Hi <<First Name>>,
CEA has been growing recently, so we’d like to welcome new hires to the Groups Team: Kuhan Jeyapragasan, Alex Holness-Tofts and Will Payne, who will be supporting university group organisers on part-time Community Building Grants. They join two other recent hires: Rob Gledhill, who is managing the Community Building Grants program, and Jessica McCurdy, who is building scalable resources for university groups. You can read more about how our team has contributed to large growth in group metrics here.
In this month’s newsletter:
-
Getting ready for Giving Season
-
Keeping people involved after an intro fellowship
-
Some great AI safety training opportunities
All the best,
Joan, Rob, Huw, Catherine, Yi-Yang, Jessica, Kuhan, Alex and Will (Groups team, CEA)
Our cover image this month is courtesy of EA at UCLA.
|
|
Giving Season Activities
November and December are popular months to donate, so now is an ideal time to promote effective giving and giving pledges in your community.
Promoting Effective Charities
Giving What We Can has a guide to choosing an effective charity in 2021. GiveWell and Animal Charity Evaluators usually publish their new recommended charity lists at the end of November.
Invite your members to online events about effective giving
Introduce newer members to effective giving
Hold charity evaluation updates and giving discussions
Run a Giving Game
Facebook’s Giving Tuesday Match
Facebook’s Giving Tuesday donation matching starts on Tuesday November 30 at 8 a.m. EST / 5 a.m. PST (and ends within seconds). This is a chance for donors to direct matching funds to effective nonprofits, and is most relevant for groups in the US. More information is on eagivingtuesday.org.
Promoting Pledges
People who join Giving What We Can (GWWC) pledge to donate a portion of their income to whichever organisations can most effectively use it to improve the lives of others. Check out this guide to promoting GWWC in EA groups. We encourage you to mention the Trial Pledge, where people try a fixed-term giving pledge instead of making a longer commitment right away.
|
|
|
|
Opportunities and Requests
|
|
Group Updates
- Nairobi Effective Altruism (pictured above) has restarted. They had their first monthly meeting last month and elected a leadership team.
- The new EA Group at Brigham Young University Idaho was interviewed on the university radio station, and had an article published about their fellowship on the school website.
- EA NTNU (Norwegian University of Science and Technology) recently ran their annual cabin retreat, and EA Norway organisers gave a talk on effective giving to the Industrial Economics department at NTNU.
- EA at UCLA (California) had 33 applications for their intro fellowship and 200 signups at the clubs fair. They’ve started running weekly picnic dinners to cultivate friendship and sample tasty vegan food together.
|
|
Engaging members after an intro program
Introductory EA programs are a great way to engage new members, but many groups find that involvement drops off at the end of the program.
Some ideas to encourage engagement:
- Encourage people to subscribe to EA content, such as podcasts, newsletters and blogs. It is best to share this with your participants during the final program session.
- Suggest members sign up for an In-Depth Program, or consider running your own if you have enough facilitators who have completed this program. Here’s the curriculum and facilitator guide for the program.
- Ask interested and capable members to help out with the group.
- Organise a book club or a reading group for a specific cause area. (See also: Tessa Alexanian’s guide to “high-energy reading groups”.)
- Provide peer support for career planning, such as these group-designed career planning programs (1,2), which are suitable for people who have extensively engaged with EA ideas.
- Regular social events such as dinners and hikes
See this page for even more ideas!
|
|
|
Interesting Links
- Videos from EA Global: London have been published. Of particular note to community builders: Campus specialists, Workplace and professional EA groups, Career strategies, and The State of EA.
- Naomi Nederlof explains how EA Switzerland benefits from a recruitment season twice a year.
- The book “Managing to Change the World: The Nonprofit Manager's Guide to Getting Results” comes highly recommended. Peter Wildeford summarises the book in a Forum post.
- Thomas Woodside outlines the benefits of planning events early.
- The Nonlinear Library is a newly launched podcast, which uses text-to-speech software to create audio content from the EA Forum, Alignment Forum, LessWrong, and other EA blogs.
- Mauricio argues that many undergrads should take light courseloads.
- Kuhan shares tips on networking with others in mind.
- Daystar Eld shares their perspective on the cost of rejection in the EA community in this Forum post.
- Training for Good is a new EA organisation aiming to upskill people to tackle the most pressing global problems.
- Jamie Harris from Animal Advocacy Careers outlines whether, when, and how to run EA movement building experiments.
- 80,000 Hours has released a new short introduction to effective altruism.
|
|
Jobs, Internships, and Volunteering
This section lists opportunities that might be suitable for people with EA group organising experience.
|
|
Organiser Spotlight: Lenni and Michel Justen, EA University of Wisconsin-Madison
“It can be scary to spend less time on classes, the very thing you thought you went to college for, especially if a perfectionist attitude towards school has always been the default. But ultimately classes and other involvement are instrumental towards your goals, they’re not the end goal. We’d recommend thinking hard about those end goals and not being surprised if different priorities than many of your peers lead to different actions than many of your peers."
Read more about Michel and Lenni here.
If there is an organiser or a group you’d like to see featured, fill in our feedback form with your suggestion!
|
|
|
|
|
|
