1. I’m not really convinced by your post that what actually happened with your grant applications was at all caused by you applying from Romania. (Personally, if I was a grantmaker, based on your EA Forum presence, I would reject your application to create/grow a new national-level group if you applied from basically anywhere. You can read more of my thinking about the topic of national EA groups in this post)
2.I really dislike the type of discourse exemplified by this paragraph: “I said that I felt Romania was being discriminated against and she said I had to understand the EA leadership because when Romania joined the EU a lot of uneducated, low-income immigrants flooded Western countries and now they have a bad impression of Romanians. I couldn’t help but have the impression that she talked to somebody in the EA leadership and concluded that Romania wouldn’t be funded any time soon.”
This is somewhat serious allegation, but also seems … a bit like free-floating rumor, without much fact? Unless the person you talked to decides to reveal herself, and explain who are the people she talked to, and what exactly did they said to her, it’s really hard to say what happened, and there is a decent chance your guesses are just wrong, or this is some sort of telephone-game scenario.
Personally, if I was a grantmaker, based on your EA Forum presence, I would reject your application to create/grow a new national-level group if you applied from basically anywhere.
Huh? It’s a little unfair to say this without substantiating. I looked at OP’s Forum history to see if there was something egregious there and didn’t see anything that would justify a claim like this. Could you elaborate more?
While I don’t want to go into discussing specific details, I want to make clear I don’t think ‘not writing something egregious in the forum’ is the standard which should be applied here.
I don’t think the original poster’s Forum history shows this. If you disagree, it’s probably important to figure out if the crux is you imagine a different bar, or you think the forum history provides little data / or positive data about meeting the bar I mean.
Since you’ve obviously thought a lot about this issue, it would be interesting to hear more about the extent to which your bar is dependent on the adjectives “funded” and/or “full-time.” Do you think the bar is significantly lower for a half-FTE, quarter-FTE, or expenses-only funding? I don’t mean with respect to the original poster, but more generally—especially in countries where the primary language is neither English nor another language with a significant amount of EA content.
I think Jan took a reasonable approach here by noting a significant problem without pointing to specific details, although I understand why people might disagree. I think commenting that the original poster’s personal suitability to create/grow a new national-level group is a much more plausible basis for denial is appropriate here—given that the poster is implying that ethnic stereotypes (or worse) may have contributed to the grant denial.
At the same time, I think a more detailed narrative discussion about the original poster’s suitability—unless that feedback was specifically requested—would be more than is necessary to respond to the implied accusation, and would risk unduly derailing the comment thread away from the substantive issue the poster is seeking to raise. Rather, Jan told those who were interested in more information where to look (“EA Forum presence”) to evaluate this possibility for themselves. For what it’s worth, I agree with Jan that the original poster’s forum history would justify a grant denial.
This is somewhat serious allegation, but also seems … a bit like free-floating rumor, without much fact? Unless the person you talked to decides to reveal herself, and explain who are the people she talked to, and what exactly did they said to her, it’s really hard to say what happened, and there is a decent chance your guesses are just wrong, or this is some sort of telephone-game scenario
Assuming the OP is telling the truth, what alternative do you expect them to do here? They have made no specific slander against anyone, they have simply mentioned a concerning encounter/rumour and asked for clarification as to whether or not it was true.
I think setting a norm of downvoting any EA criticism that isn’t backed by audio recordings or whatever is not a good idea, especially coming off of a disaster that could have possibly been prevented if more people blurted.
For example, the OP could have contacted the person he talked to at the EAGx and asked her whether his interpretation of what she said were correct. If you read OP’s other post about a conflict resulting from asking for feedback about the grant application, you have one datapoint where someone was talking with him about the unsuccessful grant application, and was surprised by OPs interpretation.
As I mentioned in the comment, in case of this post, unless the person he talked to decides to reveal herself (and she may have good reasons not to do that), I don’t see any reasonable way to ‘clarify’ this. The OP makes a lot of statements about what was his interpretation—unfortunately even if I completely believe him what he writes was his interpretation, I have some doubts the other person would agree this is what she meant, and I have even more doubts about the next inferential step, where the proposed explanation involves ‘EA leadership’ talking with her.
