Sadly, the pandemic means that most of us won’t be able to meet with our communities in person for some months. Going online doesn’t provide the same valuable in-person interactions, but it does mean that geographic boundaries are no longer a barrier, which has opened up space for collaborations and connections that may not have happened otherwise.

This newsletter focuses on ways we can offer a range of virtual meetups for our local and global communities. Hopefully, during this period of physical distancing, we can take some time to connect with new people as well as preserve the bonds within our local groups.  

Best wishes to you and your group members, 

David, Catherine and Katie

Running Online Events

• Here’s a collaborative rough guide to running virtual events. A key takeaway is to consider the goals and target audience for your online event. While in theory anyone in the world can join your event, you may wish to run some events exclusively for your local group members to help maintain and build your existing connections. 

• Planning any of the following types of events? Please let Catherine know so that CEA can provide feedback, help you coordinate with other organisers, and learn how to improve online events across the community.

  • Online fellowships or courses

  • Online retreats or conferences 

  • Online events specifically for group organisers 

• Thinking about hosting a biosecurity-related event? Chris Bakerlee (chrisbakerlee@gmail.com) is available as a point person to advise group organisers on best practices and risks. Chris is a PhD student in genetics and synthetic biology at Harvard, with a special interest in pandemic risk mitigation. He’s also happy for you to refer group members considering biosecurity as a career path to him. 

Discovering online events

Group members can discover online EA-related events from around the world in a variety of ways:

• The international EA events calendar, curated by several group organisers, lists high-quality speaker events and large social events suitable for anyone interested in EA. To add an event, fill out this form.

• For a wide range of online events, check out the EA online events Facebook group - feel free to share events you’d like to promote to a wider audience here

• Special interest events are being run by some groups based on interest areas, affiliations, or professions 

• Cristina (Hamburg), Noga (Israel), and Vaidehi (Philadelphia) are running social ‘Icebreakers’ across various time zones to help people make new connections: Asia/Australasia, Europe/Africa, Americas

Cross-group collaborations

If you don’t have capacity to host events right now, or want to open up an event to more people, you might consider joining forces with nearby groups. Some examples:

• Portland, Seattle and Vancouver groups are co-hosting ‘Pacific Northwest’ events

• Several small UK groups have invited members to a co-hosted online discussion group

• The Australian and NZ groups are hosting shared meetups

Contact Catherine if you’d like ideas for who you might collaborate with.  

Get involved

The EA Groups Slack and Facebook group have been especially active recently, with groups sharing their resources and experiences of running virtual meetups. Get involved by joining the Slack (see discussion on the #virtualmeetups channel), or share your ideas and event reports on this shared Google Doc. 

• EAGxBerlin is moving online. The conference is scheduled for 12 – 14 June 2020, although the dates may be slightly adjusted. More information and a signup form for email updates are here.   

• All the talks from last month’s virtual EA Global are available in this playlist. 

• Several groups are looking for community building staff:

  • EA New York City are looking for a full-time or part-time community director

  • EA Netherlands are looking for a managing director (0,6 - 1 FTE)

  • EA Cambridge are gauging interest from people who might like to join their team as a full- or part-time paid organiser, starting in September 2020. Here’s a form to express interest.

• Animal Advocacy Careers is a new nonprofit organisation, seeking to address the career and talent bottlenecks in the animal advocacy movement. They are offering one-to-one career coaching sessions.

• 80,000 Hours has excellent content about COVID-19

• The EA Hub Resources page is now the main collection of resources for local group organisers; it includes resources for running events, editable graphics, and an updated “pitch” guide. There is also content of interest to all EAs, including reading lists, links for donors, a compendium of EA Facebook groups, and many more. The collection is community-created and continually evolving. We are particularly eager for group organisers to contribute. 
• Omer Nevo from EA Israel has published an excellent guide to career consultations for local groups.

In this section, we interview a different group organiser each month. If there is someone you’d like to nominate, fill in our feedback form with your suggestion!

Organiser

What first drew you to effective altruism?

“I first encountered effective altruism on a Rationally Speaking podcast that featured Peter Singer. The interviewer (Massimo Pigliucci) described how reading Singer's books caused him to change his lifestyle dramatically in order to have a more positive impact. I found it astonishing that a book could do that. While I found Singer's ideas on global poverty and animal rights compelling, it was knowing there were generous, intelligent people out there who allowed these ideas to change their lives that gave me some sort of permission to take significant action myself.”

What are the biggest challenges as a community organiser?

“I feel that the impact of our community is far smaller than it could be because the ideas aren't getting to the people that would use them. So a big challenge is getting a really good message out to the people who would be receptive. While I’ve done a fair bit of EA outreach, I haven’t been as successful as I had initially expected I would be, so it seems to be a difficult task.” 

What could EA communities do better?

“Currently, many people new to the movement report that EA seems too elitist for them, even people who have an awful lot to contribute. So I worry that we are missing out on impact as a result of the messages that we consciously or unconsciously put out. As EA is fundamentally judgemental, and the scale of what we are trying to do is so enormous and potentially anxiety-inducing, I think our community needs to be more deliberate about making people feel valued and excited to contribute than other movements do.”