.

Larissa’s departure means that CEA will be conducting a search for a new CEO. In the meantime, Max Dalton, who has been leading the Content team, will serve as interim Executive Director. Larissa will provide support to help ensure a smooth transition.

This decision was made after much deliberation and consultation between Larissa, CEA’s UK trustees, CEA’s US board, and management, and we all agree that Larissa’s departure is in the best interest of CEA.

We want to thank Larissa for her service to CEA. Larissa has been a valued member of CEA for a number of years. She joined as part of the Giving What We Can team and later progressed to Head of Community (managing our Events, Local Groups, and Community teams) and then to COO. Larissa was a strong performer throughout this period, and we heard nothing but praise for her performance during her time as COO. Most recently, Larissa took on the CEO role in early 2018 at a time of significant change in the organization.

We feel that the role of CEO at CEA is an incredibly challenging one, and our expectations are very high. We are grateful to Larissa for stepping up to take it on after the departure of CEA’s previous CEO. Though we feel her departure is, in the end, the best outcome for CEA, we think she's a dedicated and capable person who has made major contributions in the past, and we look forward to her making major contributions in the future.


Announcing a change of leadership at CEA

Former staff: Sam worked as a developer on the EA Funds team. Until the end of 2020, he was CEA's Head of Tech. Before that, he worked in policy and communications roles for several high-profile Australian politicians, and was part of the team that won the 'unwinnable' 2014 South Australian state election. He studied Politics and History at the University of Adelaide, and has nearly a decade of experience as a web developer.

[sam@centreforeffectivealtruism.org](mailto:sam@centreforeffectivealtruism.org)

DSC03906 -Sam - 2880

Sam Deere

It has come to our attention that the public source of randomness used to draw [the EffectiveAltruism.org donor lottery](https://app.effectivealtruism.org/lotteries) — the [NIST Randomness Beacon](https://www.nist.gov/programs-projects/nist-randomness-beacon) — is not currently operating due to the ongoing US government shutdown. This means our regular method of drawing winning numbers is unavailable.

There have been several alternative methods suggested for a good public source of randomness. After careful deliberation, we have chosen to use the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology (IRIS) list of earthquakes as a randomness source. The data includes a range of numbers that will be impossible to predict in advance, including the latitude, longitude, magnitude, and depth of the earthquake.

We will choose the first earthquake appearing on this [list of large earthquakes](http://ds.iris.edu/seismon/eventlist/) with a timestamp immediately after the lottery draw date.

Specifically, we will:

*   Take the numeric digits in order from the text-formatted response of the IRIS API for the relevant earthquake ID ([example response](http://service.iris.edu/fdsnws/event/1/query?eventid=10998539&format=text))
*   Calculate the [SHA256 hash](https://komodoplatform.com/cryptographic-hash-function/) of the resulting string of digits
*   Use the first 10 hexadecimal digits of the resulting SHA256 hash as the winning number

We will do the drawing at least 24 hours after the draw date to ensure that IRIS has had time to process incoming data.

There are two lotteries up for drawing ($100k and $500k), currently with draw times staggered by five minutes. In order to ensure there are two separate drawings, we will reset their draw timestamps to be identical, and then use the first _two_ earthquake events appearing on the list after that timestamp as follows:

*   First earthquake: $100k donor lottery (ID [63715163508812](https://app.effectivealtruism.org/lotteries/63715163508812))
*   Second earthquake: $500k donor lottery (ID [63715163508813](https://app.effectivealtruism.org/lotteries/63715163508813))

## Worked Example

Let’s assume that the donor lotteries in question closed at midnight on January 23, 2019\. The two earthquake events immediately after this timestamp are [10998501](http://ds.iris.edu/ds/nodes/dmc/tools/event/10998501) and [10998539](http://ds.iris.edu/ds/nodes/dmc/tools/event/10998539) respectively.

*   The ordered digits from [the API response for the first earthquake](http://service.iris.edu/fdsnws/event/1/query?eventid=10998501&format=text) are `1099850120190123013843145727667721002000743`
*   The SHA256 hash of these characters is `3914a0a9b27a061c620ee651f417c4d211b218c41c089c96c8b9ad567d8c`
*   The first 10 hexadecimal characters of the hash are `3914a0a9b2`, which is `245159209394` in decimal
*   Therefore `245159209394` is the winning number for the first ($100k) lottery!
*   Repeating the process for the second number gives a winning number for the second ($500k) lottery of `df4ceccb88`/`959068294024`

## Reference implementation

The following bash script illustrates the process for generating the hashes:

```sh
#!/bin/bash  

#  Bash script for calculating the winning lottery number using earthquake  
#  data from IRIS (Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology).  
#  
#  Usage:  
#         ./draw_lottery_iris.sh iris_id  
#   e.g.  ./draw_lottery_iris.sh 10998811  
#  
#  The script works as follows:  
#  - get the request from the IRIS server for the relevant event  
#  - trim newlines from the response  
#  - strip the response to just the numeric digits  
#  - get the SHA256 hash of the digit string in binary  
#  - cast the binary hash to a hexdump (only keeping the first line)  
#  - truncate the hash to its first 10 characters  

EVENT_ID=$1  

curl -s "http://service.iris.edu/fdsnws/event/1/query?eventid=$EVENT_ID&format=text" \  
 | tr -d '\n' \  
 | awk '{gsub(/[^0-9]/,"")}1' \  
 | openssl dgst -sha256 -binary \  
 | xxd -p | head -n 1 \  
 | cut -c -10
```

## Further info

If you have any more questions, please [comment on the Effective Altruism Forum](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ut29rXvY9hAGgatNR/announcing-an-updated-drawing-protocol-for-the).