Object level: I’d bet EAIF doesn’t have a policy “don’t fund EA efforts in Romania”. Maybe someone from EAIF can confirm.
I don’t think Rob’s post covers this case—and if it does, I basically disagree such norm would be good.
For example, the OP could have contacted the person he talked to at the EAGx and asked her whether his interpretation of what she said were correct.
That is a fair point. I thought of doing that but I ended up choosing not to because I’ve been overthinking this post for quite a while and I wanted to get it over with. But now that you mention it I realize that it is indeed important, so I will do it :)
Object level: I’d bet EAIF doesn’t have a policy “don’t fund EA efforts in Romania”. Maybe someone from EAIF can confirm.
I would also bet the same, sorry if I gave the wrong impression! I just think they have a higher bar for Romanian projects, which again, is fair enough as long as there is more transparency regarding how countries are prioritized.
Regardless of OP’s specific case, I think it would be interesting and important to know if grantmakers in the community building area have strategies or priorities in this area, and what they are. On the one hand, as Berke pointed out, there are community building projects being funded in various countries poorer than Romania. On the other hand, you can see prominent forum users writing about prioritising counties based on how rich they are, and if this point of view is also found among grantmakers, that’s concerning.
It’s getting clearer and clearer that EA has a problem with diversity and isn’t promoting it nearly enough, instead directing most of its efforts into audiences similar to already existing members. Given the increasing number of people who are troubled by this, I think transparency in this regard would be beneficial.
I don’t know what the actual grantmakers think, but if I was deciding about the funding
- you can get funding to do EA localization basically in any country, if you come up with a reasonable strategy & demonstrate competence and understanding of EA - difficulty of coming up with a reasonable strategy in my view varies between places; e.g., if you wanted to create, for the sake of discussion, EA Norway, a reasonable strategy may be ‘just’ supporting people in attempts to do impactful work, supporting uni groups, routing donations and maybe engaging with Norway’s policy sphere. What you end up with could be pretty close to what’s done in Oxford or London. In contrast, if you wanted to create, for the sake of discussion, EA Nepal, I don’t think you should focus on routing donations or tell people they should follow 80k career advice. (And if you ask for funding to do that, I don’t think you should be funded.) - some locations could be obviously important, but that may mean actually higher bar for the efforts there
With this decision model in mind, - I would be confused how to react to confused and extremely straw models (e.g. GDP of the country or per capita? neither) - I think I would find it pretty difficult to produce the type of artifacts some commenters here demand (i.e. some ranked lists of countries?) - Even when I would be able to list some ‘obviously important places’, the interpretation of what does that mean would not be ‘you should do community building there’ or ‘community building there should get funding’, but more like “it’s important to get this right”.
As I explained in the post, I never meant to suggest that my application was rejected primarily because it was coming from Romania. It is clear to me, however, that this was one of the reasons, because I’ve been told that quite explicitly. The stories I shared here are not very detailed because I didn’t want to identify anybody, so I’m in a tricky position where it’s hard for me to provide additional evidence. But let me clarify a few things:
I’m not making the allegation that the EA leadership is discriminating Romania in some evil Machiavellian way (sorry if it seemed like that). I think it’s legitimate to prioritize some countries over others in principle, as long as this is transparent. My guess is that the people in charge of this decision did some calculations and concluded that Romania is not very high priority (which is fair enough), but they’re afraid to be transparent about it because they’re afraid it might be controversial. I personally think this reveals a dangerous pattern of avoiding controversy in EA, a pattern that is not sustainable because it just creates unnecessary drama when things do eventually come out.
The allegation that “Westerners have a bad impression of Romanians” didn’t come from me, and I think this provides extra evidence for the view that EA is reluctant to fund Romania because, if this person was told that the problem was only with me and not at all with Romania, she wouldn’t have made this allegation. I already felt that Romania was not a priority at that point, and they clearly felt something similar if they made this comment.
In any case, I didn’t want to focus so much on my particular story, I am more interested in having a discussion about how EAIF prioritizes countries. Do you think they don’t prioritize countries differently at all? You think there would never be a situation where an application is almost good enough, but the country is too low in priority so it doesn’t get approved?
While trying not to be ungenerous, this new post of “EA not funding country” aspect seems to fit into the above schema, whose goal seems to be drawing attention to their rejection (or relitigating it outright).
