[I’m an EAIF grant manager, but I wasn’t involved in this particular grant.]
I’m sorry you’ve been having a frustrating time in your community building work. As you say, rejections sting even in the best of circumstances, particularly when it feels counter to the narrative being portrayed of there being funding available. Working hard to help others is difficult enough without feeling that others are refusing to support you in it.
It seems very difficult to me to accurately represent in advance what kinds of community building EAIF is and isn’t keen to fund, because it depends on a lot of details about the place/person/description of activities planned. Having said that, I’m keen to avoid people getting a false impression of our priorities. I wanted to clarify that we are in fact keen to fund full time community builders outside of existing EA hubs.
It happens that the majority of past requests we’ve had for full time positions in the US have come from Boston/NY/SF/Berkeley. We’ve received a number of applications for full time community builders in non-hub cities in the rest of the world though. For example we’ve funded full time community builders in Italy, the Philippines, Denmark and the Czech Republic.
I think a reason it looks like we prefer funding people part time is that we fund quite a bit of university community building. Doing that is often most suited to students at that university, who are therefore only able to do community building part time.
We’ve tried to keep our application form short to make it feel low cost to apply. I’d be keen for people to put in speculative quick draft applications to see whether you might be a good fit for an EAIF grant!
Thanks for saying that. I understand that grantmaking is complex and that some CB plans simply won’t be right to encourage. But I still don’t really feel this changes my expectation around community building being funded for full-time. Some questions that would go a long way to correct this impression if answered:
(FWIW I feel weird posting this publicly, [EDIT: and I don’t necessarily think you/EAIF should be expected to respond here] but I think it is important to ask these questions)
[EDIT: Also reading all this is probably not a productive activity for people who don’t work in CB or grantmaking]
Can you share how many of those organisers of non-american areas (Italy, Denmark, Czech Republic, Philippines) were mainly funded for FTE after doing PTE first? I know at least that in the Phillipines, some organizers were funded for part-time work first. I also remember reading one post by a part-time organizer (I think in the Phillipines) reflecting on that dilemma. S/he was lucky to get their full-time job to reduce to part-time, but wondering whether they should just quit their part-time job and work the remaining hours as EA Phillipine hours for free because there was so much to be done. This was very shocking to me. So, I’m glad to hear these areas have full-time organizer(s), but I wonder if that would have happened if a volunteer organizer came to you and said, “I want to make this my career, but I need to do it full-time and here are reasons I think it is impactful and relatively easy to prove out.”
Those full-time community builders you mentioned are still not in American cities. Can you by chance estimate how many applications you have gotten for full-time community building in American cities? (excluding the 4 priority cities that are now funded by CEA’s Community Building Grants program, not EAIF?) Assumption being that you denied all of them, but definitely interested to hear if you approved any, but the applicant didn’t take the role after all!
(Not really a question) Would really appreciate if you guys would eventually publish the types of regional community organizing and programming you are excited to fund? You can still encourage submitting innovative ideas you may not have even thought of yet, but if you list established activities you like, the assumption can be that a lot of default community organizing activities don’t make the cut (fair and I agree with this). I think clarifying this would have a big impact by helping people to create more impactful CB plans and making CB seem more skill-based and less vague and therefore a more desirable career path. The approval would still be contingent on the area and the applicant’s strength, but this would go so far. And if is just an applicant’s plans that aren’t quite right, you can advise them to revise and resubmit very easily.
Other grantees are encouraged to work full-time on their ideas if they have good ideas. And while I appreciate your response I still don’t get this vibe around CB. I think this is bad because I think that 1 FTE is usually worth much more than 2x0.5 FTEs. It is hard to do good work working part-time, and it is especially hard when you know that the people who are supposed to be better at evaluating good work than you don’t believe in you or your work enough to encourage you to do it full-time.
