EA Philippines Needs Your Help!

zianbee21 Mar 2024 4:42 UTC
93 points
18 comments13 min readEA link

Summary

(For an executive summary version of our post, feel free to check our briefer here.)

In light of the current funding constraints in the EA community, EA Philippines has had a difficult time securing the means to continue its usual operations for this year. This can mean less support for growing a highly engaged community of Filipino EAs.

We are seeking USD 43,000 as our preferred funding for 1 year of operations and a 2-month buffer. The minimum amount of funding we are seeking would be USD 28,000 for 1 year of operations. This will help us with our staffing as well as being able to produce valuable projects (e.g. introductory fellowship for professionals, career planning program, EA groups resilience building, leadership retreat, etc.) and guidance to encourage, support, and excite people in their pursuit of doing good.

You can help our community with a donation through our Manifund post[1] or through Paypal.

Outline of this post

  1. Why donate to EA Philippines?

  2. What are EA Philippines’ goals and how do we aim to achieve them?

  3. Who is on your team?

  4. What other funding is EA Philippines applying to?

  5. What are the most likely causes and outcomes if this project fails? (premortem)

  6. Concluding thoughts

Why Donate To EA Philippines

Track record

EA Philippines was founded in November 2018 by Kate Lupango, Nastassja “Tanya” Quijano, and Brian Tan. They made great progress in growing our community in 2019 and 2020, and the three of them received a community building grant (CBG) from CEA to work on growing the community from late 2020 until the end of 2021. Since then, EA PH has become one of the largest and most active groups among those in LMICs and Southeast Asia. The group has received grants from the EA Infrastructure Fund to fund us from 2022– 2023, with Elmerei Cuevas serving as our Executive Director during this period.

Since being founded, EA PH has:

  1. helped start three student chapters in the top three local universities

  2. organized a successful EAGxPhilippines conference being the 3rd most likely to be recommended among EAGs and EAGxs

  3. had over 300 different people complete an introductory EA fellowship of ours or our student chapters)

  4. had over 80 active members join EAG/​EAGx conferences around the world including EAGxPhilippines (which also garnered 40 first-timer Filipinos)

  5. had 2 retreats for student organizer leadership and career planning

  6. members who have started promising EA projects (with a total of at least 14 EA-aligned organizations in the Philippines), such as the ones in the next section.

However, EAIF’s last grant to EA PH was only for 6 months (from April to September 2023), and they decided to just give the then team a 2-month exit grant rather than a renewal grant at the end of it. Due to the lack of secured funding, as well as wanting to rethink and redefine EA Philippines’s strategic priorities, EA PH’s board decided that it would be in the organization’s best interest to explore new leadership to pursue its refined direction. The new leadership would then have to fundraise for their salaries and EA PH’s operational expenses. The board led a public hiring round, and this led to them hiring us (Sam and Zian)[2] in late December to serve as interim co-directors of EA PH and to fundraise for EA PH.

EA-Aligned Organizations in the Philippines: Case Studies

Over the last few years, several EA PH members have started cause-specific organizations, projects, and initiatives. Below we highlight some

Animal Empathy Philippines

Animal Empathy Philippines was founded by Kate Lupango (co-founder of EA Philippines), Ging Geronimo (former volunteer at EA Philippines), and Janaisa Baril (former Communications and Events Associate of EA Philippines). The organization started with community building and now focuses on bringing farmed animal issues in the Philippines to the forefront and harnessing collective action to effectively help farmed animals in the Philippines. AEP has published a scoping report on alternative proteins and is currently completing its animal advocacy journey mapping and its swine welfare research project. They also represented the consumer sector in a national stakeholder consultation for the development of the local plant-based industry and the creation of a roadmap. They are supported by EA Funds, Animal Charity Evaluators, Humane America Animal Foundation, and the Open Philanthropy Project.

Phlourish Mental Health Initiative

Phlourish Mental Health Initiative is co-founded by Roc Bata, Joseph Cubar, and Shen Javier, all of whom are active members of EA PH. Phlourish is on a mission to test and scale evidence-based and cost-effective mental health interventions so they are accessible to Filipino adolescents. They are currently testing guided self-help workbooks, which is one of the interventions identified in Effective Altruism Philippines’ Mental Health Charity Ideas Research Project. Phlourish is a recipient of Mental Health Funding Circle’s Spring Grants Round.