It’s bad if the post series of the OP is mischaracterizing these events, which I think is happening in the case of the grantmaker and now in this post about EA and countries.
I also don’t think it is good to say “Founder of EA <Country/Region/City>”, unless this is a claim for unusual/special activity or accomplishments that is distinct from normal community building.
Some people in the comments were saying that EA orgs don’t want to give feedback because it could cause complaints online, but my guess is that giving feedback would’ve reduced online complaints in this particular instance.
While trying not to be ungenerous, this new post of “EA not funding country” aspect seems to fit into the above schema, whose goal seems to be drawing attention to their rejection (or relitigating it outright).
I’m not surprised that you have this impression, which is one of the reasons why I was anxious about posting about my experience, but let me explain how I approached it:
After my first rejection, my posts were genuinely only trying to learn more so that I could write a better application in the future. After my second rejection, I lost hope of getting funded so I really have no intention of “relitigating” anything. I posted about my “clash” because I wasn’t sure how to deal with it and I needed some advice, and I am posting about this now because I think EAIF/CEA should be more transparent about how they prioritize different countries. But yes, I understand that if I prolong this discussion too much it can get repetitive, so I will only write one more post about it trying to summarize my whole experience and give some constructive feedback.
I also don’t think it is good to say “Founder of EA <Country/Region/City>”, unless this is a claim for unusual/special activity or accomplishments that is distinct from normal community building.
I just started the group, I am not claiming any special accomplishments. I just mentioned it because I believe it’s relevant information. Do you think I should phrase it in some other way?
Romania is not a very rich country (GDP/Capita under $15k, around 20% of the US).
Romania is not a very large country (19m people, around 6% of the US).
There are not a very large number of EAs in Romania.
There are no ‘special’ reasons to think Romania is unusually important.
(all statistics from Google).
I think the above probably basically fully explains Romania’s relative ranking, compared to other countries and regions. Then there are individual team-specific (not country-specific) reasons like the social skills and conscientiousness of the potential organiser, and the threshold for funding, which determines how far along the list of potential groups the funding goes. I think you’re right that in the past people have made (at least ex post) misleading statements about how plentiful funding is.
Finally, I think you are over-updating on your conversation; it seems like a stretch to me to imply that someone at CEA suggested the problem was the poor behavior of Romanian immigrants to the UK.
As a data point, a few months ago an Italian friend mentioned hearing at an EA conference in ~2016 that Italy was not a priority country at the time. ~6 years later he was still very upset about it, he felt that the statement was racist and discriminatory.
I was very surprised by the reaction, as rational prioritization is a core principle of EA, and we don’t have infinite resources to focus on every single country, so I think we should be particularly/surprisingly sensitive when discussing these things.
Is this information public but buried in some long PDF report?
You can use https://funds.effectivealtruism.org/grants to look for country names/adjectives (e.g. “Czech”) and find some public grants. But I think that lots of grants are (understandably) not public.
Turkey, Kenya and Philippines have lower GDP per capita than Romania but all of these countries have community builders(correct me if I’m wrong) that receive financial or infrastructural support from EA organizations/funds, so I’m not sure how much this has to do with the fact that Romania is poorer compared to Western Europe(or cultural biases that result from this wealth discrepancy between Romania and Western Europe).
Although there may be some other reason that explains why EAIF may prefer not to fund any EA projects in Romania(or some other country x), but even if such a country-specific reason exists, not being transparent about those reasons and lack of proper feedback seems problematic(and frustrating for applicants).
It might also be a matter of who is funding the community builders in these countries—maybe some grantmakers are better at this than others. This seems like it would be useful to know, if it is the case.
Strong upvote because it’s an important question to raise. I am a newcomer/outsider, and my reaction comes with all the downsides and (potential) advantages that implies . . .