Some more details (all events in the past 1-3 months): -I realize that students can only do PTE and didn’t lump University organizing in when forming this opinion. -one community organizer in DC did tell me that my few months of doing unpaid CB part-time was nowhere near enough to go straight into paid fulltime work, although I wasn’t working at that time and was spending about 20 hours a week on CB and getting up to speed studying CB from EA and non-EA sources. I also had pre-covid CB experience. -I shared my city plans at EAG and others in the field thought they were good. I do now think they could have been better, as I kept learning in the last month, but I also would have come to that conclusion while doing the work as well. -I know personally of at least one big US city (much bigger than Austin) which was denied for FTE and a month later approved for PTE, though I think their plans may have improved in the interim.
Hi, EAIF chair here. I agree with Michelle’s comment above, but wanted to reply as well to hopefully help shed more light on our thinking and priorities.
As a preamble, I think all of your requests for information are super reasonable, and that in an ideal world we’d provide such information proactively. The main reason we’re not doing so are capacity constraints.
I also agree it would be helpful if we shared more about community building activities we’d especially like to see, such as Buck did here and as some AMA questions may have touched uppn. Again this is because we need to focus our limited capacity on other priorities, such as getting back to applicants in a reasonable timeframe.
I should also add that I generally think that most of the strategizing about what kind of community building models are most valuable is best done by organizations and people who (unlike the fund managers) focus on the space full time – such as the Groups team at CEA, Open Phil’s Longtermist EA Movement Building Team, and the Global Challenges Project. Given the current setup of EA Funds, I think the EAIF will more often be in a role of enabling more such work. E.g., we funded the Global Challenges Project multiple times. Another thing we do is complementing such work by providing an additional source of funding for ‘known’ models. Us providing funding for university and city groups outside of the priority locations that are covered by higher-touch programs by other funders is an example of the latter.
(I do think we can help feed information into strategy conversation by evaluating how well the community building efforts funded by us have worked. This is one reason why we require progress reports, and we’re also doing more frequent check-ins with some grantees.)
To be clear, if someone has an innovative idea for how to do community building, we are excited and able to evaluate it. It’s just that I don’t currently anticipate us to do much in the vein of coming up with innovative models ourselves.
A few thoughts on your questions:
I wonder if that would have happened if a volunteer organizer came to you and said, “I want to make this my career, but I need to do it full-time and here are reasons I think it is impactful and relatively easy to prove out.”
We would be excited to receive such applications.
We would then evaluate the applicant’s fit for community building and their plans, based on their track record (while keeping in mind that they could devote only limited time and attention to community building so far), our sense of which kinds of activities have worked well in other comparable locations (while remaining open to experiments), and usually an interview with the applicant.
Can you by chance estimate how many applications you have gotten for full-time community building in American cities?
Unfortunately our grant data base is not set up in a way that would allow me to easily access this information, so all I can do for now is give a rough estimate based on my memory – which is that we have received very few such applications.
In fact, apart from your application, I can only remember three applications for US-based non-uni city group organizing at all. Two were from the same applicants and for the same city (the second application was an updated version of a previous application – the first one had been unsuccessful, while we funded the second one). The other applicant wants to split their time between uni group (70%) and city group community building (30%). We funded the first of these, the second one is currently under evaluation.
(And in addition there was a very small grant to a Chicago-based rationality group, but here the applicant only asked for expenses such as food and beverages at meetings.)
It’s possible I fail to remember some relevant applications, but I feel 90% confident that there were at most 10 applications for US-based full-time non-uni community building since March 2021, and 60% confident that there were at most 3.
(I do think that in an ideal world we’d be able to break down the summary statistics we include in our payout reports – number of applications, acceptance rate, etc. – by grant type. And so e.g. report these numbers for uni group community building, city group community building, and other coherent categories, separately. But given limited capacity we weren’t able to prioritize this so far, and I’m afraid I’m skeptical that we will be able to any time soon.)
I know personally of at least one big US city (much bigger than Austin) which was denied for FTE and a month later approved for PTE, though I think their plans may have improved in the interim.
Was this at the EAIF? I only recall the case I mentioned above: One city group who originally applied for part-time work (30h/week spread across multiple people), was unsuccessful, updated their plans and resubmitted an application (still for part-time work), which then got funded.
It’s very possible that I fail to remember another case though.
I think that 1 FTE is usually worth much more than 2 0.5 FTEs.
I generally agree with this.
