EA Community Building Grants Applications Open
CEA is holding a second application round for EA Community Building Grants, with applications open until Monday 18th February.
Effective Altruism Community Building Grants is a project run by the Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA), providing grants of between $5,000 and $100,000 to individuals and groups doing local effective altruism community building. The main type of application we receive is for funding for group leaders to conduct part-time or full-time paid work with their groups, though we also accept applications for more general EA community building projects.
We expect successful applications to have the following:
Exceptional Organizers:
EA expertise
Adherence to CEA’s guiding principles of effective altruism
Excellent judgement
Skill at EA community building
Understanding of EA community building
A high-potential EA group:
An inner core of well-coordinated organizers
Stable, highly-engaged group members
A goal-oriented activity portfolio
A record of past success in attracting talented, dedicated people to make significant contributions to the most important problems
For more detail regarding the qualities we expect successful applications to have, see the EA Community Building Grants Announcement Post.
The main stages of the application process and the estimated times it will take for grantees to complete are as follows:
Short Application—about 10-30 minutes.
Long Application—about 3-8 hours.
Interviews—about 1-2 hours.
For the current round, we will have a budget cap of $150,000, though we are not committed to granting the full amount. This makes the current funding round significantly smaller in scale than the previous round in Spring 2018, which granted a total of $623,000.
We are waiting on the completion of an impact evaluation for the previous grants before deciding upon significantly scaling the project. As such, this round is for highly promising, time-sensitive opportunities that we’d be willing to commit to before the completion of the impact evaluation. Given the above, the bar for successful applications will be higher than the previous round.
Please let us know if you need us to make a decision within a certain time period. In order to apply, please complete the short application form.
For further information about EA Community Grants, including the rationale behind the project and the kinds of applications that we would like to fund, see the following posts:
To apply for smaller amounts of EA group funding, see the following page:
If you have any questions, please contact groups@effectivealtruism.org. If you would like to learn more about the experience of current EA Community Grant Recipients, the following grantees have said they would be happy to take questions:
- The flow of funding in EA movement building by (23 Jun 2023 3:45 UTC; 206 points)
- Which Community Building Projects Get Funded? by (13 Nov 2019 20:31 UTC; 99 points)
- Update on CEA’s Group Support and Effective Altruism Community Building Grants by (5 Jul 2019 17:37 UTC; 47 points)
- 's comment on Kocherga’s leaflet by (LessWrong; 20 Feb 2019 12:02 UTC; 13 points)
“We are waiting on the completion of an impact evaluation for the previous grants before deciding upon significantly scaling the project.” Is there an intended timeline for this evaluation?
Following up on this—we’ve conducted initial parts of the programme evaluation, though haven’t yet done this comprehensively, and we’re not at the moment planning on publishing a public impact evaluation for EA Community Building Grants before the end of 2020. This is mainly because we’ve decided to prioritise other projects (fundraising, grant evaluation, developing programme strategy) above a public impact review. Also, we’ve found both doing the impact evaluation and communicating this externally to be larger projects than we previously thought. In retrospect, I think it was a mistake for me to expect that we’d be able to get this done by August.
Thanks for the question—the impact evaluation will take place in the summer of 2019, likely around August, which is when the majority of the 1-year community building grants end.