Announcing an updated drawing protocol for the EffectiveAltruism.org donor lotteries

__Update (30 April 2019):__ We previously stated in this post that we planned to post a review of our work in 2018 and plans for 2019 “early [in 2019].” Because of our leadership change early in 2019, these plans were delayed, and we aren’t certain whether we’ll publish those materials this year. If we don’t release a full 2018 review, we may still release reports on individual projects.

Meanwhile, if you have any questions about our work, please reach out to [Ben West](mailto:ben.west@centreforeffectivealtruism.org), our Head of Community and Outreach. 

--

CEA is fundraising for 2019.

This post gives an overview of who we are, what we do, and the projects for which we are raising funds.

We’d really value feedback from anyone who reads this and has thoughts on our recent work, our plans, or our general strategy. Please add your comments to this post. If you’d prefer they not be public, you can submit them through [this survey](https://cea-core.typeform.com/to/MKJKx9) or send them to [Ben West](mailto:ben.west@centreforeffectivealtruism.org), who is currently gathering feedback from the community about CEA.

[toc]

## What is CEA?

CEA exists to help the effective altruism community coordinate and tackle pressing problems in the world.

[Our beliefs](https://www.centreforeffectivealtruism.org/strategy/):

*   We want to improve the world as much as possible, both now and in the future.
*   To do this, we’ll need to figure out which problems we should solve, prioritize the most important ones, and then work together on the solutions.

This requires a community of people who have diverse backgrounds and skills, but also have two things in common: They care a lot about helping others, and they want to use evidence and reason to learn how to help as effectively as possible.

In the last decade, this community has grown from a few dozen people to thousands. Collectively, its members have [pledged over 1.5 billion dollars to charity](https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/) and produced substantial progress in multiple academic fields.

We think this is an outstanding start — but it’s only the beginning. CEA wants to help effective altruism reach its full potential by helping people who are interested in these ideas to learn new things, gain skills, and take action, so that together we can build on the movement’s intellectual foundations and make progress on the problems we’ve prioritized.

## What Does CEA Do?

In order to make progress, the EA community will need important ideas, talented and dedicated people, and the necessary funding for those people to take action.

Crucially, these elements need to be [extremely well-coordinated](https://80000hours.org/articles/coordination/), so that we can work together to do as much good as possible. This is where CEA comes in.
 
__Funding effective work__

We coordinate donations through [Effective Altruism Funds](https://app.effectivealtruism.org/funds) (which helps donors pool their money and have grantmaking teams work out where it can best be spent) and the [Giving What We Can](https://givingwhatwecan.org/) community (which encourages people to give 10% of their income to effective charities). We also allocate funding to promising projects and groups through [Effective Altruism Grants](https://www.effectivealtruism.org/grants/) and [EA Community Building Grants](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/6kFcr6L2jZhcsZnao/announcing-effective-altruism-community-building-grants).


__Sharing important ideas__

We help people get up to speed and contribute to the community’s ideas via the [Effective Altruism Forum](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/wrPacgwp3DsSJYbce/why-the-ea-forum) and content on [effectivealtruism.org](https://www.effectivealtruism.org/) (a collection of high-quality articles, including an [introduction to EA](https://www.effectivealtruism.org/articles/introduction-to-effective-altruism/) that reached over 50,000 readers this year). We also share content using social media, recordings of EA speakers, and the [Effective Altruism Newsletter](https://www.effectivealtruism.org/ea-newsletter-archives/).

__Bringing people together__

Finally, we help people coordinate with one another through events and group support.

__Events:__ We organize large [EA Global](https://www.eaglobal.org/) conferences and support volunteer-run [EAGx](https://www.eaglobal.org/eagx/) conferences around the world, so that people can meet and discuss ideas with others interested in effective altruism. (Over 1200 people attended EA Global in SF or London this year, and three EAGx conferences each drew more than 100 people.) We also run small, targeted events to help people with particular skills and interests find ways to work on high-impact activities.

__Groups:__ We offer effective altruism groups around the world a set of [models and plans](https://app.effectivealtruism.org/groups/resources/resources-and-support), as well as funding to implement them, saving them from having to reinvent the wheel. And Julia Wise, our Community Liaison, serves as a [contact person](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/hYh6jKBsKXH8mWwtc/a-contact-person-for-the-ea-community) for the community, providing advice and support to groups and individuals.

* * *

We’ve come to focus on coordination after spending years on refining our strategy, testing new ideas, and developing our beliefs about [the best ways to build a thriving community](https://www.centreforeffectivealtruism.org/models-of-community-building/). We’re still learning, and as such, we’ve [made mistakes](https://www.centreforeffectivealtruism.org/our-mistakes/) over the years. We’re aiming to share more of our thinking so we can get feedback from the community; we encourage you to complete our [feedback survey](https://cea-core.typeform.com/to/MKJKx9) or reach out to [Ben West](mailto:ben.west@centreforeffectivealtruism.org) if you have any thoughts.

## Recent Work and Future Plans

We planned for 2018 and 2019 using the [funnel model](https://www.centreforeffectivealtruism.org/the-funnel-model), which helps us understand the paths people take to become more engaged in the community.

In 2018, we focused on the bottom of the funnel. While we continued our existing projects with a wide audience (e.g. the EA Newsletter), we especially aimed to support the “[core](https://www.centreforeffectivealtruism.org/the-concentric-circles-model)” and “[contributor](https://www.centreforeffectivealtruism.org/the-concentric-circles-model)” segments of the community.

This meant supporting people who already understood many of the ideas of EA and were dedicating a lot of their time or money to EA projects, so they could improve their plans or begin to work full-time on the world’s most pressing problems. For example, they might [take a job at a high-impact organization](https://80000hours.org/articles/operations-management/) or [get funding to pursue a new research project](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/6kFcr6L2jZhcsZnao/announcing-effective-altruism-community-building-grants).

