What does “community health” mean?
When we refer to community health, we mean the community’s ability to achieve its potential for positive impact. For example, the community’s health might be at risk if people who would make great contributions to the community are repelled by its culture, if leaders don’t get important feedback about effects of their work, or if people's work is hampered by unfair treatment.
Do you only care about avoiding risks?
Nope! We’re trying to think about ways EA can go better. Often that’s mitigating risk, other times it’s trying to create value that might otherwise get missed. We care about the net effect, not minimizing risk.
What are some examples of the work you do?
- Advising on decisions that have a lot of potential downside risk and helping the decision-makers to weigh these up against the positives.
- e.g. projects in less established and/or more sensitive fields, such as policy work or work involving minors
- Handling cases involving interpersonal harm in the community. This often involves one or more of:
- Listening to people talk through what they have experienced
- Talking to people who have caused harm to others about how to improve their behavior
- Restricting people who have caused harm from attending CEA events
- Informing other EA groups, projects, or organizations about the problem
- Advising organizations and groups in the EA ecosystem on good cultural practices, and providing focused support when tricky situations come up.
- Advising individual community members who are dealing with personal or interpersonal problems, such as a conflict between multiple community members.
- Trying to foster better norms and practices in the community
- e.g. Advising young job-seekers about warning signs to look out for in a new job
What are some examples of work you don’t do?
While our scope as a team is broad, we don’t have the capacity to work on everything we might like to. There will be many potential projects which could improve the health of the EA community that we are unable to prioritise. If you’re thinking of working on something in the realm of community health, we’d love to hear from you. We might be able to recommend resources or connect you with others interested in similar work.
In addition, there are some kinds of work that we don’t consider to be within our scope:
- We might be able to direct you towards mental health resources, but we don’t provide mental health services ourselves.
- We’re not the HR department for CEA.
- However, we have provided some HR-style support to some smaller EA organizations in the past and may continue to do so where appropriate.
- We’re not responsible for admissions to EA events such as EA Global, though we often give input.
It's common to assume things are covered by others in the community when they aren't; feel free to check with us to see what's already being done in a space, but we recommend not assuming that everything important has been thought of or is being owned by someone else!
How do you handle conflicts of interest?
If you want your message not to reach a particular member of the community health team, please send it to a different team member and we can handle it without including that person. (For example, if you prefer not to involve one of our staff because they’re friends with someone involved.)
Here are some things our team policy covers, in addition to our employer’s general conflict of interest policy for staff.
- Individual conflicts of interest: Close friend, current or past romantic/sexual relationship, housemate, have received funding from them as an individual. These may also apply if our serious partner / close family member has such a relationship with the person there is a complaint about.
- Institutional conflicts of interest:
- Someone in EV leadership (board members or CEOs of EV US or EV UK)
- Someone above us in a chain of reporting
- A major funder of our work, where the individual has control over the funding
If one of us has a conflict of interest with a person there is a complaint about, we’ll try to hand the situation off to another team member.
If there's a complaint about someone where we have an institutional conflict of interest, we’ll talk to CEA’s leadership and/or our legal team about alternatives, like the possibility of hiring an outside second opinion.
If you have a complaint about behavior by a member of our team, please contact Nicole Ross as the team manager, Zach Robinson as the head of CEA, and/or our parent organization, EV.
How do I know which of you to contact about a personal or interpersonal issue?
Julia Wise, Catherine Low and Charlotte Darnell are our primary community liaisons. See our contact page for more information about when and how to contact them.
Other team members may be listed as a contact person in specific situations (e.g. at particular camps or conferences). In other situations, people who are not on our team may be the designated contact people, for example, within a local group or at a conference.
I’m not sure this concern I have is worth flagging. Should I really contact you?
Yes! That’s what we’re here for. Please have a low bar for contacting us about things. You’re doing us a service by giving us more data about possible problems in the community. You can let us know about a concern via our form.
What if I have a concern or complaint about your work?
The manager of the community health team is Nicole Ross; you can contact her if you have a concern about our work. If the concern involves Nicole, you could contact Zach Robinson as the head of CEA, or our parent organization, EV.