We are not designed to replace existing local EA groups or giving opportunities. For instance, the Giving What We Can pledge involves giving 10% of your income to effective charities; clearly a much larger impact than our 1% starting point. Similarly, we believe that the EA community has very strong foundations in its use of local groups, and we want to complement existing resources and practices.
Can you talk a bit more about how you intend for 1FTW to connect people with EA more broadly? Or how 1FTW will avoid crowding out existing EA outreach, especially if everyone is focused on the same top universities?
On the flip side, maybe it’s a good idea for 1FTW to maintain some distance from the EA community/EA as a concept. If they specialize in promoting effective giving to global poverty to people who are unlikely to embrace EA as a whole, that might be a good way to avoid competing with existing EA outreach.
Personally, I see oftw as complementary to existing EA outreach, in particular local EA groups. I think Oftw can be very effective in ‘broadening the funnel’ of engagement with EA and raising money, then a general EA group provides a platform for those who become most engaged in EA, particularly in non-poverty cause areas. I think a OFTW pledge drive can help with engagement too, by giving concrete, tangible actions for members to work on.
In terms of how this works in practice, there are a couple of cases that have taken different approaches here. At Penn, the Oftw groups have operated pretty independently from the penn EA group—they have organised some events together, sometimes join each others’ discussion groups and socials, but the core organisers haven’t overlapped much. They’ve also focused on different populations I think (Oftw on MBA, law students and the broad undergrad body, the EA group focusing more on a smaller group of people very engaged in EA). At HLS, I think Oftw operates more as a ‘project’ of the general EA group, and the core organising team has a lot of overlap. To avoid crowding out or duplicating effort, I think some collaboration is desirable, but I think either of these approaches can work well.
This is correct about HLS. We think that OFTW outreach has generally been a good way to build name recognition for EA—if you ask people what we do, they know about OFTW because it’s a big, very visible effort. I think there’s some risk that they think we’re limited to poverty work (a general EA problem), but I don’t think this is an unavoidable consequence of our partnership with OFTW—it’s because our other programming has so far been less visible.
It’s also a good way for us to stratify our programming (both for our members and for involving non-members) so that we have meaningful interaction with both EA-sympathetic “normal” (i.e., not EA career things) people and career-minded EAs.
Thanks Rossa, this is really cool to see.
Can you talk a bit more about how you intend for 1FTW to connect people with EA more broadly? Or how 1FTW will avoid crowding out existing EA outreach, especially if everyone is focused on the same top universities?
On the flip side, maybe it’s a good idea for 1FTW to maintain some distance from the EA community/EA as a concept. If they specialize in promoting effective giving to global poverty to people who are unlikely to embrace EA as a whole, that might be a good way to avoid competing with existing EA outreach.
Thanks Peter, Josh.
Personally, I see oftw as complementary to existing EA outreach, in particular local EA groups. I think Oftw can be very effective in ‘broadening the funnel’ of engagement with EA and raising money, then a general EA group provides a platform for those who become most engaged in EA, particularly in non-poverty cause areas. I think a OFTW pledge drive can help with engagement too, by giving concrete, tangible actions for members to work on.
In terms of how this works in practice, there are a couple of cases that have taken different approaches here. At Penn, the Oftw groups have operated pretty independently from the penn EA group—they have organised some events together, sometimes join each others’ discussion groups and socials, but the core organisers haven’t overlapped much. They’ve also focused on different populations I think (Oftw on MBA, law students and the broad undergrad body, the EA group focusing more on a smaller group of people very engaged in EA). At HLS, I think Oftw operates more as a ‘project’ of the general EA group, and the core organising team has a lot of overlap. To avoid crowding out or duplicating effort, I think some collaboration is desirable, but I think either of these approaches can work well.
This is correct about HLS. We think that OFTW outreach has generally been a good way to build name recognition for EA—if you ask people what we do, they know about OFTW because it’s a big, very visible effort. I think there’s some risk that they think we’re limited to poverty work (a general EA problem), but I don’t think this is an unavoidable consequence of our partnership with OFTW—it’s because our other programming has so far been less visible.
It’s also a good way for us to stratify our programming (both for our members and for involving non-members) so that we have meaningful interaction with both EA-sympathetic “normal” (i.e., not EA career things) people and career-minded EAs.