The Nonlinear Library EA - CEA is fundraising, and funding constrained by Ben West
Nov 20, 2023
14:54
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: CEA is fundraising, and funding constrained, published by Ben West on November 20, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.
Tl;dr
The Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) has an expected funding gap of $3.6m in 2024.
Some example things we think are worth doing but are unlikely to have funding for by default:
Funding a
Community Building Grant in Boston
Funding travel grants for EAG(x) attendees
Note that these are illustrative of our current cost-effectiveness bar (as opposed to a binding commitment that the next dollar we receive will go to one of these things).
In collaboration with EA Funds we have
produced models where users can plug in their own parameters to determine the relative value of a donation to CEA versus EA Funds.
Intro
The role of an interim executive is weird: whereas permanent CEOs like to come in with a bold new vision (ideally one which blames all the organization's problems on their predecessor), interim CEOs are stuck staying the course. Fortunately for me, I mostly liked the course CEA was on when I came in.
The past few years seem to have proven the value of the EA community: my own origin cause area of animal welfare has been substantially transformed (e.g. as recounted by Jakub
here), and even as AI safety has entered the global main stage many of the people doing research, engineering, and other related work have interacted with CEA's projects.
Of course, this is not to say that CEA's work is a slamdunk. In collaboration with Caleb and Linch at EA Funds, I have included below some estimates of whether marginal donations to CEA are more impactful than those to EA Funds, and a reasonable confidence interval very comfortably includes the possibility that you should donate elsewhere.
We are fortunate to count the Open Philanthropy Project (and in particular Open Phil's
GCR Capacity Building program) among the people who believe we are a good use of funding, but they (reasonably) prefer to not fund all of our budget, leaving us with a substantial number of projects which we believe would produce value if we could fund starting or scaling them.
This post outlines where we expect marginal donations to go and the value we expect to come from those donations.
You can donate to CEA
here. If you are interested in donating and have further questions, feel free to email me (ben.west@centreforeffectivealtruism.org). I will also try to answer questions in the comments.
The basic case for CEA
Community building is sometimes motivated by the following: suppose you spent a year telling everyone you know about EA and getting them excited. Probably you could get at least one person excited. Then this means that you will have doubled your lifetime impact, as both you and this other person will go on to do good things. That's a pretty good ROI for one year of work!
This story is overly simplistic, but is roughly my motivation for working on (and donating to) community building: it's a leveraged way to do good in the world.
And it does seem to be the case that many people whose work seems impactful attribute some of their impact to CEA:
The Open Philanthropy longtermist survey in 2020 identified CEA among the top tier of important influences on people's journey towards work improving the long-term future, with about half of CEA's demonstrated value coming through events (EA Global and EAGx conferences) and half through our other programs.
The 80,000 Hours user survey in 2022 identified CEA as the EA-related resource which has influenced the most people's career plans (in addition to 80k itself), with 64% citing the EA Forum as influential and 44% citing EAG.
This selection of impact stories illustrates some of the ways we've helped people increase their impact by providing high-quality discussion spaces to consider their ideas, values and options for and about maki...
Tl;dr
The Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) has an expected funding gap of $3.6m in 2024.
Some example things we think are worth doing but are unlikely to have funding for by default:
Funding a
Community Building Grant in Boston
Funding travel grants for EAG(x) attendees
Note that these are illustrative of our current cost-effectiveness bar (as opposed to a binding commitment that the next dollar we receive will go to one of these things).
In collaboration with EA Funds we have
produced models where users can plug in their own parameters to determine the relative value of a donation to CEA versus EA Funds.
Intro
The role of an interim executive is weird: whereas permanent CEOs like to come in with a bold new vision (ideally one which blames all the organization's problems on their predecessor), interim CEOs are stuck staying the course. Fortunately for me, I mostly liked the course CEA was on when I came in.
The past few years seem to have proven the value of the EA community: my own origin cause area of animal welfare has been substantially transformed (e.g. as recounted by Jakub
here), and even as AI safety has entered the global main stage many of the people doing research, engineering, and other related work have interacted with CEA's projects.
Of course, this is not to say that CEA's work is a slamdunk. In collaboration with Caleb and Linch at EA Funds, I have included below some estimates of whether marginal donations to CEA are more impactful than those to EA Funds, and a reasonable confidence interval very comfortably includes the possibility that you should donate elsewhere.
We are fortunate to count the Open Philanthropy Project (and in particular Open Phil's
GCR Capacity Building program) among the people who believe we are a good use of funding, but they (reasonably) prefer to not fund all of our budget, leaving us with a substantial number of projects which we believe would produce value if we could fund starting or scaling them.
This post outlines where we expect marginal donations to go and the value we expect to come from those donations.
You can donate to CEA
here. If you are interested in donating and have further questions, feel free to email me (ben.west@centreforeffectivealtruism.org). I will also try to answer questions in the comments.
The basic case for CEA
Community building is sometimes motivated by the following: suppose you spent a year telling everyone you know about EA and getting them excited. Probably you could get at least one person excited. Then this means that you will have doubled your lifetime impact, as both you and this other person will go on to do good things. That's a pretty good ROI for one year of work!
This story is overly simplistic, but is roughly my motivation for working on (and donating to) community building: it's a leveraged way to do good in the world.
And it does seem to be the case that many people whose work seems impactful attribute some of their impact to CEA:
The Open Philanthropy longtermist survey in 2020 identified CEA among the top tier of important influences on people's journey towards work improving the long-term future, with about half of CEA's demonstrated value coming through events (EA Global and EAGx conferences) and half through our other programs.
The 80,000 Hours user survey in 2022 identified CEA as the EA-related resource which has influenced the most people's career plans (in addition to 80k itself), with 64% citing the EA Forum as influential and 44% citing EAG.
This selection of impact stories illustrates some of the ways we've helped people increase their impact by providing high-quality discussion spaces to consider their ideas, values and options for and about maki...