The Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) wants to explore how to make Community Building a more attractive career path to pursue long term, especially with regards to the role of CEA community building grantee (CBG).
I am very excited by this! I think that community building has historically been massively promoted as important by EA communicators and key institutions, but then implicitly undervalued by the actual prestige, funding and support offered to existing or aspiring community builders.
I have done a lot of movement building, and I sometimes think about reconsidering it as a career, or at least making it a major part of my time allocation.
Happy to share some of my experiences in private, if you’d like, so feel free to message if you would to chat!
Quick thoughts now
It might be worth exploring if titles (e.g., community builder and strategy/research/analytics) make a difference. For instance, they may make some candidates feel like they will get more transferrable career capital from having the title.
Getting testimonials from former participants was helpful for me in terms of reducing uncertainty and fear of any bad experiences, so getting and sharing more of those would help.
What about increasing motivation to apply with advance market commitments for movement builders in certain areas (e.g., people with x will be likely to be funded to x value), or awareness with talent scouting (e.g., reaching out to someone doing a good job to request they apply and will be in with a reasonable chance of x outcomes if they do) would probably bring more people into the funnel which might lead to more long term participants.
Maybe support part-time roles better? These may be easier to sell, I think, and they can often have synergies that seem underappreciated. Much of the output value from movement building comes from the networks that the movement builder has access to. An EA might therefore be a much better movement builder if they it part-time alongside academia than if they go full-time because they can reach more smart people in their work and connect them to new collaborators or get them to come for talks and so on.
Yeah I agree a lot with this point about titles. I’m pretty hesitant to go into community building because it seems like it would be seen as a neutral or negative thing on the cv for most other roles. Maybe if you want to work in event organizing or something it would be seen as a plus but I feel like most other sectors and jobs would view it as worse than most other roles I could get. If we could figure out how to make the role more legible (with better job titles and so on) that could go a long way to make it a better career prospect. Even if we make the role more prestigious within EA that still means that community builders cut themselves off from most of the job market, which seems like something that will scare off a lot of potential community builders.
I also think this is a very good point and that we should consider titles. However, I think one often pretty easily can spin community building as being something more legit / impressive outside EA. I call myself “Executive Director” of EA Sweden, and I do think that sounds pretty good on a CV. Also, with the new funding situation in EA and the many talented people in the movement I actually think strating / running an EA group can be a good opportonity to build an impressive organization.
Indeed. Given that the payment is a grant and you’re working for [name of your local org], what’s stopping you from using an appropriate title? Be it CEO, director, strategy, program director, etc. Most nationwide EA groups do so and also a handful of local groups.
I think that community building has historically been massively promoted as important by EA communicators and key institutions, but then implicitly undervalued by the actual prestige, funding and support offered to existing or aspiring community builders.
This is my impression too. For university groups, CEA was trying to fix this with the Campus Specialist program, which was then discontinued. I’m curious why an org isn’t hiring people on 2-year contracts / longer-term roles to lead promising city and national groups, since only being able to do the job on a grant already seems lower-prestige. (Someone might think: if people cared about community building enough, they would hire me to do it in a more stable way.)
The alternative is to ping people or get on a zoom call. But this is demanding of others time, especially since sometimes these contacts are not seen as entirely asynchronous.
You would might need to ping multiple people, or otherwise babysit this issue by successively contacting people, and that isn’t worth it for many people.
When programs are cancelled like this, it’s often for complicated reasons. While getting a personal account is useful (but costly), it’s harder to share this with others. It seems better to create norms to encourage this announcement on the EA Forum.
There is a good chance the parent comment is wrong/noise and this public comment should fix that.
I am also curious why there aren’t set up orgs in central locations that can employ people. And I am hoping to get some input on from CEA / similar actors.
To be fair though, many city/national groups (e.g. EA Sweden that I run) are set up as non-profits and CEA are happy to fund those organizations, that in turn employs group organizers.
This is an intersting idea! I can see som practical / legal issues with having a organization with a few hired people in many different countries. But it should defintely work for the US and UK, where many community builders are based. Also it should work with “regional hubs” in other locations. And even though one might not be able to be technically hired, having a joint back office for many things just seems robustly good. Maybe EA Nordics can lead the way with some experiments here!
As a really quick thought, I was just chatting with an aspiring community builder and we thought that (executive) director of community (strategy) or something similar sounding could be worth considering. It might be worth looking at the tech community or similar to see their norms.
Or test titles on an appropriate audience. For example, come up with 20 different titles, then pay 100 professional recruiters 20 dollars each to vote on which one sounds most impressive. Actually, maybe something like that could be done on an even larger scale to find out how this “career capital issue” can be improved for many EA job roles.
I agree that community building has been promoted as important, but then implicitly undervalued by the actual prestige, funding and support offered to existing or aspiring community builders. And I think this is detrimental to EA. However, I want to stress that I am very encouraged about the efforts CEA are putting into making community building more attractive. I also think it is encouraging to see 80k giving more and better coverage on community building now and Openphil highlighting it in their new grantmaking.
Really appreciate your thoughts, and would love to discuss this further in private—I’ll send a message.
Thanks for this work!