It sounds like you got some feedback, although it may not have been stated clearly. Reading between the lines, it sounds like the grantmakers—who have limited time for independent research—do not have much relevant knowledge about Romania, so you would have some extra tasks that someone who was seeking funding for a group in (say) a large US city would not. In the US-city example, the reviewer would assume—or could easily verify—that there was a reasonably-sized group of potential future donors and/or potential full-time EAs to justify the expenses of building a community and the risk of failure. The reviewer probably has a better sense of whether the proposed project will work, because they would know about projects in similiar US cities. Do you think you made a good business case for (a) the likelihood that your project would succeed and (b) the upside of the project succeeding? I am not a grantmaker, but for (a) I’d want to hear about what your group has done without funding, and for (b) I’d want to hear about the people you have already recruited (for lack of a better word), where you planned to expand your group’s reach, and why you thought funding would help that happen.
I could be reading your post incorrectly, but it leaves me with the vague idea that you may think that (1) community building is important as an end to itself, not as a means to ultimate ends; and (2) a comparison to what gets funded in other environments is an important means of evaluation—possibly for fairness reasons. I doubt either impression would help your grant with most funders in this space. I think the reason I get this vague impression is that your post doesn’t seem to engage with the feedback implied by questions like “what’s the comparative advantage of Romania”? You may not think either of those things, but it might be helpful to read through your grant proposal (or ask someone else to do so) to see if anything in them gives off either of these impressions.
On “our time is too valuable to put out a list of country’s relevance” etc.:
I think this might be a case where a little bit of visible effort avoids much unseen effort. Maybe we have a tendency to overlook the latter and thus we underinvest in data, organization and communication ?
A lot of effort is spent planning and writing grants. While some of it may be useful practice even if the application is futile, I think a lot of this effort could be put to better use.
So, e.g., if grant makers like EAIF put out a list of priority countries, or allowed preliminary “one paragraph applications” and responded with a yes/no or a predicted chance of success it might save ppl like Ariel a lot of time, effort and frustration. He/she could say “I’m applying to start an EA Romania group, here’s my CV and profile” and they could say “we predict less than 2% chance of success”.
(Similar arguments apply to giving feedback, I think.)
Adding that this doesn’t have to be an explicit list of ~200 countries, but rather the general ideas that guide the strategy on funding community building efforts should be enough. This way we can compare and offer criticism of important grantmaking strategies.
There may be no realistic way to produce a master list of what countries do / do not have a reasonable chance at funding. For instance, the grantmaker may just not know enough about the country and the possibilities it offers without reading a grant proposal.
What would people think of a presumption that EAIF or other funders in this space should ordinarily offer at least a minimal participation grant for first-time applications filed in good faith coming from low/middle income countries?
By “participation grant” I mean a reasonable amount to compensate for planning and writing of the grant itself. And I might extend “middle income countries” a bit further than the official World Bank definition, at least for partial compensation. The grants could be rather low; at the top of the World Bank definition, the top of the range for MICs is $12,535 GNI per capita, so a week’s worth of time based on that rate would be somewhere around $241. I’m not wedded to a specific way of calculating a participation grant, but this payout report suggests the number of denials is not that large and presumably only a fraction of denials are from LMICs.
The perception that funding is harder to get in LMIC countries may dissaude people from applying in the first place, and getting applications from LMIC countries has value. So the presumption would shift at least some of the costs of producing unsuccessful applications in LMICs from the applicant to the community. It’s not a complete answer, but compensating certain unsuccessful applicants who produce something for community use seems better to me than making them bear all costs.
This whole experience has made me realize there is very little transparency regarding group funding and groups in general...
...Is this information public but buried in some long PDF report? Or is it not public at all?
Is there a reason why this information is not public (besides “it will take time to generate/maintain it and we would rather spend our time on more impactful work) ? Are there any downsides to making this information public?
I think for some of the questions the information the information would take an effort to collect. For example, I don’t think anyone in CEA or EAIF knows the answer of “How old is EA Finland” (and many members of EA Finland would not know this either). Estimating the size of EA Finland is also a little tricky. When we applied for funding, we gave many different numbers, such as the number of active volunteers and number of people on our Telegram channel, so these numbers EAIF would know, in case they would want to start collecting an info list like the suggested one.
I could find some national organization related approved grants here: https://funds.effectivealtruism.org/grants, but there is a warning that some data is still missing, because the tool is in beta. When the data is complete, an interested person could do a search by country and create a list of funding received per country, with some info on details such as how much of it goes to salaries. (At least I could find the grant info of the grant we received for EA Finland by searching by “Finland”.)
