Our history

2009

• Giving What We Can, a community of effective givers, is founded in Oxford, UK.

2011

• 80,000 Hours is founded to help people lead high-impact careers.
• The Centre for Effective Altruism is founded as an umbrella organization for Giving What We Can and 80,000 Hours. In the process, we come up with the term "effective altruism".

2012

• Giving What We Can incubates The Life You Can Save, which later spins off as a separate organization.
• 80,000 Hours incubates Animal Charity Evaluators, which later spins off as a separate organization.

2014

• We host Good Done Right, an academic conference on effective altruism.
• We work with the Future of Humanity Institute to form the Global Priorities Project (which merged back into CEA in 2016).

2015

• We trial EA Ventures to fund experimental projects (the project was closed in 2016, and later replaced with EA Grants).
• We begin to run the EA Global conference series.
• The 80,000 Hours team participates in the Y Combinator startup accelerator.
• We help to promote Doing Good Better, the first widely-read book on effective altruism.

2016

• CEA helps local organizers run the first EA Global X community conferences.
• Giving What We Can merges into CEA.
• CEA's Special Projects division is formed; it includes our Philanthropic Advising and Fundamentals Research teams.
• The Global Priorities Project is discontinued and merged into the Future of Humanity Institute and our Fundamentals Research team.

2017

• We participate in the Y Combinator startup accelerator and launch Effective Altruism Funds.
• We establish a new permanent office in Berkeley, CA (in addition to our office in Oxford, UK).
• The Special Projects division decides to focus on content production and merges with the rest of CEA.
• We launch Effective Altruism Grants and our Individual Outreach team. (The team will later be merged into the Groups, Online, and Events teams.)

2018

• We award our first round of Community Building Grants and second round of Effective Altruism Grants.
• We launch a new version of the Effective Altruism Forum.
• We formalize the Community Health team as one of our main projects, and publish our stance on diversity and inclusion.
• We incubate the Forethought Foundation for Global Priorities Research, providing key operational support to help the foundation begin its work.

2019

• We grant $9.8 million (our highest annual total so far) to a variety of causes through Effective Altruism Funds.
• We provide nearly $900,000 in Community Building Grants to assist individuals and groups working on local EA community building.
• We scale up our work on helping community members to navigate media engagement, and publish a revised version of our advice for responding to journalists.
• We begin to collect much more feedback from the EA community, and to share updates on our projects more frequently to keep the community up-to-date.

2020

• We expand our support for groups, funding full-time organizers in 20 locations and supporting student-run discussion-based courses that reached hundreds of students.
• EA Forum pageviews nearly double, with many more high-quality posts than in 2019.
• We begin to run online events, including the first-ever EA Student Summit.
• We close EA Grants, and spin off Giving What We Can and EA Funds under independent leadership (while continuing to provide operational support).
• We develop a new mission: building a community of students and professionals acting on EA principles, by creating and sustaining high-quality discussion spaces.

2021

• We set up EA Virtual Programs to introduce people to EA ideas online
• Many of our key metrics grow very significantly - for instance, time on site on the EA Forum doubles.
• We release an online platform for finding local groups and events

2022

• Events: The number of connections made at our events grew by around 5x, which should help many more people find a way to contribute to important problems.
• Online: Engagement on the EA Forum grew by around 2.9x, helping the spread of important new ideas and richness of discussion.
• Groups: 208 organizers went through our University Groups Accelerator Program (10x growth for a new program starting from a low base), receiving 8 weeks of mentorship designed to accelerate EA journeys for organizers and their groups.