I am very excited by this! I think that community building has historically been massively promoted as important by EA communicators and key institutions, but then implicitly undervalued by the actual prestige, funding and support offered to existing or aspiring community builders.
I have done a lot of movement building, and I sometimes think about reconsidering it as a career, or at least making it a major part of my time allocation.
Happy to share some of my experiences in private, if you’d like, so feel free to message if you would to chat!
Quick thoughts now
It might be worth exploring if titles (e.g., community builder and strategy/research/analytics) make a difference. For instance, they may make some candidates feel like they will get more transferrable career capital from having the title.
Getting testimonials from former participants was helpful for me in terms of reducing uncertainty and fear of any bad experiences, so getting and sharing more of those would help.
What about increasing motivation to apply with advance market commitments for movement builders in certain areas (e.g., people with x will be likely to be funded to x value), or awareness with talent scouting (e.g., reaching out to someone doing a good job to request they apply and will be in with a reasonable chance of x outcomes if they do) would probably bring more people into the funnel which might lead to more long term participants.
Maybe support part-time roles better? These may be easier to sell, I think, and they can often have synergies that seem underappreciated. Much of the output value from movement building comes from the networks that the movement builder has access to. An EA might therefore be a much better movement builder if they it part-time alongside academia than if they go full-time because they can reach more smart people in their work and connect them to new collaborators or get them to come for talks and so on.
Yeah I agree a lot with this point about titles. I’m pretty hesitant to go into community building because it seems like it would be seen as a neutral or negative thing on the cv for most other roles. Maybe if you want to work in event organizing or something it would be seen as a plus but I feel like most other sectors and jobs would view it as worse than most other roles I could get. If we could figure out how to make the role more legible (with better job titles and so on) that could go a long way to make it a better career prospect. Even if we make the role more prestigious within EA that still means that community builders cut themselves off from most of the job market, which seems like something that will scare off a lot of potential community builders.
I also think this is a very good point and that we should consider titles. However, I think one often pretty easily can spin community building as being something more legit / impressive outside EA. I call myself “Executive Director” of EA Sweden, and I do think that sounds pretty good on a CV. Also, with the new funding situation in EA and the many talented people in the movement I actually think strating / running an EA group can be a good opportonity to build an impressive organization.
Indeed. Given that the payment is a grant and you’re working for [name of your local org], what’s stopping you from using an appropriate title? Be it CEO, director, strategy, program director, etc. Most nationwide EA groups do so and also a handful of local groups.
This is my impression too. For university groups, CEA was trying to fix this with the Campus Specialist program, which was then discontinued. I’m curious why an org isn’t hiring people on 2-year contracts / longer-term roles to lead promising city and national groups, since only being able to do the job on a grant already seems lower-prestige. (Someone might think: if people cared about community building enough, they would hire me to do it in a more stable way.)
The Campus Specialist program was discontinued? The one announced ~4 months ago?
This seemed like an important thing.
(It seems like there are other ways to ask about this. I am biased to making a public comment, because it seems like good practice [1]).
The alternative is to ping people or get on a zoom call. But this is demanding of others time, especially since sometimes these contacts are not seen as entirely asynchronous.
You would might need to ping multiple people, or otherwise babysit this issue by successively contacting people, and that isn’t worth it for many people.
When programs are cancelled like this, it’s often for complicated reasons. While getting a personal account is useful (but costly), it’s harder to share this with others. It seems better to create norms to encourage this announcement on the EA Forum.
There is a good chance the parent comment is wrong/noise and this public comment should fix that.
Yes, it was discontinued shortly after being launched. I am not sure why, but would be very curious to learn why.
I am also curious why there aren’t set up orgs in central locations that can employ people. And I am hoping to get some input on from CEA / similar actors.
To be fair though, many city/national groups (e.g. EA Sweden that I run) are set up as non-profits and CEA are happy to fund those organizations, that in turn employs group organizers.
This is an intersting idea! I can see som practical / legal issues with having a organization with a few hired people in many different countries. But it should defintely work for the US and UK, where many community builders are based. Also it should work with “regional hubs” in other locations. And even though one might not be able to be technically hired, having a joint back office for many things just seems robustly good. Maybe EA Nordics can lead the way with some experiments here!
As a really quick thought, I was just chatting with an aspiring community builder and we thought that (executive) director of community (strategy) or something similar sounding could be worth considering. It might be worth looking at the tech community or similar to see their norms.
Or test titles on an appropriate audience. For example, come up with 20 different titles, then pay 100 professional recruiters 20 dollars each to vote on which one sounds most impressive. Actually, maybe something like that could be done on an even larger scale to find out how this “career capital issue” can be improved for many EA job roles.
I like this!
Thank you for the comment and encouragement!
I agree that community building has been promoted as important, but then implicitly undervalued by the actual prestige, funding and support offered to existing or aspiring community builders. And I think this is detrimental to EA. However, I want to stress that I am very encouraged about the efforts CEA are putting into making community building more attractive. I also think it is encouraging to see 80k giving more and better coverage on community building now and Openphil highlighting it in their new grantmaking.
Really appreciate your thoughts, and would love to discuss this further in private—I’ll send a message.