Catherine, you and Nicole are both CH team members who advise the EAIF and the LTFF. Given that CH “heard about many of the concerns mentioned in [Ben’s] post” in mid-2022, did either of you share those concerns with the EAIF team prior to that fund granting $73k to Nonlinear in 4Q22?
You’ve previously written that “meta work like incubating new charities, advising inexperienced charity entrepreneurs, and influencing funding decisions should be done by people with particularly good judgement about how to run strong organisations, in addition to having admirable intentions.” Since the grant was for work of that type (“6-12 months of salary for 3 experienced EAs to set up an EA recruiting/hiring agency”), I would think the case for raising the concerns you’d heard about with the EAIF management team would be particularly strong. If you did not share those concerns, what was the rationale?
I don’t know if the grant information is accurate (there’s a disclaimer on the page), but if it is, this is pretty shocking. I would appreciate clarification on this.
Catherine from Community Health here. I was aware of this grant application. After discussion with my colleagues in Community Health who were also aware of the same concerns about Nonlinear mentioned in this post, I decided not to advise EAIF to decline this application. Some of the reasons for that were:
The funding was for a project run by three other people (not Nonlinear staff), and I had no concerns about those people working on this project
The three people were not going to be living with Kat and Emerson, which made risks to them lower
At that stage, I had heard some but not all of the complaints listed in this post, so I didn’t have the same picture as I do now. The complaints were confidential, which constrained the possible moves I could make – I wasn’t able to get more information, and I couldn’t share information with the EAIF team that might lead to someone identifying the complainant or Nonlinear guessing that someone complaining had affected their grant decision.
I could and did put some risk mitigation measures in place, in particular, by requiring the grant to be made on the condition that they set up an incubation contract to formalise the roles, reducing the risk that the incubatees and Nonlinear would have different expectation of access to funds and ownership of the project (which was one of the problems Alice reported).
I didn’t request that EAIF send the money directly to the three people involved in the project, rather than Nonlinear, but I was pleased that it happened
Looking back, given the information and constraints I had at the time, I think this was a reasonable decision.
I could and did put some risk mitigation measures in place, in particular, by requiring the grant to be made on the condition that they set up an incubation contract to formalise the roles, reducing the risk that the incubatees and Nonlinear would have different expectation of access to funds and ownership of the project (which was one of the problems Alice reported).
Just in case it wasn’t clear from Catherine’s comment, if Catherine hadn’t recommended that we require an incubation contract, it’s very unlikely that we would have asked for one. In light of Ben’s post, setting up this contract seems like a very good decision.
The EAIF did make a grant for $73k—but it was to a project that Nonlinear was incubating (not to Nonlinear themselves) - I’ll update the website to reflect this. Looking at the email thread for this grant now we actually made the grant out to a separate company (the new hiring agency) so the money never went through nonlinear and required (at com health’s advice) that they set up an incubation contract to formalise the roles, responsibilities and decision making between the founders and Nonlinear.
I’ll let the com health team speak for themselves, but I think given the information that we had the grant was reasonable and looking back I am happy with the advice com health gave us.
Catherine, you and Nicole are both CH team members who advise the EAIF and the LTFF. Given that CH “heard about many of the concerns mentioned in [Ben’s] post” in mid-2022, did either of you share those concerns with the EAIF team prior to that fund granting $73k to Nonlinear in 4Q22?
You’ve previously written that “meta work like incubating new charities, advising inexperienced charity entrepreneurs, and influencing funding decisions should be done by people with particularly good judgement about how to run strong organisations, in addition to having admirable intentions.” Since the grant was for work of that type (“6-12 months of salary for 3 experienced EAs to set up an EA recruiting/hiring agency”), I would think the case for raising the concerns you’d heard about with the EAIF management team would be particularly strong. If you did not share those concerns, what was the rationale?
I don’t know if the grant information is accurate (there’s a disclaimer on the page), but if it is, this is pretty shocking. I would appreciate clarification on this.
Catherine from Community Health here. I was aware of this grant application. After discussion with my colleagues in Community Health who were also aware of the same concerns about Nonlinear mentioned in this post, I decided not to advise EAIF to decline this application. Some of the reasons for that were:
The funding was for a project run by three other people (not Nonlinear staff), and I had no concerns about those people working on this project
The three people were not going to be living with Kat and Emerson, which made risks to them lower
At that stage, I had heard some but not all of the complaints listed in this post, so I didn’t have the same picture as I do now. The complaints were confidential, which constrained the possible moves I could make – I wasn’t able to get more information, and I couldn’t share information with the EAIF team that might lead to someone identifying the complainant or Nonlinear guessing that someone complaining had affected their grant decision.
I could and did put some risk mitigation measures in place, in particular, by requiring the grant to be made on the condition that they set up an incubation contract to formalise the roles, reducing the risk that the incubatees and Nonlinear would have different expectation of access to funds and ownership of the project (which was one of the problems Alice reported).
I didn’t request that EAIF send the money directly to the three people involved in the project, rather than Nonlinear, but I was pleased that it happened
Looking back, given the information and constraints I had at the time, I think this was a reasonable decision.
Just in case it wasn’t clear from Catherine’s comment, if Catherine hadn’t recommended that we require an incubation contract, it’s very unlikely that we would have asked for one. In light of Ben’s post, setting up this contract seems like a very good decision.
The EAIF did make a grant for $73k—but it was to a project that Nonlinear was incubating (not to Nonlinear themselves) - I’ll update the website to reflect this. Looking at the email thread for this grant now we actually made the grant out to a separate company (the new hiring agency) so the money never went through nonlinear and required (at com health’s advice) that they set up an incubation contract to formalise the roles, responsibilities and decision making between the founders and Nonlinear.
I’ll let the com health team speak for themselves, but I think given the information that we had the grant was reasonable and looking back I am happy with the advice com health gave us.
Thanks for clarifying that Caleb, that does seem substantially less problematic than granting to Nonlinear themselves.
Thanks for flagging the disclaimer (“Please note that this page is in beta testing and grant data may not be accurate”), I’d missed that.