I don’t think anyone is publicly listing the rejected grants. Personally, I would be interested to see them – maybe grant applications could ask for approval to list the rejections as well in the application process?
Downvoted. Let me explain why:
1. I’m not really convinced by your post that what actually happened with your grant applications was at all caused by you applying from Romania. (Personally, if I was a grantmaker, based on your EA Forum presence, I would reject your application to create/grow a new national-level group if you applied from basically anywhere. You can read more of my thinking about the topic of national EA groups in this post)
2. I really dislike the type of discourse exemplified by this paragraph: “I said that I felt Romania was being discriminated against and she said I had to understand the EA leadership because when Romania joined the EU a lot of uneducated, low-income immigrants flooded Western countries and now they have a bad impression of Romanians. I couldn’t help but have the impression that she talked to somebody in the EA leadership and concluded that Romania wouldn’t be funded any time soon.”
This is somewhat serious allegation, but also seems … a bit like free-floating rumor, without much fact? Unless the person you talked to decides to reveal herself, and explain who are the people she talked to, and what exactly did they said to her, it’s really hard to say what happened, and there is a decent chance your guesses are just wrong, or this is some sort of telephone-game scenario.
Huh? It’s a little unfair to say this without substantiating. I looked at OP’s Forum history to see if there was something egregious there and didn’t see anything that would justify a claim like this. Could you elaborate more?
While I don’t want to go into discussing specific details, I want to make clear I don’t think ‘not writing something egregious in the forum’ is the standard which should be applied here.
In my view, national-level groups are potentially important and good but need to be able to do a lot of complex work to be really successful. This means my bar for ‘who should do this as a funded full-time job’ is roughly similar to ‘who should work at median-impact roles at CEA’ or ‘work as a generalist at Rethink Priorities’ or similar.
I don’t think the original poster’s Forum history shows this. If you disagree, it’s probably important to figure out if the crux is you imagine a different bar, or you think the forum history provides little data / or positive data about meeting the bar I mean.
Since you’ve obviously thought a lot about this issue, it would be interesting to hear more about the extent to which your bar is dependent on the adjectives “funded” and/or “full-time.” Do you think the bar is significantly lower for a half-FTE, quarter-FTE, or expenses-only funding? I don’t mean with respect to the original poster, but more generally—especially in countries where the primary language is neither English nor another language with a significant amount of EA content.
I think Jan took a reasonable approach here by noting a significant problem without pointing to specific details, although I understand why people might disagree. I think commenting that the original poster’s personal suitability to create/grow a new national-level group is a much more plausible basis for denial is appropriate here—given that the poster is implying that ethnic stereotypes (or worse) may have contributed to the grant denial.
At the same time, I think a more detailed narrative discussion about the original poster’s suitability—unless that feedback was specifically requested—would be more than is necessary to respond to the implied accusation, and would risk unduly derailing the comment thread away from the substantive issue the poster is seeking to raise. Rather, Jan told those who were interested in more information where to look (“EA Forum presence”) to evaluate this possibility for themselves. For what it’s worth, I agree with Jan that the original poster’s forum history would justify a grant denial.
Assuming the OP is telling the truth, what alternative do you expect them to do here? They have made no specific slander against anyone, they have simply mentioned a concerning encounter/rumour and asked for clarification as to whether or not it was true.
I think setting a norm of downvoting any EA criticism that isn’t backed by audio recordings or whatever is not a good idea, especially coming off of a disaster that could have possibly been prevented if more people blurted.
For example, the OP could have contacted the person he talked to at the EAGx and asked her whether his interpretation of what she said were correct. If you read OP’s other post about a conflict resulting from asking for feedback about the grant application, you have one datapoint where someone was talking with him about the unsuccessful grant application, and was surprised by OPs interpretation.
As I mentioned in the comment, in case of this post, unless the person he talked to decides to reveal herself (and she may have good reasons not to do that), I don’t see any reasonable way to ‘clarify’ this. The OP makes a lot of statements about what was his interpretation—unfortunately even if I completely believe him what he writes was his interpretation, I have some doubts the other person would agree this is what she meant, and I have even more doubts about the next inferential step, where the proposed explanation involves ‘EA leadership’ talking with her.