FWIW a community organizer in DC did tell me that my few months of doing unpaid CB part-time was nowhere near enough to go straight into paid fulltime work, although I wasn’t working at that time and was spending about 20 hours a week on CB and getting up to speed and studying CB from EA and nonEA sources.
I can’t speak for that DC organizer (or even other EAIF managers), but FWIW for me the length of someone’s history with community building work is not usually a consideration when deciding whether to fund them for more community building work – and if so, whether to provide funding for part-time or full-time work.
I think someone’s history with community building mostly influences how I’m evaluating an application. When there is a track record of relevant work, there is more room for positive or negative updates based on that, and the applicant’s fit for their proposed work is generally easier to evaluate. But in principle it’s totally possible for applicants to demonstrate that they clear the bar for funding – including for full-time work – otherwise, i.e., by some combination of demonstrating relevant abilities in an interview, having other relevant past achievements, proposing well thought-through plans in their application, and providing references from other relevant contexts.
I think part-time vs. full-time most commonly depends on the specific situation of the application and the location – in particular, whether there is ‘enough work to do’ for a full-time role. (In the context of this post, FWIW I think I agree that often an ambitious organizer would be able to find enough things to do to work full time, which may partly involve running experiments/pilots of untested activities.)
Another consideration can sometimes be the degree of confidence that a candidate organizer is a good fit for community building. It might sometimes make sense to provide someone with a smaller grant to get more data on how well things are going – this doesn’t necessarily push for part-time funding (as opposed to full-time funding for a short period), but may sometimes do so. One aspect of this is that I worry more about the risk of crowding out more valuable initiatives when an organizer is funded full-time for an extended period because I think this will send a stronger implicit message to people in that area that valuable community building activities are generally covered by an incumbent professional compared to a situation when someone is funded for specific pilot projects, part-time work, or for a shorter time frame.
Thank you for this well-thought-out response. I appreciate the effort it took you and Michelle to respond to me. I am leaning much more that I was wrong about all this then. And if LA’s application was initially part-time, that was one foundational wrong piece. I still wish that I could have received more details about my own application (the email specified that no feedback could be provided), but I will encourage more people I know to apply for CB work.
I have added a qualifier to my original comment that I am probably wrong. As this particular forum piece and the comments are likely to be revisited for some time (maybe years?), I will probably eventually redact my comment fully to not confuse and deter future readers about how supported CB work would be. Will leave it up for epistemic reasons for at least a week longer.
[I’m an EAIF grant manager, but I wasn’t involved in this particular grant.]
I’m sorry you’ve been having a frustrating time in your community building work. As you say, rejections sting even in the best of circumstances, particularly when it feels counter to the narrative being portrayed of there being funding available. Working hard to help others is difficult enough without feeling that others are refusing to support you in it.
It seems very difficult to me to accurately represent in advance what kinds of community building EAIF is and isn’t keen to fund, because it depends on a lot of details about the place/person/description of activities planned. Having said that, I’m keen to avoid people getting a false impression of our priorities. I wanted to clarify that we are in fact keen to fund full time community builders outside of existing EA hubs.
It happens that the majority of past requests we’ve had for full time positions in the US have come from Boston/NY/SF/Berkeley. We’ve received a number of applications for full time community builders in non-hub cities in the rest of the world though. For example we’ve funded full time community builders in Italy, the Philippines, Denmark and the Czech Republic.
I think a reason it looks like we prefer funding people part time is that we fund quite a bit of university community building. Doing that is often most suited to students at that university, who are therefore only able to do community building part time.
We’ve tried to keep our application form short to make it feel low cost to apply. I’d be keen for people to put in speculative quick draft applications to see whether you might be a good fit for an EAIF grant!