Here are some of the ways we did this:

*   We made 22 [EA Community Building Grants](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/6kFcr6L2jZhcsZnao/announcing-effective-altruism-community-building-grants) to individuals and groups, and funded 22 other projects through EA Grants, including the [All-Party Parliamentary Group for Future Generations](https://appgfuturegenerations.com/) (which is building support for long-termist ideas within the UK Parliament) and the work of a researcher who is advising philanthropists on tens of millions of dollars in donations. We also ran a [second round of public grant applications](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/nstKfMKh36Xdjsezm/ea-grants-applications-are-now-open), which closed in October.
*   We ran a series of retreats, including events aimed at local group leaders, artificial intelligence researchers, and community members with an interest in operations work. These were quite impactful: for example, the operations retreat led to CEA’s hiring two people who would otherwise have been unlikely to join, and several attendees found work at other EA organizations.

The year’s other accomplishments include:

*   [Launching the new Effective Altruism Forum](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/h26Kx7uGfQfNewi7d/welcome-to-the-new-forum).
*   [Selecting new management teams](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/yYHKRgLk9ufjJZn23/announcing-new-ea-funds-management-teams) for Effective Altruism Funds.
*   Redesigning our [YouTube channel](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEfASxwPxzsHlG5Rf1-4K9w) and video release process, which has nearly doubled monthly viewing time of recorded talks from EA Global.
*   Running an extremely successful hiring round, which brought in six new full-time staffers to start between October and December.

* * *

In 2019, we want to keep working at the bottom of the funnel, while also expanding our support to more of the community. This will mean finding people in the “[participant](https://www.centreforeffectivealtruism.org/the-concentric-circles-model)” segment who have started to engage (perhaps by taking the Try Giving pledge, attending an EAGx conference, or getting involved with an EA group) and helping them take the next steps.

A few of our projects which align with this strategy:

*   We now have two additional staff working on student, city, and national EA groups, allowing us to provide more support.
*   We are considering expanding the EA Community Building Grants Program to fund the work of more group organizers.
*   We may publish a collection of curated articles on the EA Forum, as a systematic way of introducing newer community members to core concepts.

## Budget Summary and Fundraising

Our core budget for 2019 is $5M. This goes toward the activities described above, as well as staff salaries, contractors, professional services (e.g. lawyers and accountants), office space, and other business expenses.

Our 2018 core budget was $4M. This year’s increase is primarily due to two factors:

1.  Increased headcount: CEA’s team grew from 17 people to 20 this year, and we aim to make several more hires in 2019, including an additional developer, and someone to work with Julia Wise on community health.
2.  A new office: Next year, our UK team is moving to a better space, which will improve productivity, support future expansion, and allow us to continue sharing an office with the [Future of Humanity Institute](https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/) and [Global Priorities Institute](https://globalprioritiesinstitute.org/). This expense is unusually large in 2019 because it includes moving costs and a one-year rental deposit.

We also have a regranting budget of $3.7M for EA Grants and EA Community Building Grants, which we use to fund other organizations, projects, individuals, and groups.

We are seeking to raise $3M over the next couple of months.

__Update (21 May 2019):__ We previously stated in this post that we planned to “run a separate fundraising campaign for both grant programs after we complete an impact review for them in the first half of 2019”.

We now expect that the impact review will not be completed in the first half of 2019. We plan to fundraise for Community Building Grants but not EA Grants during 2019.

## How to Donate

You can donate to CEA, or (separately) to EA Grants or EA Community Building Grants, through [Effective Altruism Funds](https://app.effectivealtruism.org/funds).

We accept donations via credit/debit card, bank transfer, check (US), or GoCardless direct debit (UK). If you have any questions or specific needs, please [get in touch](mailto:development@centreforeffectivealtruism.org) to discuss your situation.

[Donate Now](https://app.effectivealtruism.org/donations/new?utm_source=centreforeffectivealtruism.org&utm_medium=partner_charity&utm_campaign=partner_charity_donations&allocation[centre-for-effective-altruism]=100&allocation[80000-hours]=0){.btn .btn-primary .btn-large target=_blank} {.center}

Donations to CEA will be split between our projects, depending on where they will do the most good. We deeply appreciate your support.

## Conclusion

Once again, we’d be happy to answer questions about our budget and fundraising plans, or any other content in this post.

If you'd like to reach out, you can: send comments and feedback to [Ben West](mailto:ben.west@centreforeffectivealtruism.org) or use our [feedback survey](https://cea-core.typeform.com/to/MKJKx9).

If you want to be alerted when we release our 2018 review and plans for 2019, you can [subscribe to CEA’s monthly email update](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfw3ynSmUgSnXPQkkxGq6NhPeUFQl8kRUBFpektLnzuLnQvlg/viewform).

You can also [read our past monthly updates](https://www.centreforeffectivealtruism.org/tags/supporters-email/), or read our [2017 review and plans for 2018](https://www.centreforeffectivealtruism.org/blog/cea-s-2017-review-and-2018-plans/) to see how our work has evolved in the last year.

CEA is fundraising for 2019

*In summary: Since our last update, we’ve been focused on setting our Q4 priorities, launching the new EA Forum, running EA Global: London, and evaluating EA Grants applications. We are also wrapping up our hiring round and have six new staff to announce!*

## CEA priorities this quarter
At our October team retreat, we reviewed our progress on our two-year plan to:

1.  Solidify our support to [core](https://www.centreforeffectivealtruism.org/the-concentric-circles-model) members of the EA community this year;
2.  Expand support up the [funnel](https://www.centreforeffectivealtruism.org/the-funnel-model/) to contributors and participants in 2019.