WhiteBox Research

WhiteBox Research is an AI safety organization co-founded by Clark Urzo, Brian Tan, and Kriz Tahimic, all of whom are active in EA PH. WhiteBox aims to solve open research problems in AI interpretability and develop more AI safety researchers. Currently, they’re organizing a five-month, part-time fellowship for 13 people in Manila to master the fundamentals of mechanistic interpretability research.

Check out other EA Organizations/​ projects active in the Philippines here.

EA PH Members: Case Studies

In the past years, several of our members took active steps to grow their EA journeys. Below we share some case studies of EA Philippines members.

Marifel “Ging” Geronimo

Ging Geronimo is a co-founder of Animal Empathy Philippines. She previously worked for the Philippines’ social and economic development planning and policy coordinating body and as a consultant for a multilateral bank. She first found out about EA by joining EA Philippines’ Intro EA discussion group in 2020 and started volunteering for us in 2021. She also took the Giving What We Can pledge in 2020.

Rochelle “Roc” Bata

Roc Bata is the Founder and Executive Director of Phlourish, a local nonprofit that aims to scale cost-effective mental health interventions in the Philippines. She was previously the Chief Operations Officer of ClimateScience, a non-profit providing free resources on climate change and its solutions. Roc first found out about EA in 2018, and she went to her first EA Philippines event in 2019. She attended our Intro to EA discussion group in 2020, which motivated her even more to do more good with her career.

Alethea “Althy” Cendaña

Althy Cendaña currently works as an Operations Associate for Fish Welfare Initiative. As part of the international support team, she provides administrative and operational support for their main program in India. She previously worked as Associate Director EA Philippines and President of EA UP Diliman. Althy first found out about EA when she joined EA UP Diliman as its founding VP for Logistics and Internal Affairs in 2021. She also works as a research volunteer for the Shrimp Welfare Project.

Our board members can also be considered case studies of EA Philippines’ success:

  1. Brian Tan is a co-founder of WhiteBox Research, where he leads their operations and marketing. He’s also a co-founder and board member of EA Philippines, and he worked full-time for EA PH on a grant in 2021. He was also a Group Support Contractor at CEA for two years, where he supported EA groups around the world. He first found out about EA in 2017 and helped start EA Philippines in 2018.

  2. Raymund “Red” Bermejo is the Executive Director of Anti-Entropy which provides operations support to high-impact organizations as well as tools and resources for ops staff. He previously was the COO of a global tech consultancy firm for almost a decade. Red got engaged in EA by joining EA Philippines’ introductory discussion group in 2020. In 2022, he left his COO role and became an Associate Director for EA Philippines.

  3. Tanya Quijano is currently a senior program officer at the Australian Embassy in the Philippines managing a 16 million USD policy development program. She co-founded EA Philippines in 2018 and served as a part-time community builder for EA PH from 2018–2023 to pursue outreach to professionals and continue to advise EA PH members in pursuing impactful careers.

What are EA Philippines’ goals and how do we aim to achieve them?

Funding breakdown

Our preferred funding amounts to USD 43,000 for 1 year of operations and a 2-month buffer for staff funding and routine operations. This will cover funding for the salaries of Zian Bonoan and Sam Ackary at 0.5 FTE each as co-directors, operational expenses (e.g. Tech Subscriptions, Events, Socials, Book Orders, Routine Volunteers, etc.), and funding all the projects mentioned in the Project Breakdown section.

The minimum amount of funding would be USD 28,000 for 1 year of operations. This would primarily entail changes in the projects we choose to run for the year.

We think EA Philippines is a cost-effective organization to fund considering the difference in the cost of living compared to EA groups in higher-income countries, making our projects and costs cheaper to run and sustain. You can refer to this budget breakdown for more information.

