The Nonlinear Library EA - How we started our own EA charity (and why we decided to wrap up) by KvPelt
Feb 26, 2024
21:38
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: How we started our own EA charity (and why we decided to wrap up), published by KvPelt on February 26, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.
This post shares our journey in starting an Effective Altruism (EA) charity/project focused on Mediterranean fish welfare, the challenges we faced, our key learnings, and the reasons behind our decision to conclude the project. Actual research results are published in a
Literature review and article.
Key points
The key points of this post are summarized as follows:
We launched a project with the goal of enhancing fish welfare in Mediterranean aquaculture.
We chose to limit our project to gathering information and decided against continuing our advocacy efforts after our initial six months.
Our strategy, which focused on farmer-friendly outreach, was not effective in engaging farmers.
The rationale behind our decision is the recognition that existing organizations are already performing excellent work, and we believe that funders should support these established organizations instead of starting a new one.
The support and resources from the Effective Altruism (EA) and animal welfare communities were outstanding.
Despite the project not achieving its intended outcomes, we view the overall experience positively. It's common for new charities to not succeed; the key is to quickly determine the viability of your idea, which we believe we have accomplished.
Note: Ren has recently begun working as a guest fund manager for the EA Funds Animal Welfare Fund. The views that we express in this article are our views, and we are not speaking for the fund.
Personal/Project background
Before delving into our project we'll provide a quick background of our profiles and how we got to starting this project.
Koen
During my Masters in Maritime/Offshore engineering (building floating things) I got interested in animal welfare. Due to engagement with my EA university group (EA Delft) and by attending EAG(x)Rotterdam I became interested and motivated to use my career to work on animal welfare. I hoped to apply my maritime engineering background in a meaningful way, which led me to consider aquatic animal welfare.
I attended EAGLondon in 2023 with the goal of finding career opportunities and surprisingly this worked! I talked to many with backgrounds in animal welfare (AW) and engineering and in one of my 1on1's I met someone who would later connect me with Ren.
Ren
As a researcher, Ren has been working at Animal Ask for the past couple of years conducting research to support the animal advocacy movement. However, Ren still feels really sad about the scale of suffering endured by animals, and this was the motivation to launch a side project.
Why work on Mediterranean fish welfare?
This project originated out of a desire to work on alleviating extreme-suffering. More background on the arguments to focus on extreme-suffering is discussed in Ren's
earlier
forum post. When the welfare of nonhuman animals is not taken into account during slaughter, extreme-suffering is likely to occur. Also, from Ren's existing work at Animal Ask, they knew that stunning before slaughter is often quite well-understood and tractable.
Therefore, Ren produced a systematic spreadsheet of every farmed animal industry in developed countries (i.e., those countries where Ren felt safe and comfortable working). This spreadsheet included information on a) the number of animals killed, and b) whether those animals were already being stunned before slaughter. Three industries emerged as sources of large-scale, intense suffering:
1. Farmed shrimp in the United States,
2. Farmed shrimp in Australia, and
3. Sea bass and sea bream in the Mediterranean.
Ren actually looked at farmed shrimp initially, and work on these projects may continue in the future, but there are some technical reasons ...
This post shares our journey in starting an Effective Altruism (EA) charity/project focused on Mediterranean fish welfare, the challenges we faced, our key learnings, and the reasons behind our decision to conclude the project. Actual research results are published in a
Literature review and article.
Key points
The key points of this post are summarized as follows:
We launched a project with the goal of enhancing fish welfare in Mediterranean aquaculture.
We chose to limit our project to gathering information and decided against continuing our advocacy efforts after our initial six months.
Our strategy, which focused on farmer-friendly outreach, was not effective in engaging farmers.
The rationale behind our decision is the recognition that existing organizations are already performing excellent work, and we believe that funders should support these established organizations instead of starting a new one.
The support and resources from the Effective Altruism (EA) and animal welfare communities were outstanding.
Despite the project not achieving its intended outcomes, we view the overall experience positively. It's common for new charities to not succeed; the key is to quickly determine the viability of your idea, which we believe we have accomplished.
Note: Ren has recently begun working as a guest fund manager for the EA Funds Animal Welfare Fund. The views that we express in this article are our views, and we are not speaking for the fund.
Personal/Project background
Before delving into our project we'll provide a quick background of our profiles and how we got to starting this project.
Koen
During my Masters in Maritime/Offshore engineering (building floating things) I got interested in animal welfare. Due to engagement with my EA university group (EA Delft) and by attending EAG(x)Rotterdam I became interested and motivated to use my career to work on animal welfare. I hoped to apply my maritime engineering background in a meaningful way, which led me to consider aquatic animal welfare.
I attended EAGLondon in 2023 with the goal of finding career opportunities and surprisingly this worked! I talked to many with backgrounds in animal welfare (AW) and engineering and in one of my 1on1's I met someone who would later connect me with Ren.
Ren
As a researcher, Ren has been working at Animal Ask for the past couple of years conducting research to support the animal advocacy movement. However, Ren still feels really sad about the scale of suffering endured by animals, and this was the motivation to launch a side project.
Why work on Mediterranean fish welfare?
This project originated out of a desire to work on alleviating extreme-suffering. More background on the arguments to focus on extreme-suffering is discussed in Ren's
earlier
forum post. When the welfare of nonhuman animals is not taken into account during slaughter, extreme-suffering is likely to occur. Also, from Ren's existing work at Animal Ask, they knew that stunning before slaughter is often quite well-understood and tractable.
Therefore, Ren produced a systematic spreadsheet of every farmed animal industry in developed countries (i.e., those countries where Ren felt safe and comfortable working). This spreadsheet included information on a) the number of animals killed, and b) whether those animals were already being stunned before slaughter. Three industries emerged as sources of large-scale, intense suffering:
1. Farmed shrimp in the United States,
2. Farmed shrimp in Australia, and
3. Sea bass and sea bream in the Mediterranean.
Ren actually looked at farmed shrimp initially, and work on these projects may continue in the future, but there are some technical reasons ...