In Q3, we made significant progress on our plan by hiring to expand our capacity and by advancing key projects like EA Grants and the EA Forum. Updates about those projects are below.

In Q4, our focus is “review and adjust.” Our goal is to learn from what we did in 2018 and apply that to improving projects in 2019, particularly with an eye toward moving up the funnel. Throughout the quarter, we will work on measuring impact, developing feedback loops, and identifying opportunities to improve and scale projects in 2019.

## EA Forum
After months of preparation and beta testing, we launched the new [EA Forum](http://forum.effectivealtruism.org)! We hope the new Forum will become the EA community’s online hub for figuring out how to do the most good. In recent posts, [Max Dalton](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/wrPacgwp3DsSJYbce/why-the-ea-forum) described how the Forum can foster the intellectual progress of the community, and [Aaron Gertler](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/dMJ475rYzEaSvGDgP/what-s-changing-with-the-new-forum) laid out the new features designed to improve Forum users’ experiences. We encourage you to write, cross-post, and comment, and to contact the moderation team ([forum@effectivealtruism.org](mailto:forum@effectivealtruism.org)) with questions or feedback.

## EA Grants
Last quarter, we re-opened EA Grants to the public in order to find more people with promising ideas to fund. The most recent [round](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/nstKfMKh36Xdjsezm/ea-grants-applications-are-now-open) of EA Grants applications closed in October. After our initial review, we asked a subset of applicants to complete more detailed proposals. CEA staff are reviewing these proposals and starting interviews this month. 

We’re excited to have Nicole Ross join our team in December to run EA Grants full-time. Nicole comes to CEA from the Open Philanthropy Project, where she is currently completing their Fall Research Analyst programme and gathering feedback on EA Grants. We’re looking forward to Nicole’s ideas for the programme.

## Hiring at CEA
One of CEA’s main focuses last quarter was hiring. Whilst we are still wrapping up this process, we have six new staff joining us for three-month trials!

*   Aaron Gertler - Content Writer. Aaron is joining our Content Team to manage the EA Newsletter and write content for CEA’s websites and the EA Forum.
*   Alex Barry - Community Specialist. Alex is adding capacity to our Events, Groups, and Grants Team to allow us to support more EA groups and better measure our impact.
*   Ben West - Analyst, Executive Office. Ben is improving systems like our CRM, as well as providing advice to managers and helping with fundraising.
*   Davis Kingsley - Events Specialist. Davis is taking on managing our individual outreach retreats.
*   Josh Axford - UK Operations Specialist. Josh replaces our previous UK Operations Specialist and is working to improve CEA UK’s systems and day-to-day operations.
*   Nicole Ross - EA Grants Evaluator. Nicole will work on evaluating applications for EA Grants and managing the EA Grants programme.

We are excited about how each of these new team members can contribute to CEA’s work building and supporting the EA community. You can read more about our new staff on CEA’s [Team](https://www.centreforeffectivealtruism.org/team/) page.

## Events
__EA Global: London__
More than 600 attendees, including 40+ speakers, gathered for EA Global: London, which had the theme “Doing Good Globally.” Will MacAskill, Kerry Vaughan, and I delivered the opening and closing talks about topics including the global reach of EA, coordinating the EA community, and improving community culture.

CEA update, October/November 2018

*This post originally appeared on the [EA Forum](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/RZrikMAuTwt4e9Fs4/ea-community-building-grants-update).*

Effective Altruism Community Building Grants is a project run by the Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA), providing grants of between $5,000 and $100,000 to individuals and groups doing local effective altruism community building for the academic year of 2018-19. We believe this could be a high-impact project for the EA community in the long term, because it is a way in which we can increase the time and effort that goes into EA community building.

This post is an update on how the project is going so far, including an overview of the application process, the grants we’ve made, our evaluation criteria, and our plans for the future.

## Background

Effective altruism groups are an integral part of the EA community and have played a central role in helping the community achieve many of its aims. They direct funds to effective causes, influence people’s career trajectories (including placing people in high-impact organisations), contribute to the intellectual progress of the community, and help to shape EA culture.

The goal of Community Building Grants is to scale the impact of high-potential effective altruism groups by increasing their organisational capacity. We expect this to have a number of beneficial effects, but we see a key benefit being the empowerment of group members to work on the world’s most important problems. We also expect Community Building Grants to enable group organisers to better coordinate and support each other, to pursue valuable projects outside the scope of EA community building, and to more more effectively disseminate a high-fidelity understanding of effective altruism.

This is a new project for CEA, and we see it as a way of testing the hypothesis that we can have a major impact by providing significant funding to effective altruism groups. If we judge EA Community Building Grants to have been successful, we intend to expand the project and the amount of funding allocated to it. Because the project is new, we’re also in the process of resolving any kinks, and we expect to continue to tweak the process as we learn more about how to execute it effectively.

To read more about EA Community Building Grants and the core rationale for the project, see this [announcement post](https://www.centreforeffectivealtruism.org/blog/announcing-effective-altruism-community-building-grants/).

## Application Process

The grants were advertised in March, in the aforementioned announcement post. Applicants could apply as individuals or with a joint application. Applicants who passed the first interview stage were then interviewed by Harri Besceli, with Kerry Vaughan monitoring the interview process during April and May. After the interviews, final decisions were made by June. Applicants also nominated referees who were asked to provide a reference in borderline cases.

