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April 2021 Newsletter

The number of COVID-19 cases in the Philippines continues to rise alarmingly, and the government's COVID-19 response has been frustrating. Some of you may have been personally affected too, and some of us may be dealing with loss or worry. As such, this newsletter includes our recommendations to the government and individuals on COVID-19. We also have some upcoming events, EA resources, and job opportunities from our new job board that you might want to view!

EA PH’s Recommendations to the Government and Individuals on COVID-19

COVID-19 is not a “neglected” problem, since lots of people work on it relative to other issues, but it is still causing massive suffering in the Philippines and all over the world. As such, we in EA Philippines still care about it, and we think a lot of this suffering locally can be lessened by sound, evidence-based decisions and policies made by the Philippine government. 
 

So Brian and Tanya from EA PH and Kirsten Angeles from EA Blue released a document last March 29 with some recommendations on what the government and individuals can do to fight the spread of COVID-19. We also link some useful resources like trackers, videos, people to follow on Twitter, and books to read for you to get informed on COVID-19.

Local EA Events:

April 11, 2 PM - 3:30 PM: EA Philippines’ Webinar on The Scale and Neglectedness of Philippine Mental Health

COVID-19 has been affecting people's mental health, and our community has had its fair share of struggles. Mental health is a cause area prioritized by some people in the EA community. This year, EA PH’s research interns, Rikaela Gabriel and JP Apellido, did a study on the scope and neglectedness of mental health in the Philippines. Their research presentation is scheduled on April 11, Sunday, from 2:00 PM to 3:30 PM. You can also read their research paper ahead here. This work was supervised by Brian from EA Philippines.

Every Weekday, 2 PM - 4 PM: EA PH Virtual Coworking Session

To stay productive and connected, EA Philippines has been holding coworking sessions since March 22. Inspired by Focusmate, a platform that matches two people to silently work together virtually, our coworking sessions run every weekday from 2pm to 4pm via zoom.

The event starts with participants sharing their intentions or goals for the session, followed by two 50-minute sessions of focused work with a 10-minute break in between. It ends with the participants sharing their achievements during the session. If you think this kind of setup can help you increase your productivity, practice accountability, and/or have fun working, then sign up for our coworking session! Everyone's invited.

International EA Events

April 10, 1-2 PM | Future of Plant-based Products: Chinese Consumer Perceptions

The Good Growth team is excited to share key insights from their qualitative study with Chinese consumers on their food consumption habits and perceptions on plant-based meat. While the insights are specific to China, the methodology of this study is applicable and valuable to players and people interested in entering the alternative protein industry, especially in Asia, where qualitative research methods are less commonly used. Whether you work in the field of plant-based products, are an investor, ecosystem builder, or just someone who is interested in the future of plant-based products in China, we welcome you to join this upcoming webinar on April 10, 1 PM - 2 PM Manila time.

Stanford EA is hosting an In-Depth EA Fellowship from April 13 to June 13, 2021. This fellowship aims to engage students with topics of morality, career planning, near-term and long-term impact, indirect effects of our actions, ways to improve the long-term future, and more; in order to better figure out what they want to do and why. Discussion groups will be led by assigned mentors, who are usually young professionals at EA orgs. For this run of the fellowship, fellows will choose six topics from this working syllabus to read about and discuss. Applications are open here until April 12 (Monday), 2:59 PM PHT. 

If you have a burning question about effective giving, if you should pledge to give, Giving What We Can, effective altruism, or you have a suggestion or idea to discuss around the topic of EA, you may want to join Giving What We Can's Open Forum hosted by Luke Freeman.

SERI (Stanford Existential Risks Initiative) is hosting a virtual conference on April 17-18th, both at 7 PM - 3 AM PHT. The conference brings together the academic community around mitigating existential and global catastrophic risks — large-scale threats which could permanently curtail humanity’s future potential. The conference is aimed primarily at faculty, graduate students, and professionals working in existential-risk-related fields, but a few spots are also reserved for undergraduates who demonstrate significant familiarity with issues related to existential risks. Applications are open until April 12. 

Human mistreatment and animal exploitation have become widely unacceptable in recent years, but what if the cause of the suffering is not humans, but nature? How can one do anything to help wild animals? If you want answers to these, you may want to join this free webinar on wild animal suffering where EA Philippines is a partner of. Aditya SK from Animal Ethics will discuss suffering in nature and how we can help.

Updates from the local EA community

EA Philippines' New Website and Job Board

We are excited to share with you EA Philippines newly-launched website! It doesn’t have a lot of content yet, but you can read EA Philippines’ vision and mission and our projects in it. You will also find on the website our new Job Board with some EA-aligned job, internship, and volunteer opportunities. We feature some opportunities on our job board at the bottom of this newsletter. Over time, we hope to add a blog and more career-related resources.

Our OKRs and Strategy

We're also sharing here our document with our Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) and our planned timesplit across our activities for March 1 - June 1, 2021. We're also linking here our Strategy Document, which contains our theory of change. Give them a read if you're interested to learn more about our plans!

EA Resources

April Fool’s Day Posts

The EA community also knows how to have some fun, especially when it's April Fool's Day! Here are some of the most upvoted EA Forum posts on that day:

1. Naming What We Can, a new meta-EA institution
   An organization that believes in a world where every EA organization and any project has a beautifully crafted name, this organization aims to name and rename every EA organization, project, thing, or person and to alleviate any suffering caused by name-selection decision paralysis.

2. New Top EA Causes for 2021, an annual thread of ideas for Cause X
   Some proposals are name-swaps, reversetermism, strong middletermism, and the most pressing puns.

