Hi, I’m the CBG manager at CEA and happy to explain how we came to this amount.
This $110,000 does indeed include a block grant of $20,000 that is intended to cover all non-salary costs, such as event costs and general operating expenses. Some non-salary costs in the past have included: venue rent, retreat costs, travel compensation for volunteers, and small regrants to local (student) groups.
The remaining $90,000 is intended to cover the personal grant and should fund all employment related costs, such as taxes, social security contributions, and other benefits. And the gross salary itself of course, which will be lower than the personal grant because of all the other employment costs.
We adjust the personal grant based on cost of living and $90,000 is our upper bound, defined as the CoL of San Francisco. Boston has a lower CoL than San Francisco so the personal grant will likely be lower than $90,000. We generally follow our personal grant formula, but infrequently make exceptions for exceptional candidates so I have included the upper bound in this ask.
I don’t know exactly how much would be deducted from the personal grant for employment related costs and other benefits in Boston, but taking the cost of living adjustment into account I would guess the actual gross salary would be on the lower end (or slightly below) the shared range above.
We have come to these policies as we think CBG’s work is really impactful and often people who would do the best job have high opportunity costs. It’s probably worth noting that salaries in the US are generally higher than in the UK/Europe and we would like to compensate our grantees decently.
We have re-evaluated the granting formula this spring and decided to neither increase nor decrease the personal salary grant. Grantees can decide to take a voluntary salary reduction and some have done this but I prefer this to stay a personal choice.
In Feb this year, CEA granted me EUR 89,905 as part of the CBG programme. USD 20,000 of that is for ‘operational costs’. At EAN we treat this 20k as ‘money we can freely spend without having to apply for a grant’ — for example, software tools, organiser retreats, etc.
Once taxes are paid, I get EUR 3,167.75 in my account every month. And then in May I also get my holiday allowance.
I need to pay my pension from that 3.1k. I haven’t set this up yet (I know, I know, very bad) but, if I remember correctly, this should be around EUR 600 every month.
For context, at my previous job (well paid but I wasn’t optimising for income), I received EUR 3,533.25 every month, I didn’t have to pay anything towards an additional pension, I worked 4 days a week, and I had 34 days of holiday per year (I now have 25). This was a very good deal. For further context, according to a quick google, the median net monthly income in NL is EUR 2,152.
P.S. Until I started writing this I’d forgotten how good my old job was… I hope this doesn’t come across as me complaining, I’m more than happy with my compensation, I just wanted to give an idea of what a CBG gets in return for their work.
Hi, I’m the CBG manager at CEA and happy to explain how we came to this amount.
This $110,000 does indeed include a block grant of $20,000 that is intended to cover all non-salary costs, such as event costs and general operating expenses. Some non-salary costs in the past have included: venue rent, retreat costs, travel compensation for volunteers, and small regrants to local (student) groups.
The remaining $90,000 is intended to cover the personal grant and should fund all employment related costs, such as taxes, social security contributions, and other benefits. And the gross salary itself of course, which will be lower than the personal grant because of all the other employment costs.
We adjust the personal grant based on cost of living and $90,000 is our upper bound, defined as the CoL of San Francisco. Boston has a lower CoL than San Francisco so the personal grant will likely be lower than $90,000. We generally follow our personal grant formula, but infrequently make exceptions for exceptional candidates so I have included the upper bound in this ask.
I don’t know exactly how much would be deducted from the personal grant for employment related costs and other benefits in Boston, but taking the cost of living adjustment into account I would guess the actual gross salary would be on the lower end (or slightly below) the shared range above.
We have come to these policies as we think CBG’s work is really impactful and often people who would do the best job have high opportunity costs. It’s probably worth noting that salaries in the US are generally higher than in the UK/Europe and we would like to compensate our grantees decently.
We have re-evaluated the granting formula this spring and decided to neither increase nor decrease the personal salary grant. Grantees can decide to take a voluntary salary reduction and some have done this but I prefer this to stay a personal choice.
For extra info, here’s my personal situation.
In Feb this year, CEA granted me EUR 89,905 as part of the CBG programme. USD 20,000 of that is for ‘operational costs’. At EAN we treat this 20k as ‘money we can freely spend without having to apply for a grant’ — for example, software tools, organiser retreats, etc.
Once taxes are paid, I get EUR 3,167.75 in my account every month. And then in May I also get my holiday allowance.
I need to pay my pension from that 3.1k. I haven’t set this up yet (I know, I know, very bad) but, if I remember correctly, this should be around EUR 600 every month.
For context, at my previous job (well paid but I wasn’t optimising for income), I received EUR 3,533.25 every month, I didn’t have to pay anything towards an additional pension, I worked 4 days a week, and I had 34 days of holiday per year (I now have 25). This was a very good deal. For further context, according to a quick google, the median net monthly income in NL is EUR 2,152.
P.S. Until I started writing this I’d forgotten how good my old job was… I hope this doesn’t come across as me complaining, I’m more than happy with my compensation, I just wanted to give an idea of what a CBG gets in return for their work.