Object level: I’d bet EAIF doesn’t have a policy “don’t fund EA efforts in Romania”. Maybe someone from EAIF can confirm.
I don’t think Rob’s post covers this case—and if it does, I basically disagree such norm would be good.
That is a fair point. I thought of doing that but I ended up choosing not to because I’ve been overthinking this post for quite a while and I wanted to get it over with. But now that you mention it I realize that it is indeed important, so I will do it :)
I would also bet the same, sorry if I gave the wrong impression! I just think they have a higher bar for Romanian projects, which again, is fair enough as long as there is more transparency regarding how countries are prioritized.
Regardless of OP’s specific case, I think it would be interesting and important to know if grantmakers in the community building area have strategies or priorities in this area, and what they are. On the one hand, as Berke pointed out, there are community building projects being funded in various countries poorer than Romania. On the other hand, you can see prominent forum users writing about prioritising counties based on how rich they are, and if this point of view is also found among grantmakers, that’s concerning.
It’s getting clearer and clearer that EA has a problem with diversity and isn’t promoting it nearly enough, instead directing most of its efforts into audiences similar to already existing members. Given the increasing number of people who are troubled by this, I think transparency in this regard would be beneficial.
I don’t know what the actual grantmakers think, but if I was deciding about the funding
- you can get funding to do EA localization basically in any country, if you come up with a reasonable strategy & demonstrate competence and understanding of EA
- difficulty of coming up with a reasonable strategy in my view varies between places; e.g., if you wanted to create, for the sake of discussion, EA Norway, a reasonable strategy may be ‘just’ supporting people in attempts to do impactful work, supporting uni groups, routing donations and maybe engaging with Norway’s policy sphere. What you end up with could be pretty close to what’s done in Oxford or London. In contrast, if you wanted to create, for the sake of discussion, EA Nepal, I don’t think you should focus on routing donations or tell people they should follow 80k career advice. (And if you ask for funding to do that, I don’t think you should be funded.)
- some locations could be obviously important, but that may mean actually higher bar for the efforts there
With this decision model in mind,
- I would be confused how to react to confused and extremely straw models (e.g. GDP of the country or per capita? neither)
- I think I would find it pretty difficult to produce the type of artifacts some commenters here demand (i.e. some ranked lists of countries?)
- Even when I would be able to list some ‘obviously important places’, the interpretation of what does that mean would not be ‘you should do community building there’ or ‘community building there should get funding’, but more like “it’s important to get this right”.
As I explained in the post, I never meant to suggest that my application was rejected primarily because it was coming from Romania. It is clear to me, however, that this was one of the reasons, because I’ve been told that quite explicitly. The stories I shared here are not very detailed because I didn’t want to identify anybody, so I’m in a tricky position where it’s hard for me to provide additional evidence. But let me clarify a few things:
I’m not making the allegation that the EA leadership is discriminating Romania in some evil Machiavellian way (sorry if it seemed like that). I think it’s legitimate to prioritize some countries over others in principle, as long as this is transparent. My guess is that the people in charge of this decision did some calculations and concluded that Romania is not very high priority (which is fair enough), but they’re afraid to be transparent about it because they’re afraid it might be controversial. I personally think this reveals a dangerous pattern of avoiding controversy in EA, a pattern that is not sustainable because it just creates unnecessary drama when things do eventually come out.
The allegation that “Westerners have a bad impression of Romanians” didn’t come from me, and I think this provides extra evidence for the view that EA is reluctant to fund Romania because, if this person was told that the problem was only with me and not at all with Romania, she wouldn’t have made this allegation. I already felt that Romania was not a priority at that point, and they clearly felt something similar if they made this comment.
In any case, I didn’t want to focus so much on my particular story, I am more interested in having a discussion about how EAIF prioritizes countries. Do you think they don’t prioritize countries differently at all? You think there would never be a situation where an application is almost good enough, but the country is too low in priority so it doesn’t get approved?
The OP has posted multiple times in the past about their unsuccessful attempts to get EAIF funding.
Their EAIF application directly
Their fellowship program.
Their blog posts.
Some sort of clash with a grant maker (this seems bad in several ways).
