We have a strong preference for a fund chair who lives in the SF Bay Area.
Why? Is EA Funds trying to consolidate staff in the Bay generally, or for the LTFF specifically? I’m worried that this perpetuates existing dynamics around the concentration of funding in the Bay, especially at a time when EA Funds is, in theory, becoming more separate from Open Phil.
The other full-time members of EA Funds work from Berkeley (as do many of the fund managers) and we find working in person very useful. It’s not implausible that we’d move to be near the new fund chair if they weren’t able to relocate to the Bay Area.
The Bay Area is also great as it has a really high density of EA and AIS stakeholders, and I’d expect it to have the plurality (but nowhere near the majority) of our grantees amongst locations of similar sizes.
I travel pretty regularly to the UK and Boston—though I haven’t visited South America, Asia etc. very much. My guess is that some of this travel helps to reduce the dynamics that you’re worried about but I don’t have great solutions beyond what we’re currently doing. If we had a lot more in the way of resources I could imagine translating the website and hiring interpreters to help us evaluate grants in other languages—but empirically I think this rarely stops people applying and I expect it to get better as LLMs improve.
In addition to the points Caleb raised, I think there are pretty good reasons to believe that longtermists[1] are underinvesting in Bay Area fundraising.
Note that this is entirely theoretical currently; all of my donor calls to date have been online, except a few in person at a Bay Area conference (which I presumably could’ve attended even if I lived elsewhere). I wouldn’t endorse the LTFF chair moving to the Bay just for fundraising until the model is more proven.
Why? Is EA Funds trying to consolidate staff in the Bay generally, or for the LTFF specifically? I’m worried that this perpetuates existing dynamics around the concentration of funding in the Bay, especially at a time when EA Funds is, in theory, becoming more separate from Open Phil.
The other full-time members of EA Funds work from Berkeley (as do many of the fund managers) and we find working in person very useful. It’s not implausible that we’d move to be near the new fund chair if they weren’t able to relocate to the Bay Area.
The Bay Area is also great as it has a really high density of EA and AIS stakeholders, and I’d expect it to have the plurality (but nowhere near the majority) of our grantees amongst locations of similar sizes.
I travel pretty regularly to the UK and Boston—though I haven’t visited South America, Asia etc. very much. My guess is that some of this travel helps to reduce the dynamics that you’re worried about but I don’t have great solutions beyond what we’re currently doing. If we had a lot more in the way of resources I could imagine translating the website and hiring interpreters to help us evaluate grants in other languages—but empirically I think this rarely stops people applying and I expect it to get better as LLMs improve.
In addition to the points Caleb raised, I think there are pretty good reasons to believe that longtermists[1] are underinvesting in Bay Area fundraising.
Note that this is entirely theoretical currently; all of my donor calls to date have been online, except a few in person at a Bay Area conference (which I presumably could’ve attended even if I lived elsewhere). I wouldn’t endorse the LTFF chair moving to the Bay just for fundraising until the model is more proven.
Probably EA in general, but I’m most convinced about the longtermist side.