[Edited for clarity]
Thanks for saying that. I understand that grantmaking is complex and that some CB plans simply won’t be right to encourage. But I still don’t really feel this changes my expectation around community building being funded for full-time. Some questions that would go a long way to correct this impression if answered:
(FWIW I feel weird posting this publicly, [EDIT: and I don’t necessarily think you/EAIF should be expected to respond here] but I think it is important to ask these questions)
[EDIT: Also reading all this is probably not a productive activity for people who don’t work in CB or grantmaking]
Can you share how many of those organisers of non-american areas (Italy, Denmark, Czech Republic, Philippines) were mainly funded for FTE after doing PTE first? I know at least that in the Phillipines, some organizers were funded for part-time work first. I also remember reading one post by a part-time organizer (I think in the Phillipines) reflecting on that dilemma. S/he was lucky to get their full-time job to reduce to part-time, but wondering whether they should just quit their part-time job and work the remaining hours as EA Phillipine hours for free because there was so much to be done. This was very shocking to me. So, I’m glad to hear these areas have full-time organizer(s), but I wonder if that would have happened if a volunteer organizer came to you and said, “I want to make this my career, but I need to do it full-time and here are reasons I think it is impactful and relatively easy to prove out.”
Those full-time community builders you mentioned are still not in American cities. Can you by chance estimate how many applications you have gotten for full-time community building in American cities? (excluding the 4 priority cities that are now funded by CEA’s Community Building Grants program, not EAIF?) Assumption being that you denied all of them, but definitely interested to hear if you approved any, but the applicant didn’t take the role after all!
(Not really a question) Would really appreciate if you guys would eventually publish the types of regional community organizing and programming you are excited to fund? You can still encourage submitting innovative ideas you may not have even thought of yet, but if you list established activities you like, the assumption can be that a lot of default community organizing activities don’t make the cut (fair and I agree with this). I think clarifying this would have a big impact by helping people to create more impactful CB plans and making CB seem more skill-based and less vague and therefore a more desirable career path. The approval would still be contingent on the area and the applicant’s strength, but this would go so far. And if is just an applicant’s plans that aren’t quite right, you can advise them to revise and resubmit very easily.
Other grantees are encouraged to work full-time on their ideas if they have good ideas. And while I appreciate your response I still don’t get this vibe around CB. I think this is bad because I think that 1 FTE is usually worth much more than 2x0.5 FTEs. It is hard to do good work working part-time, and it is especially hard when you know that the people who are supposed to be better at evaluating good work than you don’t believe in you or your work enough to encourage you to do it full-time.
Some more details (all events in the past 1-3 months):
-I realize that students can only do PTE and didn’t lump University organizing in when forming this opinion.
-one community organizer in DC did tell me that my few months of doing unpaid CB part-time was nowhere near enough to go straight into paid fulltime work, although I wasn’t working at that time and was spending about 20 hours a week on CB and getting up to speed studying CB from EA and non-EA sources. I also had pre-covid CB experience.
-I shared my city plans at EAG and others in the field thought they were good. I do now think they could have been better, as I kept learning in the last month, but I also would have come to that conclusion while doing the work as well.
-I know personally of at least one big US city (much bigger than Austin) which was denied for FTE and a month later approved for PTE, though I think their plans may have improved in the interim.
Hi, EAIF chair here. I agree with Michelle’s comment above, but wanted to reply as well to hopefully help shed more light on our thinking and priorities.
As a preamble, I think all of your requests for information are super reasonable, and that in an ideal world we’d provide such information proactively. The main reason we’re not doing so are capacity constraints.
I also agree it would be helpful if we shared more about community building activities we’d especially like to see, such as Buck did here and as some AMA questions may have touched uppn. Again this is because we need to focus our limited capacity on other priorities, such as getting back to applicants in a reasonable timeframe.
I should also add that I generally think that most of the strategizing about what kind of community building models are most valuable is best done by organizations and people who (unlike the fund managers) focus on the space full time – such as the Groups team at CEA, Open Phil’s Longtermist EA Movement Building Team, and the Global Challenges Project. Given the current setup of EA Funds, I think the EAIF will more often be in a role of enabling more such work. E.g., we funded the Global Challenges Project multiple times. Another thing we do is complementing such work by providing an additional source of funding for ‘known’ models. Us providing funding for university and city groups outside of the priority locations that are covered by higher-touch programs by other funders is an example of the latter.
(I do think we can help feed information into strategy conversation by evaluating how well the community building efforts funded by us have worked. This is one reason why we require progress reports, and we’re also doing more frequent check-ins with some grantees.)