While trying not to be ungenerous, this new post of “EA not funding country” aspect seems to fit into the above schema, whose goal seems to be drawing attention to their rejection (or relitigating it outright).
It’s bad if the post series of the OP is mischaracterizing these events, which I think is happening in the case of the grantmaker and now in this post about EA and countries.
I also don’t think it is good to say “Founder of EA <Country/Region/City>”, unless this is a claim for unusual/special activity or accomplishments that is distinct from normal community building.
See related post: The Cost of Rejection
Some people in the comments were saying that EA orgs don’t want to give feedback because it could cause complaints online, but my guess is that giving feedback would’ve reduced online complaints in this particular instance.
I’m not surprised that you have this impression, which is one of the reasons why I was anxious about posting about my experience, but let me explain how I approached it:
After my first rejection, my posts were genuinely only trying to learn more so that I could write a better application in the future. After my second rejection, I lost hope of getting funded so I really have no intention of “relitigating” anything. I posted about my “clash” because I wasn’t sure how to deal with it and I needed some advice, and I am posting about this now because I think EAIF/CEA should be more transparent about how they prioritize different countries. But yes, I understand that if I prolong this discussion too much it can get repetitive, so I will only write one more post about it trying to summarize my whole experience and give some constructive feedback.
I just started the group, I am not claiming any special accomplishments. I just mentioned it because I believe it’s relevant information. Do you think I should phrase it in some other way?
My guess is the answer is basically:
Romania is not a very rich country (GDP/Capita under $15k, around 20% of the US).
Romania is not a very large country (19m people, around 6% of the US).
There are not a very large number of EAs in Romania.
There are no ‘special’ reasons to think Romania is unusually important.
(all statistics from Google).
I think the above probably basically fully explains Romania’s relative ranking, compared to other countries and regions. Then there are individual team-specific (not country-specific) reasons like the social skills and conscientiousness of the potential organiser, and the threshold for funding, which determines how far along the list of potential groups the funding goes. I think you’re right that in the past people have made (at least ex post) misleading statements about how plentiful funding is.
Finally, I think you are over-updating on your conversation; it seems like a stretch to me to imply that someone at CEA suggested the problem was the poor behavior of Romanian immigrants to the UK.
As a data point, a few months ago an Italian friend mentioned hearing at an EA conference in ~2016 that Italy was not a priority country at the time. ~6 years later he was still very upset about it, he felt that the statement was racist and discriminatory.
I was very surprised by the reaction, as rational prioritization is a core principle of EA, and we don’t have infinite resources to focus on every single country, so I think we should be particularly/surprisingly sensitive when discussing these things.
You can use https://funds.effectivealtruism.org/grants to look for country names/adjectives (e.g. “Czech”) and find some public grants. But I think that lots of grants are (understandably) not public.
Why do you think it is “understandable” that lots of grants are not public?
I think a main reason is that many people don’t want their salaries to be public.
Turkey, Kenya and Philippines have lower GDP per capita than Romania but all of these countries have community builders(correct me if I’m wrong) that receive financial or infrastructural support from EA organizations/funds, so I’m not sure how much this has to do with the fact that Romania is poorer compared to Western Europe(or cultural biases that result from this wealth discrepancy between Romania and Western Europe).
Although there may be some other reason that explains why EAIF may prefer not to fund any EA projects in Romania(or some other country x), but even if such a country-specific reason exists, not being transparent about those reasons and lack of proper feedback seems problematic(and frustrating for applicants).
It might also be a matter of who is funding the community builders in these countries—maybe some grantmakers are better at this than others. This seems like it would be useful to know, if it is the case.
Strong upvote because it’s an important question to raise. I am a newcomer/outsider, and my reaction comes with all the downsides and (potential) advantages that implies . . .
It sounds like you got some feedback, although it may not have been stated clearly. Reading between the lines, it sounds like the grantmakers—who have limited time for independent research—do not have much relevant knowledge about Romania, so you would have some extra tasks that someone who was seeking funding for a group in (say) a large US city would not. In the US-city example, the reviewer would assume—or could easily verify—that there was a reasonably-sized group of potential future donors and/or potential full-time EAs to justify the expenses of building a community and the risk of failure. The reviewer probably has a better sense of whether the proposed project will work, because they would know about projects in similiar US cities. Do you think you made a good business case for (a) the likelihood that your project would succeed and (b) the upside of the project succeeding? I am not a grantmaker, but for (a) I’d want to hear about what your group has done without funding, and for (b) I’d want to hear about the people you have already recruited (for lack of a better word), where you planned to expand your group’s reach, and why you thought funding would help that happen.
