State of the Swedish EA Community and Strategic Focus for 2023

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: EA Sweden's Impact 2023, Plans for 2024, and Current Funding Gap, published by Emil Wasteson on March 25, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.
This post draws on insights from
EA Sweden's 2023 Impact Report, which we encourage the interested reader to read in its full length. The purpose of the report, and this post, is to share and reflect on:
The current state of the Swedish EA community
EA Sweden's activities, impact and learnings during 2023
Our plans for 2024 and current funding gap to realize these plans
We believe that this post has the most value for 1) People in the Swedish EA community, 2) Other EA community building groups, 3) Grantmakers and individuals who seek to financially support the development of EA community building.
Introduction to EA Sweden
EA Sweden acts as an umbrella organization for the Swedish EA community, and consists of a 4 people team (3.25 FTEs). We are mostly active in Sweden since we have our comparative advantage here, but act with a global impact in mind, which we do in three main ways:
Building a thriving and inclusive community of epistemically humble people who are ambitious in their altruistic pursuit. We enhance engagement with EA by raising public awareness, ensuring our active presence in spaces where like-minded individuals gather, and organizing events and conferences. Additionally, we maintain a vibrant online presence through our website and Slack workspace, while also providing resources, encouragement, and opportunities for networking.
Supporting individuals to realize their full impact potential, mainly through their careers. We do that by providing individual career counseling, in-depth career courses, resources about how one can have an impactful and fulfilling career depending on personal skills and experiences, sharing open high impact opportunities and personal job recommendations as well as supporting people through the job switching process.
Supporting promising projects to increase their impact. We do that by providing support with funding applications, fiscal sponsorship and employer of record services, office space alongside other EAs, and strategic and operational support tailored to each project's or organization's needs, often crafting a robust theory of change and a structure for goal setting and impact evaluation.
A visual version of our current theory of change (ToC) can be found
here.
State of the Swedish EA community
Below are some of the most noteworthy data points of the current state of the Swedish EA community. Please note that these results might not entirely represent the whole community, since most data points are based on a survey with 73 respondents and these respondents might represent the most committed and involved in the community.
The average age of the community is 31.54 and the median age is 30.5
~50% of the community has more than 5 years of work experience.
AI Safety is the cause area most of our members are interested in, (51%), followed by Global Health & Wellbeing (40%) and Climate Change (36%).
73% strongly believe EA will guide their future career choices.
Women and non-binary people constitute 38% of the community and engage less than men in EA Sweden's activities.
Women believe to a lesser extent that they can use the ideas of effective altruism to make a significant difference for the world.
12% volunteered for an EA organization during the year, and 24% worked on an individual EA-motivated project.
24% of the community donated 10% or more of their income to charity.
For our reflection on these, and more data points, see the "Our Community" section in the
impact report.
Our strategy and focus areas 2023
During 2022, EA Sweden focused on building up robust infrastructure, processes and practices, which created good conditions for scaling up our impact during 2023. On the ot...