Project breakdown

In the next year, our core team hopes to achieve the following goals with the specified metrics for success for each project:

We recognize that these particular projects may not necessarily “reinvent the wheel.” However, these events are strategically chosen not only to sustain our uphill progress but to continue scaling up towards a diverse pool of individuals looking to do the most good they can. These projects will be designed as a funnel to the other; for example, we hope to initiate our projects in this order:

Introductory fellowship for professionals/​Seeding a new EA chapter —> In-depth fellowship —> Career planning program —> Leadership retreat/​EA groups resilience building

This chain model is a response to the need for impactful follow-ups after projects. Alongside these projects, routine activities such as career/​chapter advising and monthly socials/​meetups.

In these succeeding projects, we hope to maximize our pool of volunteers and potentially take on some interns who can assist in events management, administrative tasks, or community engagement. We expect to take in at least 5 volunteers for these initiatives, both students and professionals potentially sourced from our introductory fellowships or previously engaged members.

Objective 1. To introduce new and diverse members to EA PH

We believe it is essential to provide EA knowledge-building spaces to unique individuals actively looking for ways to create more impact with their resources. We plan to achieve this in two ways:

  1. Introductory fellowship for professionals. In 2022 EA Philippines has hosted one cycle of IF for professionals (see syllabus here). We believe this is an important initiative to sustain considering that all introductory fellowship opportunities in the Philippines are geared for university students or fresh graduates. Additionally, given that we have previously conducted this program, our team has a model to work with and improve on for future cycles. Ideally, we would be accepting ~30 participants and aiming for a 60% graduation rate—the same metric we followed in our first cycle. While we only reached a 40% graduation rate for all monitored fellows, we were able to generate 17 graduates and around 14 members willing to be part of EA PH. We aim to exceed these numbers in the succeeding cycle. Additionally, we aim to channel these talents into existing EA-aligned organizations or to other EA PH events such as a career planning program.

  2. Seeding a new EA chapter. A motivated university student member of the EA PH community expressed interest in opening an EA chapter outside of Metro Manila—specifically in the Mindanao region. This member expressed confidence in taking on three co-founders and eight new members. We see supporting this budding EA chapter as an exciting opportunity to pursue, especially with local EA organizations such as Healthy Futures Global. With an EA chapter in Mindanao, we can help create talent to support these organizations. Additionally, much of the activities of EA Philippines has been centered on Metro Manila audiences. Our team finds seeding a new chapter outside of Metro Manila to be a compelling opportunity to expand the EA movement into other parts of the Philippines. EA Philippines would be providing mentoring to the co-founders and connecting them with existing EA group support programs.

Objective 2. To build the skills and confidence of EA PH members to pursue/​sustain EA-aligned initiatives

Our members have initiated various local EA initiatives ranging from spearheading projects to leading registered nonprofits. We believe it is important to both 1) support our existing members leading these initiatives and 2) encourage aspiring members looking to initiate a local EA endeavor. We have two key projects we believe can accomplish this:

  1. Leadership retreat. Retreats are an incredibly high-impact opportunity. EA Philippines has not yet conducted a similar program to a leadership retreat. We hope to explore this leadership retreat through one of either ideas: 1) helping existing founders lead organizations better through strategy setting, fundraising, delegation skills, etc. or 2) helping aspiring founders by exploring topics such as co-founder fit, project ideation, etc. In either idea, our goal is to facilitate a participant-driven program design. We have at least 14 cause/​topic specific organizations based in the Philippines led by amazing EAs, offering a wide opportunity to support these EAs. With this number of organizations (and considering that we can expect around 2-3 EAs on average from each of these orgs), our ideal turnout would be 20-30 participants for a leadership retreat.

  2. Student groups resilience building. While EA PH is not completely hands-on with our university chapters, we provide regular support in terms of advising and resources such as books. In our observations with our three university chapters, we recognize that recruiting organizers is a significant challenge. We hope to address this by providing a space where university organizers convene and share ways in which resilience can be sustained in their respective chapters. Additionally, if we could support the fruition of a new EA chapter in Mindanao, we could provide this same opportunity for their organizers.