## Evaluation Criteria

The three main criteria used to assess applications were:

- The applicant's skillset and general ability
- Applicant understanding of and engagement with effective altruism and effective altruism community building
- The future potential of the effective altruism group (where relevant)

Applicants were scored on all three criteria, and the scores were combined (using equal weighting) to create an overall rating of the application. This was a key input in the decision process, but did not solely determine the final decisions.

## Grant Offers

Since the programme launched in March, we've made 22 grant offers for a total of $623,000, almost all of which were meant to enable group organisers to work full- or part-time on organising their effective altruism group.

Of the 22 offers made, 18 will fund individuals directly working on their effective altruism group, and 4 will fund either a specific project or a group's general expenses. The table below lists the grants made, the number of people who will be working part- or full-time as a result of the grants, and the length of the grant period. The majority of the grant periods started at the beginning of this month. A small number of applications to the programme were referred to EA Grants for evaluation, and aren’t included below.

![EA CBGs](//images.ctfassets.net/es8pp29e1wp8/dV53swOLOyEDprDYwb3lY/717d97c538c6df6c3beab63fedd516c4/EA_CBGs.png)

We ultimately granted significantly more funding than we expected to. This was largely due to the quality of applicants exceeding our expectations, but also because we concluded that the potential for harmful indirect effects was smaller than we previously thought.

## Support

Recipients of EA community grants will largely work independently from and autonomously to CEA. The main support offered is regular calls with CEA staff, a private Slack channel, and a retreat which took place in September (hosted and co-organised by the Czech Association for Effective Altruism). The structure and extent of support for grantees is something that we intend to experiment with significantly over the duration of the grant period.

## Evaluation

Evaluating the impact of groups is challenging, because they provide a complex mix of direct and indirect benefits to both individuals and the wider EA community. Our goals in designing an evaluation process for EA community grants were to:

- Give groups clear guidance on what would cause us to evaluate their activities favourably.
- Make it easy for the EA community and potential funders to understand and evaluate the success of each grant.
- Provide sufficient evidence of the value produced to enable CEA to make well-informed decisions on whether to renew funding for given groups, and whether to scale up the programme.
- Avoid incentivising groups to optimise for our metrics rather than for what is actually highest-impact.
- Minimise the time cost to CEA and to groups in evaluating their results.

On the basis of these criteria, we’ve chosen to evaluate the success of grants primarily by assessing outcomes pertaining to influencing the career trajectories of their members, but also by taking into account how groups are good representatives of the EA community and by evaluating other valuable outcomes on a case-by-case basis.

The primary metric used to assess grants at the end of the first year is the number of group members who apply for internships or graduate programmes in priority areas and reach at least the interview stage. For subsequent years, the primary metric used to assess the grants is the number of group members who go on to work in priority areas.

We have chosen to prioritise career-related outcomes because we believe that this will track a key source of the community grants' value, and because we feel like we have a reasonable understanding of the value of these kinds of outcomes. Though career-related outcomes will be a useful proxy for success, it’s worth emphasising that we don’t expect them to capture all of the value that the groups produce. However, we feel it is important to have concrete metrics for our projects, especially ones that require a lot of people’s time and money.

We used the [80,000 Hours list of priority paths](https://80000hours.org/articles/high-impact-careers/#our-list-of-priority-paths) as the basis for our list of accredited roles, but expanded it to be somewhat broader. The areas and roles that we intend to accredit are still being decided upon, and we expect the number of accredited roles and areas to increase in the future. We’ve chosen a relatively restricted set of criteria for the time being, as we think the costs to later restricting the criteria will be significantly higher than the costs of expanding them.

A general expectation of all grantees and a necessary condition for receiving further funding is that they abide by [CEA’s Guiding Principles of Effective Altruism](https://www.centreforeffectivealtruism.org/ceas-guiding-principles/) and act as good representatives of the EA community. By this, we mean that we expect the indirect effects of grantees to the community to be positive, both on the public perception of effective altruism and on the cultural norms of the effective altruism community.

Beyond career-related outcomes, we will encourage grantees to submit other outcomes that they’ve produced, which we can evaluate on a case-by-case basis. Such outcomes could include career-related outcomes not previously specified or non-career related outcomes, such as supporting other EA Groups, influencing donations, etc. This is in part intended to minimise the potential of creating adverse incentives, and to help us better understand the value created by grantees for future evaluation rounds.

We are aware of how focusing on career-related outcomes could have negative effects. For example, we could disincentivise valuable activities because they don’t count towards the success criteria. These activities could include:

- Having people enter the priority area where they will have the highest expected impact (rather than the one where they have the highest chance of ‘success’);
- Helping promote good epistemic norms and considerate culture so that people entering these areas will have larger positive externalities than otherwise;
- Helping out other EA groups, with information and shared best practices.

We could also incentivise suboptimal or harmful activities because they do count towards the success criteria. For example:

- People pushing group members to apply for a priority position even if it isn't a good fit for them
- The use of potentially harmful strategies such as large-scale outreach in order to achieve the success conditions
- Distorting grantees' thinking by encouraging them to believe that career changes are the most important thing to work on, and not to question the metric (even if they acquire evidence that ought to make them question it)

We hope to avoid these negative effects by providing after-the-fact assignment of credit for outcomes outside the scope of the primary success criteria, and by emphasising the criterion of ‘being a good representative of EA’.

We recognise that these measures may be imperfect, and we may seek to make improvements to future evaluation criteria based on our mid-term review of current grantees’ reported outcomes.

## Future Plans

CEA will run additional, smaller grant rouns in January 2019 and in the summer of 2019.

Prior to the summer 2019 funding round, we’ll evaluate the grants provided so far. If we judge specific EA Community Building Grants to be successful, we’ll renew the funding provided to those groups in the funding round. If we judge any groups to have been particularly successful, we may provide grants for time periods longer than a year. Additionally, if we judge the process as a whole to have been successful, we may expand the number of groups we fund.

