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 receive important feedback about the effects of their work, or if people's work is hampered by unfair treatment.
Do you only care about avoiding risks?
No—we’re also trying to think about ways EA can improve as a community and have further positive impacts. This involves both mitigating risk and facilitating opportunities to create additional value. We care about the net effects of our work, not just 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 against the positives.
- E.g., projects in less established and/or more sensitive fields, such as career programs for high schoolers
- 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 EA events like EA Global
- 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 arise.
- Advising individual community members dealing with personal or interpersonal problems, such as a conflict with other 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 that could improve the health of the EA community which we are unable to prioritize. Here are some kinds of work that we don’t consider to be within our scope:
- We might be able to direct you toward 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-run events such as EA Global, though we sometimes ask the admissions team not to admit people who have caused problems in the past.
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! 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.
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 (contact details here), 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 friends, current or past romantic/sexual relationships, housemates, or people a team member has received funding from 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 we have an institutional conflict of interest with, 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 (at a conference, for example, or within a local group).
I’m not sure this concern I have is worth flagging. Should I still contact you?
Yes! That’s what we’re here for. Please have a low bar for contacting us about things. Your information can potentially help us identify patterns or problems in the community and offer better support to address them. You can let us know about a concern via our form.
Who are other people I can talk to or services I can access?
Many services might be able to help with a problem you’ve experienced, such as the healthcare system, legal system, restorative justice, ombudsperson offices, and informal networks. They each have different strengths and weaknesses.
Sometimes, we’ll be a good fit for what you need, but sometimes, another institution or resource will be a better fit.
Other resources in EA
- A Human Resources staff member if the problem relates to a workplace.
- Your local EA group organizer if the problem you are having is with another member of the group.
- Some EA groups have their own contact people, such as EA Germany and EA NYC.
- If you’re a group organizer, we can help you navigate problems in your group.
- Managers of a space:
- Event organizers or event contact people if the problem relates to an event you are attending,
- Whoever manages the space where the problem happened (e.g., an office manager).
If you have questions about how they will handle confidentiality or steps they might take, we recommend asking services about that before you share sensitive information. You can contact our team if you’re concerned about talking to one of the resources above or related services.
If you’d like us to pass on information or feedback to a person or organization in EA while keeping you anonymous, we may be able to do that.
Places outside of EA
- If you need mental health care, we recommend you seek help from mental health experts.
- Mental Health Navigator provides some resources and guidance for accessing mental health care.
- We’re sometimes able to help advise about accessing care when someone in the community is having a mental health crisis.
- If you’ve been a victim of a crime
- Consider whether it makes sense to report the crime to the relevant authorities in your region (although we understand why victims sometimes don’t find it worthwhile to go through the legal system).
- You might find some of the services listed here useful:
- Some people have asked us about a restorative justice approach. We don’t have the training or capacity to run that, but there are other groups that specialize in it.
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.