Objective 3. To introduce high-fidelity models of EA for in-depth EA knowledge

EA Philippines, along with our university chapters, offer several entry points into the EA knowledge space. Our goal is to elevate this further by offering more high-fidelity avenues for in-depth EA knowledge. We plan to facilitate an in-depth EA fellowship targeted towards those who have accomplished an introductory fellowship provided by either our university student chapters or by EA Philippines’ professional’s introductory fellowship. Previously, EA Philippines conducted an in-depth reading group (see syllabus here) An in-depth EA fellowship can offer members an opportunity to engage in EA more profoundly.

Objective 4. To prepare EA PH members for pursuing a high-impact career

A common concern in our community is the need for a follow-up to EA introductory-level opportunities. We believe offering a program for career support and development is a viable fit for this need. We believe it is essential to help members further apply EA principles to their careers. To achieve this, we plan to pursue a career planning program. In the past, EA Philippines has provided career support by offering advising and hosting a career planning retreat tailored for students and professionals. Shifting from a retreat program to a continuous 6-week program allows us to provide our members’ long-term focus, flexibility, and structured guidance as opposed to having these

Aside from our four objectives, our team is considering the possibility of registering EA Philippines. EA Philippines is aiming to solidify our credibility in the local context to open avenues for a wider network of opportunities. We recognize that with this established credibility comes more opportunities for sustainable funding, networking, trust in the organization, and attracting more talent (which increases the pool of potentially high-impact EAs in the Philippines). Out of all these benefits, we see the opportunity for sustainable funding of particular interest. Registration can reduce friction or barriers associated with accepting funding from potential grantors/​donors. This is important for EA Philippines to continue scaling up as more and more.

Who is on your team?

What’s your track record on similar projects?

Zian

Zian Bonoan (LinkedIn) currently serves as the Co-Director of EA Philippines. She has a Bachelor’s Degree in Economics from Ateneo de Manila University. Besides being active in the Effective Altruism space, Zian also works as a part-time market researcher in GoDoc, a software company specializing in developing applications for medical practitioners.

Much of her work is centered within EA, having recently helped organize EAGxPhilippines in October, last year. Her experience here includes producing all graphics used before and during the conference, coordinating with several suppliers for the timely production of needed materials, and crafting an appropriate marketing strategy to pique the interest of EAs primarily within the Philippines and in Asia. Her interest in EA started within her university group, EA Blue, where she also served as the Vice President for Communications. She also provides communications and graphic design support for EA university and city groups on a freelance basis. Some of her previous clients include EA for Christians, Stanford EA, and a handful of EAGxs among others.

Sam

Sam Ackary (LinkedIn) currently serves as the Co-Director of EA Philippines. She graduated in 2023 from Ateneo de Manila University with a degree in BS Health Sciences and a minor in Sociology. After graduating from university, Sam began working in the health and development space. She currently works at the Ateneo School of Government as a Research and Project Assistant for their Tobacco Control and Governance Program under the Ateneo Policy Center division.

In the EA space, Sam served as the Secretary-General of Effective Altruism Blue in her last year of university. Her milestones as a Secretary-General include spearheading the creation of an organizational constitution, mentoring an Associate Secretary-General, and systematizing an event evaluation system. She also has experience in EA operations work as a Research and Project Assistant with Anti-Entropy, directly reporting to Red Bermejo, Executive Director and a board member of EA Philippines. Sam has explored other EA opportunities by joining a Virtual Program reading group for The Precipice, volunteering for EAGxPhilippines, and facilitating EA topic discussion spaces for EA Blue.

How the work will be split

The following breakdown of roles and responsibilities are divided between Zian and Sam:

Zian

  • Career advising

  • Events organizing and management

  • Communications

  • Operations (finances, administrative tasks)

Sam

  • Career advising

  • University chapter advising

  • Events organizing and management

  • Community health

  • Volunteer/​intern management

While Zian and Sam are early in their careers, they can provide value to university students or fresh graduates initiating their professional careers. Both Zian and Sam are backed by rich work experience gained through both professional work in the EA and non-EA space through student organizing for EA, internships, freelance work, and part-time jobs. With these experiences in hand, Zian and Sam can provide young EA members with advice regarding seeking high-impact work experiences, maximizing networking opportunities, and developing career goals.