Given that EA Community Grants is in its first iteration, it is difficult to make strong predictions about its impact. However, one vision of the EA community building landscape within a few years’ time could involve:

- The equivalent of 50 full-time people doing local EA community building
- Full-time EA community builders in the majority of (but not restricted to) ~15 major universities and cities in Europe and North America
- 5 national or regional EA organisations, employing a handful of people working on both EA community building and ‘direct’ projects
- 5 people working on supporting and coordinating EA Community Grantees, providing a combination of retreats, conferences, training, mentorship, online infrastructure, etc.
- 100+ EA group members going into high-priority positions each year

If you’d like to support EA Community Building Grants, you can do so [here](https://app.effectivealtruism.org/donations/new/allocation?allocation[community-building-grants]=100). 

If you have any questions relating to EA Community Grants, please contact [groups@effectivealtruism.org](mailto:groups@effectivealtruism.org).

EA Community Building Grants update

I’m announcing that the Centre for Effective Altruism’s (CEA) EA Grants project has now been reopened for public applications. If you have a project that you think is worth funding, you can [fill out our short application here](https://cea-core.typeform.com/to/M1FttK?r=forum). Applications close on Sunday, October 14. We expect to run regular rounds of public EA Grant applications like this. We expect the next round after this one to be early next year but we want to review lessons from this round before committing to a date.

CEA’s mission is to build the EA community because we believe that a community of capable, dedicated, and altruistic people can make real progress on some of the world’s most significant problems. As part of this work, we look for ways to help coordinate the distribution of resources to the places in the community where they will have the highest impact. In many cases, people in this community have ideas for promising projects but lack sufficient access to funding to pursue their ideas. The goal of EA Grants is to find and support these kinds of projects.

Below I explain the current status of EA Grants, the application process, our evaluation criteria and what kinds of projects should apply.

## Current status of EA Grants
We ran our first public round of EA Grants in the summer of 2017 and distributed around £500,000. In total this consumed ~800 hours of staff time. At its peak, EA Grants required three staff members working on it on a roughly full time basis. After the initial EA Grants round we concluded that we would likely want to run a similar project again in the future, preferably at a lower staff time cost than the previous round. You can read a review of that round [here](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/ea/1fc/effective_altruism_grants_project_update/).

We had planned to open a public round of Grants in early 2018, but realized we did not have the staff capacity to process the number of applications we expected. We elected to devote staff time to launching [EA Community Building Grants](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/ea/1l3/announcing_effective_altruism_community_building/) and to launching our individual outreach retreats (such as our Operations Forum) instead of devoting that time to reopening EA Grants for public applications. When we began our hiring round in the summer we then advertised for someone to take on our [EA Grants Evaluator](https://www.centreforeffectivealtruism.org/careers/ea-grants-evaluator/) role full time. As a stop-gap measure we decided to evaluate EA Grants on a referral basis, and we distributed links to the application form to some members of the EA community whose judgement we trust. This had the benefit of meaning we had to review fewer applications and so could run the project with less staff capacity.

Through the referral process, we’ve agreed to fund 22 grants for a total of ~$850,000, using substantially less staff time than the 2017 EA Grants round. However, the referral system has the significant downside of making it less likely that we encounter projects from people outside of our networks. It also meant that some potentially promising applicants may have failed to develop projects that would have been good candidates for EA Grants funding, because they didn’t know that EA Grants funding was still available.

Our ultimate goal is to keep EA Grants open for anyone to apply on an ongoing basis. We’re currently looking to hire an EA Grants Evaluator to oversee the evaluation process and to give us enough capacity to reliably keep EA Grants open for applications. However, even with a full time EA Grants Evaluator on staff, when we reopen EA Grants to the public, we expect to get an initial surge of applications that might prove too much for us to evaluate in a timely manner.

To deal with this concern and to accelerate the timeline for a public EA Grants application, we’ve decided to open EA Grants to the public, but to restrict the number of applications that move from the first stage of the evaluation process (the short application) to the second stage of the process (the long application) to 100. This should ensure that we don’t end up with more applications than we can evaluate in a timely manner. We plan to notify applicants that we suspect might have advanced without the restriction and ask them to reapply at a later date.

## What happens when I apply?
The application process for EA Grants now has five basic stages:
1. Short application
2. Long application
3. Reference check
4. Interview
5. Final decision

Applications are open now and will close on Sunday, October 14. We expect to begin evaluating applications before the application period ends, so it’s advantageous to submit your application sooner rather than later.

Between October 19 and 26, we will notify the top 100 applicants and ask them to complete our long application. As mentioned above, we’re restricting the number of applications that we evaluate further to ensure that we have sufficient capacity to perform the evaluations. This means that we expect to reject some applicants who we think might have been plausible candidates for funding after further evaluation. After the long application we will select the top applicants for interviews, reference checks and, potentially, funding. Given the stages required to assess grant applications, we expect to make final decisions in early December. We’ll keep applicants up to date on the progress of their application by email.

## Changes from the previous EA Grants round
The biggest change over the 2017 round is that we broke up the application form into two stages: the short application and the long application. In the 2017 round, we noticed that many of the applications could be rejected after a brief review because they weren’t focused on a plausibly high priority area or because the applicant lacked any signs of alignment with EA values. We also suspect that some plausible applicants failed to apply because the application form was particularly daunting to complete.

The short application is designed to give us enough information to determine if an application is plausible. For applications that aren’t plausible, the short application reduces the time they spend on applying for an EA Grant. For applications that are plausible, the short application allows us to send a positive signal about the application before asking the applicant to spend more time on the application process. For the current application round, the number of applicants that can be moved to the long application will be restricted to 100, but in the future we plan to accept all applications that seem to be above our funding bar.