I could be reading your post incorrectly, but it leaves me with the vague idea that you may think that (1) community building is important as an end to itself, not as a means to ultimate ends; and (2) a comparison to what gets funded in other environments is an important means of evaluation—possibly for fairness reasons. I doubt either impression would help your grant with most funders in this space. I think the reason I get this vague impression is that your post doesn’t seem to engage with the feedback implied by questions like “what’s the comparative advantage of Romania”? You may not think either of those things, but it might be helpful to read through your grant proposal (or ask someone else to do so) to see if anything in them gives off either of these impressions.
On “our time is too valuable to put out a list of country’s relevance” etc.:
I think this might be a case where a little bit of visible effort avoids much unseen effort. Maybe we have a tendency to overlook the latter and thus we underinvest in data, organization and communication ?
A lot of effort is spent planning and writing grants. While some of it may be useful practice even if the application is futile, I think a lot of this effort could be put to better use.
So, e.g., if grant makers like EAIF put out a list of priority countries, or allowed preliminary “one paragraph applications” and responded with a yes/no or a predicted chance of success it might save ppl like Ariel a lot of time, effort and frustration. He/she could say “I’m applying to start an EA Romania group, here’s my CV and profile” and they could say “we predict less than 2% chance of success”.
(Similar arguments apply to giving feedback, I think.)
Adding that this doesn’t have to be an explicit list of ~200 countries, but rather the general ideas that guide the strategy on funding community building efforts should be enough. This way we can compare and offer criticism of important grantmaking strategies.
There may be no realistic way to produce a master list of what countries do / do not have a reasonable chance at funding. For instance, the grantmaker may just not know enough about the country and the possibilities it offers without reading a grant proposal.
What would people think of a presumption that EAIF or other funders in this space should ordinarily offer at least a minimal participation grant for first-time applications filed in good faith coming from low/middle income countries?
By “participation grant” I mean a reasonable amount to compensate for planning and writing of the grant itself. And I might extend “middle income countries” a bit further than the official World Bank definition, at least for partial compensation. The grants could be rather low; at the top of the World Bank definition, the top of the range for MICs is $12,535 GNI per capita, so a week’s worth of time based on that rate would be somewhere around $241. I’m not wedded to a specific way of calculating a participation grant, but this payout report suggests the number of denials is not that large and presumably only a fraction of denials are from LMICs.
The perception that funding is harder to get in LMIC countries may dissaude people from applying in the first place, and getting applications from LMIC countries has value. So the presumption would shift at least some of the costs of producing unsuccessful applications in LMICs from the applicant to the community. It’s not a complete answer, but compensating certain unsuccessful applicants who produce something for community use seems better to me than making them bear all costs.
Thanks for the post. I was talking to Leo yesterday … do you think it’d be interesting to have something like “country profiles” for EA?
Is there a reason why this information is not public (besides “it will take time to generate/maintain it and we would rather spend our time on more impactful work) ? Are there any downsides to making this information public?
I think for some of the questions the information the information would take an effort to collect. For example, I don’t think anyone in CEA or EAIF knows the answer of “How old is EA Finland” (and many members of EA Finland would not know this either). Estimating the size of EA Finland is also a little tricky. When we applied for funding, we gave many different numbers, such as the number of active volunteers and number of people on our Telegram channel, so these numbers EAIF would know, in case they would want to start collecting an info list like the suggested one.
I could find some national organization related approved grants here: https://funds.effectivealtruism.org/grants, but there is a warning that some data is still missing, because the tool is in beta. When the data is complete, an interested person could do a search by country and create a list of funding received per country, with some info on details such as how much of it goes to salaries. (At least I could find the grant info of the grant we received for EA Finland by searching by “Finland”.)
I don’t think anyone is publicly listing the rejected grants. Personally, I would be interested to see them – maybe grant applications could ask for approval to list the rejections as well in the application process?