What other funding is EA Philippines applying to?

While the Co-directors currently receive a small stipend from the savings of the previous core team, this runway is projected to run out by the end of April. We will be putting out a call for funding on the EA Forum shortly after this is posted. Around the same time, we will be passing in an application for CEA Group Support Funding after Zian became a CEA Certified Organizer last February. We will also be applying for funding from Meta Charity Funders and the EA Infrastructure Fund which we intend to put out by mid to late March. Finally, we are considering seeking funding locally although we currently have no funders in mind for this.

As of this time, we have received USD 2000 from Brian and Red ($1000 each) which will be placed into paying Zian and Sam part-time stipends for the next couple of months.

What are the most likely causes and outcomes if this project fails? (premortem)

  1. Issues in the global community put EA in a bad light

    1. Outcome: People who would normally be excited about EA ideas might look to the issues of the global EA community. This may influence their view of EA and lead them to disengage or even take on a negative view of EA regardless of the progress and welcoming community the Philippines has.

    2. Mitigation: Provide a space in the EA PH community where people can discuss and ask their questions about concerns they may have. It would also be best practice for us to be as transparent and honest as possible about EA PH’s stances on such events while also promoting or defending EA/​EA Philippines locally.

  2. The information we put out is not valuable or communicates EA poorly

    1. Outcome: Very talented people who go through our programs may disengage with EA or engage with EA for reasons other than doing good effectively. EA Philippines may also end up progressively moving away from the ideas of EA or producing programs that ultimately do not lead anyone to pursue tangible actions of their own.

    2. Mitigation: Establish a deep understanding of EA knowledge among the core team so that projects and operations are designed in such a way that communicates EA ideas as clearly and accurately as possible. This can mean expecting core team members to regularly put aside the time to read through EA material, stay updated with developments across the global EA community, retain involvement and connection with the wider EA community outside of the Philippines, etc. Projects would also be designed in such a way that encourages following through with personal actions from the participants besides being a source of information.

  3. We can’t get enough volunteers

    1. Outcome: Some of the projects we’ve carefully selected and planned for will have to be deprioritized or restructured and therefore some goals may ultimately not be attained.

    2. Mitigation: Selecting volunteer involvement to be in roles that are more suitable to university students who also happen to be the biggest group and have also shown to be the most eager to take part in such activities.

  4. Internal disputes deter people from participating in the community

    1. Outcome: Internal conflicts can produce an environment that feels unwelcoming and distracts from the goals of EA therefore the loss of more talented people in the EA space.

    2. Mitigation: Continue providing the means for people to voice out concerns and have a point person for community health support to make sure this is not overlooked.

Concluding thoughts

EA Philippines humbly seeks your support to sustain and expand our impactful initiatives. With a proven track record of fostering a vibrant community and catalyzing meaningful change, EA Philippines has emerged as a leader in Southeast Asia. However, the recent conclusion of our grant underscores the urgent need for sustainable funding to support our operations and initiatives. Your contribution will enable us to sustain our staffing, produce valuable projects, and provide essential guidance to our community members. Your support is not just an investment in EA Philippines; it’s an investment in the future of effective altruism in the Philippines.

We look forward to your generosity — your support will drive the current and future effective altruists in the Philippines!

Should you have any questions or clarifications, you can contact either Sam (sam@effectivealtruism.ph) or Zian (zian@effectivealtruism.ph) and they’d be happy to help!

  1. ^

    How to donate through Manifund:
    1. Create a Manifund account (should take <2 minutes)
    2. You can add money via credit card, or bank transfers, DAF, and crypto for larger donation sizes
    3. Go to the EA Philippines post on Manifund and donate there

    US-based donors can get a tax deduction for donating on Manifund.

  2. ^

    The board initially hired Sam and Zian as Co-Associate Directors and Mark Romero as Executive Director. However, last January, Mark’s Canadian residency application got approved. Given this, Mark decided to resign from the position, and Sam and Zian stepped up as Co-Directors. See more about this here.

zianbee21 Mar 2024 4:42 UTC
93 points
18 comments13 min readEA link