We’ve also added a request for three references to the long application. We’ll email each reference once the application is complete and ask them to fill out a brief survey about their relationship to the applicant. In particularly close funding decisions we may also call the references.

## Evaluation criteria
EA Grants applications are challenging to evaluate. We accept applications in any cause area, and we accept requests for many different types of projects and funding amounts ranging from requests for a few thousand dollars to travel to a conference to requests for a hundred thousand dollars to start a new organization. In addition, because the average amount of funding requested is small, it often doesn’t make sense to spend as much time as we’d like on evaluating each request.

The wide range of possible projects means that we expect to use somewhat different evaluation criteria for different types of projects, and that we expect to evaluate larger funding requests much more thoroughly than smaller funding requests. However, we expect the basic evaluation framework to remain similar across projects.

Roughly speaking, we evaluate projects on the basis of three key questions.

*How valuable is this project?*

First, we look at how valuable the project is likely to be if it goes well. Roughly speaking there are three ways a project can go well: (1) the project itself produces some positive result; (2) the person running the project gains some valuable skills or experience; (3) some useful knowledge is created as a result of the project.

Ideally projects produce value along multiple dimensions, but we’re open to funding projects that produce value only on one dimension. For example, we may sometimes choose to fund projects where we are unsure of the object-level value of the project, if we think the project will produce useful knowledge for the community. While we didn’t fund this particular project, an example of a past project we consider worthwhile for the information it produced was Charity Science’s [early work on grantwriting for effective charities](http://www.charityscience.com/operations-details/6-month-review-of-the-grant-writing-experiment), which did not achieve its goal of raising funds but did provide useful information to other EAs about whether grantwriting on behalf of other organizations was a viable project.

*Is this person well-suited to this project?*

We also look at whether the applicant is a good person to run the project. This breaks down into whether this is a good person to run an EA Grants project in general, and whether they seem suited to this particular project.

The general characteristics we look for in EA Grants applications are understanding of, and commitment to, the principles of effective altruism, demonstrated ability and drive, demonstrated ability to run projects autonomously, and overall good judgement. For evaluating fit between the applicant and a particular project, we look for evidence that the applicant has the skills and knowledge likely to be necessary to complete it.

*What happens otherwise?*

Finally, we attempt to roughly figure out the counterfactuals to us funding the project. In particular, we look at what the person would do if the project isn’t funded and whether they’d be able to access funding without our assistance. If we think that a person’s alternative plans are better than the project, then we may discuss that with the applicant. If we think the applicant can raise money easily from other sources, we may encourage them to do that instead.

Asking what happens otherwise should also predispose us in favor of funding people that are less well known in the EA community or funding projects that fall outside of established cause areas, as these projects are significantly less likely to be funded otherwise.

## What kinds of projects should apply?
EA Grants has an intentionally broad mandate. We’re open to funding any project in any cause area. We expect to mostly fund less-established projects without easy access to other funding sources and we generally expect to commit less than $130,000 per project, although we may make exceptions in some cases.

One area we’re not currently funding is directly covering tuition expenses for people who want to go to grad school, although we are willing to fund related expenses, like living expenses to take a high-impact internship. 

The projects that we funded in 2017 are [available here](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/1/d/1iBy--zMyIiTgybYRUQZIm11WKGQZcixaCmIaysRmGvk/edit?usp=sharing). Some example projects that we’ve funded more recently include:
- Funding for a project working on productivity coaching for EAs
- Funding for some recent graduates to spend 6 months working out what cause area they should work on by working on some short independent projects.
- Funding to help a researcher transition from traditional political science into AI politics and strategy.
- Funding to support Charity Entrepreneurship in creating new high-impact charities.
- Funding for research on the psychology of effective and ineffective altruism.

If you have a project that you think is worth funding, you can [fill out our short application here](https://cea-core.typeform.com/to/M1FttK?r=forum).

EA Grants applications are now open

Julia is one of the [contact people](https://www.centreforeffectivealtruism.org/community-health/contact-us) when community members find themselves in challenging situations. She writes about effective altruism, parenting, and other topics at [Otherwise](https://juliawise.net/). She was president of Giving What We Can from 2017-2020. Before joining CEA, Julia was a social worker, and studied sociology at Bryn Mawr College.

You can contact Julia via [this form](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScWtG3hNhdzSpVSAEHmpEz7mjlvoRhqch8hsFF2lKJX8dzrvw/viewform) (you'll be anonymous by default).

julia.wise@centreforeffectivealtruism.org

Community Liaison

Julia Wise headshot

Julia Wise

CEA is making more concrete plans for the opening of the new EA Forum, and we wanted to let users know about the next steps. Please see our prior post about [updating the Forum](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/ea/1qv/ea_forum_20_initial_announcement/) for more background.

Our vision is that the Forum becomes the main hub for content and discussion in the community. We’d like this to be a place where community members can come to see all the key thinking happening in EA, as well as sharing their ideas with others.

## Prizes
CEA is planning to fund monthly cash prizes for the best content published on the EA Forum. (We commit to doing this for at least the first 3 months.) The first prize will be $1000, second $500, and third $200. The winning posts will be determined by a vote of the moderators (Max Dalton, Howie Lempel, Denise Melchin, and Julia Wise) and the current top three Forum users (Peter Hurford, Joey Savoie, and Rob Wiblin).

## Sequences
The new Forum will feature sequences of posts on particular themes or topics. You can see something similar in the “Recommended Reading” section of the [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/) site.