3. Canning What We Give, a new EA org

   Wouldn't it be great if there was a way to directly link the simplicity of donations with effective methods for the recovery of civilisation? Say "Yes we can!" with their proposal and CWWG dashboard.

    

Check out these talks from the recent EA Global: Reconnect Conference.

1. Ezra Klein on making an impact through journalism | In 2014, Ezra co-founded Vox.com and served as Executive Director, and also hosted the podcast The Ezra Klein Show. While at Vox, he helped start the Future Perfect vertical, which runs evidence-driven stories about a variety of topics, many of which are related to focus areas in effective altruism.

2. Holden Karnofsky on the work of Open Philanthropy | Holden is the Chief Executive Officer at Open Philanthropy, which identifies outstanding giving opportunities and grants hundreds of millions of dollars each year.

3. Julia Wise's interview with community members on how to maintain motivation in effective altruism despite various challenges | Marcus Davis about engaging in many different EA projects, Tan Zhi Xuan on reconciling EA with her lifestyle and worldview, Alex Gordon-Brown on his experience as a parent in EA, and Howie Lempel about mental health and burnout.

4. Habiba Islam hosted an AMA with Toby Ord | Toby Ord is a moral philosopher at Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute and the author of The Precipice. His work focuses on the big-picture questions facing humanity. His current research is on avoiding the threat of human extinction, which he considers to be among the most pressing and neglected issues we face. 

As we recently celebrated the Holy Week, we’d like to share with you these resources below to understand effective altruism and Christianity and how they meet together.

1. Biblical Generosity x EA: Stewarding God's resources to help the world's most vulnerable people (1 hour talk)

2. Read stories about people’s effective giving journey and how it means to them as a Christian.

3. Do you think it's important for Christians to care about effectiveness? Learn more about Effective Altruism for Christians here.

Job and Volunteer Opportunities in EA-aligned organizations

Photo of our newly released Job Board

Below are some featured opportunities that are accessible to Filipinos from our newly-released Airtable Job Board! It currently has almost 30 impactful opportunities (full-time, part-time, internship, volunteer, and grant opportunities) accessible to Filipinos. 

Our job board has remote jobs from foreign EA organizations and also some roles at impactful organizations locally that we’ve vetted and think are impactful to work in. In the future, we’d likely add more local roles, once we have more time to vet and look at the roles of other impactful organizations locally.

Local roles that might be of interest to Filipino EAs

Machine Learning Researcher, Thinking Machines

This is an opportunity for someone with a strong portfolio of work in machine learning to do great work in Thinking Machines.
 

Software Engineer - Senti AI

Senti AI is looking for a Software Engineer to build and implement functional programs. We think this role and the Thinking Machines role can help people build experience in AI or software engineering, which can be used for technical AI safety work or other EA causes.
 

Local Consultant for Philippine Approach to Sustainable Sanitation (PhATSS) Toolkit and Training Module Development, UNICEF Philippines

This role is under UNICEF Philippines' WASH program and requires a strong attention to detail in reviewing voluminous knowledge products that have been developed on PhATSS, or the Philippine Approach to Sustainable Sanitation. The deadline to apply is on April 12.

Research Associate - Zuellig Family Foundation

The Zuellig Family Foundation (ZFF) is focused on improving health conditions in rural Filipino communities. The Research Associate position spearheads technical support, coordination, and management to strengthen the research agenda and capacity of the Foundation. This position requires at least 3 years of relevant work experience in the health and development sector.

Volunteer opportunities, Food Fortification Initiative’s work in the Philippines

Food Fortification Initiative, a GiveWell standout charity, is looking for local volunteers. People with communication and advocacy skills, or a health / nutrition research background, would be a good fit for these roles. Click the link above to read more and apply for these!
 

Foreign EA-aligned Organizations (All allow for remote work)

Research Fellow, Stanford Existential Risks Initiative (SERI)

The Stanford Existential Risks Initiative is looking for research fellows anywhere in the world who will carry out full-time 10-week research projects, from June 21 to Aug. 27, which aim towards mitigating existential risks. This program seeks to build a community of existential risk researchers via cause-area subgroups, speaker events, discussion groups, 1:1s, and social events. They provide a research stipend of $5,500 USD or PHP 267,000 if you get in to the program.

Digital Communications Internship - IDInsight

The Digital Communications Intern will contribute to amplifying IDinsight’s impact by actively creating and disseminating content to specific target audiences on different online communication channels.

Summer Student Internship - Global Operations Intern - IDInsight

IDInsight's Summer Student Internship is now open for applications. The Operations Intern for Summer 2021 will build and maintain key internal knowledge management (KM) systems.

Incubation Program Participant, Charity Entrepreneurship

Charity Entrepreneurship’s Incubation Program is a two-month, cost-covered online course that will take you from a basic familiarity with starting charities to being fully prepared to create and operate an effective organization. They also have a region-specific charity analysis program, and they may be able to accept one more person to analyze what charity ideas would be impactful to start in the Philippines. The deadline to apply is on April 15, 2021.

Digital Marketing Specialist - Sinergia Animal

Sinergia Animal, an international animal welfare organization, is seeking a digital marketing specialist who knows a lot about web advertising, social media and newsletters. This role will be responsible for creating and implementing marketing strategies to support the engagement and growth of our campaigns and social media audiences.

Our job board webpage also has links to other relevant places where you can find impactful jobs, and we also include there how we choose which jobs to feature. 

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Stay safe and well,

- Brian, Janai, Tanya, and Kate from EA Philippines

P.S. You are receiving this newsletter because you have signed up for an event of EA PH, EA Blue, or EA UPD in the past.