As a manager of a small “EA organisation” I strongly agree with this post.
To expand slightly on the points you made under the flexibility headings, I focus on two things more significant organisations can offer that smaller ones can’t:
Better support to employees, particularly in fostering diversity. To oversimplify, a small organisation with the funding models and employment models that follow typically can’t offer the proper range of supports (e.g. parental leave, a degree of employment stability, internal mobility for career growth) that a diverse workforce needs. This directly causes many of the diversity challenges EA faces and harms the movement.
Linked to the previous point—talent identification and management. I know the people in my field and I know the people in my area. I know the other institutions where the talent is currently employed. I can find value-aligned talent and pull them into my organisation / our sphere. But the model needs to be legible to them. When I explain the bizarre series of runways and grants that my organisation is funded by, and the limits and dependencies that follow, that is a massive turn-off to people. And fair enough. Going back to point 1, risky employment structures are only tolerable for a subset of people.
There’s also a point about weight and influence. We greatly reduce our policy influence by fracturing ourselves so much. We are a significant movement that ought to have a weight in the policy conversation equal to our significance. But we present ourselves poorly for that purpose and are weaker as a result. I understand there are risks we manage through the current approach, but I think we are very much on the wrong point of the spectrum.
In my specific case, I would much prefer a world where funders who wanted activities to occur in Australia were able to pool money into one or a small number of top-level organisations and communicate to the board their top-down view of prioritisation and the degree of autonomy + trust they are or aren’t happy with through funding agreements. And then the organisation can do fundraising and community building and policy development and advocacy and organising conferences and coordinating volunteers and all the other things. Presumably, it would also be easier for donors to interface with one or a few organisations, rather than dozens.
I’d push back on the idea that certain “funding models and employment models . . . follow” from organizational size. I don’t see why donors couldn’t use different funding models, which would allow for different employment models. They choose to deploy short-term grants for their own reasons . . . but much of the fix is changing the funding model. I’m not sure how consolidating orgs is either necessary or sufficient for that. In the non-EA world, larger orgs often have more diverse and stable funding streams than smaller ones . . . but here, the bulk of funding is coming from the same few sources.
I think I mostly agree with what you’re saying. Perhaps the difference at the margins is that if 10 organisations get 10 grants for 10 researchers for 6 months, what they’ll each do is find a person for a short-term contract. If someone leaves or gets sick etc, a stream of work might not be completed and an organisation will be in a tight spot.
If that was instead one organisation, maybe it brings on 5-6 researchers for a year (or ongoing), makes some assumptions about staff turnover and part-time arrangements, and when someone leaves or gets sick it’s not a big deal because work can be reassigned between the team and project timelines can be shuffled (surge people onto the more urgent work). Basically bigger numbers (dollars; staff; projects) gives managers more wiggle room to find ways to make things work.
But I agree with you, that if funders were hard over on smaller organisations, there are ways they could ease the employment model concerns in other ways. I just think the ideal situation from an employment and management perspective would be longer term and more centralised.
As a manager of a small “EA organisation” I strongly agree with this post.
To expand slightly on the points you made under the flexibility headings, I focus on two things more significant organisations can offer that smaller ones can’t:
Better support to employees, particularly in fostering diversity. To oversimplify, a small organisation with the funding models and employment models that follow typically can’t offer the proper range of supports (e.g. parental leave, a degree of employment stability, internal mobility for career growth) that a diverse workforce needs. This directly causes many of the diversity challenges EA faces and harms the movement.
Linked to the previous point—talent identification and management. I know the people in my field and I know the people in my area. I know the other institutions where the talent is currently employed. I can find value-aligned talent and pull them into my organisation / our sphere. But the model needs to be legible to them. When I explain the bizarre series of runways and grants that my organisation is funded by, and the limits and dependencies that follow, that is a massive turn-off to people. And fair enough. Going back to point 1, risky employment structures are only tolerable for a subset of people.
There’s also a point about weight and influence. We greatly reduce our policy influence by fracturing ourselves so much. We are a significant movement that ought to have a weight in the policy conversation equal to our significance. But we present ourselves poorly for that purpose and are weaker as a result. I understand there are risks we manage through the current approach, but I think we are very much on the wrong point of the spectrum.
In my specific case, I would much prefer a world where funders who wanted activities to occur in Australia were able to pool money into one or a small number of top-level organisations and communicate to the board their top-down view of prioritisation and the degree of autonomy + trust they are or aren’t happy with through funding agreements. And then the organisation can do fundraising and community building and policy development and advocacy and organising conferences and coordinating volunteers and all the other things. Presumably, it would also be easier for donors to interface with one or a few organisations, rather than dozens.
I’d push back on the idea that certain “funding models and employment models . . . follow” from organizational size. I don’t see why donors couldn’t use different funding models, which would allow for different employment models. They choose to deploy short-term grants for their own reasons . . . but much of the fix is changing the funding model. I’m not sure how consolidating orgs is either necessary or sufficient for that. In the non-EA world, larger orgs often have more diverse and stable funding streams than smaller ones . . . but here, the bulk of funding is coming from the same few sources.
I think I mostly agree with what you’re saying. Perhaps the difference at the margins is that if 10 organisations get 10 grants for 10 researchers for 6 months, what they’ll each do is find a person for a short-term contract. If someone leaves or gets sick etc, a stream of work might not be completed and an organisation will be in a tight spot.
If that was instead one organisation, maybe it brings on 5-6 researchers for a year (or ongoing), makes some assumptions about staff turnover and part-time arrangements, and when someone leaves or gets sick it’s not a big deal because work can be reassigned between the team and project timelines can be shuffled (surge people onto the more urgent work). Basically bigger numbers (dollars; staff; projects) gives managers more wiggle room to find ways to make things work.
But I agree with you, that if funders were hard over on smaller organisations, there are ways they could ease the employment model concerns in other ways. I just think the ideal situation from an employment and management perspective would be longer term and more centralised.