We think it’s important to encourage new users to engage with some core content when they first visit the site, so that they have more context for whatever is currently being discussed. We also think it’s helpful to have some core content that most people in the community will have read, in order to create common knowledge that can be built on in discussion and debate.

We are assembling some sequences to introduce core ideas of EA. While we’ll choose a few main sequences to feature, users will also be able to put together their own sequences.

## Cross-posting from personal blogs
We can set up automatic cross-posting to the EA Forum from personal blogs. Please [fill in this form](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSf0M-pbfwqKsRGWoojZ6i2KuCDTDtmlBQ5mF07W1Vj404yzew/viewform?usp=sf_link) if you would like us to do this for you — note that you'll need to have a blog that's consistently about EA-relevant topics, or use tags that let us pull the EA-relevant posts.

## Beta
We are running a small, private beta version of the Forum in order to catch bugs and fix problems before we open to the broader community. We are currently forming a list of additional people who would like to participate in the beta version of the Forum. Please [fill in this form](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfcqB_MY7FJHihtoMuJWgz2HerFvjUfdniSZCgumqbwrMCYdg/viewform?usp=sf_link) to express interest.

***

*The rest of this post is the text that will appear as the “How to use the Forum” guide on the new Forum.*

## User guide and moderation policy
Effective altruism is a joint effort. Our goal is to make the EA Forum the central place for collaborative discussion about how to do the most good we can.

### What we’re aiming for
We encourage:
* Writing that is accurate, kind, and relevant to the discussion at hand.
* [Scout mindset](https://ideas.ted.com/why-you-think-youre-right-even-when-youre-wrong/): “The drive not to make one idea win or another lose, but to see what’s there as honestly and accurately as you can.”
* Clarity about what you believe, your reasons for believing it, and [what would cause you to change your mind](https://www.lesserwrong.com/lw/o6p/double_crux_a_strategy_for_resolving_disagreement/).
* Making concrete predictions where possible.
* Summary articles: Distilling previous ideas and debates can be really useful because it allows people to get up to speed quickly and build on previous knowledge.

We don’t worry much about:
* Polish: We’d rather hear an idea that’s presented imperfectly than not hear it at all.

We discourage (and may delete):
* Unnecessary rudeness or offensiveness
* Materials advocating major harm or illegal activities
* Abuse
* Spam
* Other behavior that interferes with good discourse

Other pointers:
* When you disagree with someone, approach it with curiosity: try to work out why they think what they think, and what you can learn from each other.
* When you criticize someone’s point, consider doing so [supportively](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/ea/dy/supportive_scepticism_in_practice/).
* Keep an eye out for ways you might be biased — ideologies, people, or causes that you’re particularly attached to.
* Try to focus on important questions, and the important parts of important questions to keep content useful and to the point.
* You can flag material that you think is inappropriate for the site, and the moderators will take a look.

### Finding content
**Frontpage posts**
Posts on the frontpage have been recommended by other users (via upvotes) or have been selected by moderators as especially useful or interesting.

**All posts**
Select the “All Posts” section to see posts in all categories.

**Sequences**
Sequences of posts allow you to follow a longer train of thought on a topic.

**Community**
This is the place for posts about the EA community itself (including EA organizations) rather than object-level discussion.

**Following users**
Love someone’s work? Click their username, and you’ll see the option to “subscribe to this user’s posts.” You’ll see their new posts in your notification area.

### Writing content
You can make a new post by clicking on your username in the upper right and selecting “new post.”

**Personal blog post**
By default, your posts will be published to your personal blog. Other users can follow your blog if they wish, and they’ll see notifications when you post.

You can use posts to share quick ideas or questions, to publish polished research, or anything in between.

A post will be more visible to other users as it gets more upvotes. If it’s upvoted enough, or if moderators curate it, it will appear on the frontpage.

**Link post**
We encourage you to post links to content from other sites. You can do this by selecting the link icon when you go to make a new post. When you post links, please either quote or write a summary of the content to get discussion going.

**Community posts**
If you’re writing about the EA community itself, giving an organizational update, or discussing specific strategies for community building, your post will be moved to the “Community” section.

**Sequences**
You’ll be able to add sequences of posts on a theme or topic.

 
### Karma
When you vote articles up and down, you give the users karma points. The karma points are equal to the number of upvotes minus the downvotes, and by default, the higher rated posts are more visible. The karma is the number shown next to each post or comment.

You don’t need any karma to post, comment, or vote.

### Voting
You can vote up or down on posts and comments. For content you think is especially good or bad, you can give a “strong upvote” or “strong downvote” by clicking and holding (on a computer) or double-tapping (on mobile). The strength of your votes is affected by your level of karma; more details [here](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/ea/1qv/ea_forum_20_initial_announcement/).

You are encouraged to also leave constructive feedback about what was helpful or unhelpful about the material you’re voting on:

“That example helped clear things up for me.”

“I didn’t find this relevant.”

“Mass voting” on large portions of a user’s content simply because it belongs to that user is not acceptable. Please judge each post or comment on its own merits.

### Profile
Let other users know more about you. To edit your user profile, click your username in the upper right and select “Profile.”

It’s fine to make a pseudonymous account in order to express views you wish to keep anonymous. It’s not acceptable to vote multiple times on the same material, to use multiple accounts to express the same opinion multiple times, or to impersonate other people.

### Moderators
Currently (as of September 2018), moderators are Denise Melchin, Howie Lempel, Max Dalton, and Julia Wise, using the email address forum@effectivealtruism.org. Please feel free to contact us with questions or feedback.

Moderators will be able to access:
* The IP address a post/comment came from
* Voting history of users
* Identity of voters on any given post/comment

This information will only be used to identify behavior such as “sockpuppet” accounts and mass downvoting. The moderators will not view or use this information for any other purpose.