To be clear, if someone has an innovative idea for how to do community building, we are excited and able to evaluate it. It’s just that I don’t currently anticipate us to do much in the vein of coming up with innovative models ourselves.
A few thoughts on your questions:
We would be excited to receive such applications.
We would then evaluate the applicant’s fit for community building and their plans, based on their track record (while keeping in mind that they could devote only limited time and attention to community building so far), our sense of which kinds of activities have worked well in other comparable locations (while remaining open to experiments), and usually an interview with the applicant.
Unfortunately our grant data base is not set up in a way that would allow me to easily access this information, so all I can do for now is give a rough estimate based on my memory – which is that we have received very few such applications.
In fact, apart from your application, I can only remember three applications for US-based non-uni city group organizing at all. Two were from the same applicants and for the same city (the second application was an updated version of a previous application – the first one had been unsuccessful, while we funded the second one). The other applicant wants to split their time between uni group (70%) and city group community building (30%). We funded the first of these, the second one is currently under evaluation.
(And in addition there was a very small grant to a Chicago-based rationality group, but here the applicant only asked for expenses such as food and beverages at meetings.)
It’s possible I fail to remember some relevant applications, but I feel 90% confident that there were at most 10 applications for US-based full-time non-uni community building since March 2021, and 60% confident that there were at most 3.
(I do think that in an ideal world we’d be able to break down the summary statistics we include in our payout reports – number of applications, acceptance rate, etc. – by grant type. And so e.g. report these numbers for uni group community building, city group community building, and other coherent categories, separately. But given limited capacity we weren’t able to prioritize this so far, and I’m afraid I’m skeptical that we will be able to any time soon.)
Was this at the EAIF? I only recall the case I mentioned above: One city group who originally applied for part-time work (30h/week spread across multiple people), was unsuccessful, updated their plans and resubmitted an application (still for part-time work), which then got funded.
It’s very possible that I fail to remember another case though.
I generally agree with this.
I can’t speak for that DC organizer (or even other EAIF managers), but FWIW for me the length of someone’s history with community building work is not usually a consideration when deciding whether to fund them for more community building work – and if so, whether to provide funding for part-time or full-time work.
I think someone’s history with community building mostly influences how I’m evaluating an application. When there is a track record of relevant work, there is more room for positive or negative updates based on that, and the applicant’s fit for their proposed work is generally easier to evaluate. But in principle it’s totally possible for applicants to demonstrate that they clear the bar for funding – including for full-time work – otherwise, i.e., by some combination of demonstrating relevant abilities in an interview, having other relevant past achievements, proposing well thought-through plans in their application, and providing references from other relevant contexts.
I think part-time vs. full-time most commonly depends on the specific situation of the application and the location – in particular, whether there is ‘enough work to do’ for a full-time role. (In the context of this post, FWIW I think I agree that often an ambitious organizer would be able to find enough things to do to work full time, which may partly involve running experiments/pilots of untested activities.)
Another consideration can sometimes be the degree of confidence that a candidate organizer is a good fit for community building. It might sometimes make sense to provide someone with a smaller grant to get more data on how well things are going – this doesn’t necessarily push for part-time funding (as opposed to full-time funding for a short period), but may sometimes do so. One aspect of this is that I worry more about the risk of crowding out more valuable initiatives when an organizer is funded full-time for an extended period because I think this will send a stronger implicit message to people in that area that valuable community building activities are generally covered by an incumbent professional compared to a situation when someone is funded for specific pilot projects, part-time work, or for a shorter time frame.
Thank you for this well-thought-out response. I appreciate the effort it took you and Michelle to respond to me. I am leaning much more that I was wrong about all this then. And if LA’s application was initially part-time, that was one foundational wrong piece. I still wish that I could have received more details about my own application (the email specified that no feedback could be provided), but I will encourage more people I know to apply for CB work.
I have added a qualifier to my original comment that I am probably wrong. As this particular forum piece and the comments are likely to be revisited for some time (maybe years?), I will probably eventually redact my comment fully to not confuse and deter future readers about how supported CB work would be. Will leave it up for epistemic reasons for at least a week longer.
Thanks again!
This was a really inspiring reply to read Ivy.