I agree that there is more to movement building than local groups and that the comparison to AI safety was not on the right level.
I still stand by my main point and think that it deserves consideration:
My main point is that there is a certain set of movement building efforts for which the CEA community building grant programme seems to be the only option. This set includes local groups and national EA networks but also other things. Some common characteristics might be that these efforts are oriented towards the earlier stages of the movement building funnel (compared to say, EAG) and can be conducted by independent movement builders.
Ideally, there should be more diverse “official” funding for this set of movement building efforts. As things currently are, private funders should at least be aware that only one major official funding source exists.
(If students running student groups can get funded by the university, that is another funding source that I wasn’t aware of before).
In practice, it’s almost never the inly option—e.g. CZEA was able to find some private funding even before CBG existed; several other groups were at least partially professional before CBG. In general it’s more like it’s better if national-level groups are funded from EA
CZEA was able to find some private funding even before CBG existed
Interesting! Up until now, my intuition was that private funding is only feasible after the group has been around for a few years, gathered sufficient evidence for their impact and some (former student) members earn enough and donate to it (at least this was the case for EA Norway, as far as I know).
Somewhat off-topic, but if you have time, I’d be curious to hear how CZEA managed to secure early private funding. How long had CZEA been active when it first received funding, what kind of donor and what do you think convinced them? (If you’d rather not share that publicly, feel free to email me at manuel.allgaier@ea-berlin.org and if you lack time to elaborate that’s fine too!)
It seems worth bearing in mind that what’s essentially happening here is you’re setting up a new charity which needs to fundraise, which happens pretty frequently in lots of different formats. There are often local advice groups around. Eg the one I used when we were setting up CEA was Oxfordshire Community and Voluntary Action—https://ocva.org.uk/ They give free sessions for people setting up charities to come in and ask questions—whether that’s about how to write their constitution, or what groups there are around which are looking to fund new charities.
Supporting embryonic charities often feels like an exciting proposition donors / foundations, because it feels like you can have strong counterfactual impact. So there are various organisations around which look specifically for charities that are at really early stages, eg The Funding Network—https://www.thefundingnetwork.org.uk/about-us
I agree that there is more to movement building than local groups and that the comparison to AI safety was not on the right level.
I still stand by my main point and think that it deserves consideration:
My main point is that there is a certain set of movement building efforts for which the CEA community building grant programme seems to be the only option. This set includes local groups and national EA networks but also other things. Some common characteristics might be that these efforts are oriented towards the earlier stages of the movement building funnel (compared to say, EAG) and can be conducted by independent movement builders.
Ideally, there should be more diverse “official” funding for this set of movement building efforts. As things currently are, private funders should at least be aware that only one major official funding source exists.
(If students running student groups can get funded by the university, that is another funding source that I wasn’t aware of before).
In practice, it’s almost never the inly option—e.g. CZEA was able to find some private funding even before CBG existed; several other groups were at least partially professional before CBG. In general it’s more like it’s better if national-level groups are funded from EA
Interesting! Up until now, my intuition was that private funding is only feasible after the group has been around for a few years, gathered sufficient evidence for their impact and some (former student) members earn enough and donate to it (at least this was the case for EA Norway, as far as I know).
Somewhat off-topic, but if you have time, I’d be curious to hear how CZEA managed to secure early private funding. How long had CZEA been active when it first received funding, what kind of donor and what do you think convinced them? (If you’d rather not share that publicly, feel free to email me at manuel.allgaier@ea-berlin.org and if you lack time to elaborate that’s fine too!)
It seems worth bearing in mind that what’s essentially happening here is you’re setting up a new charity which needs to fundraise, which happens pretty frequently in lots of different formats. There are often local advice groups around. Eg the one I used when we were setting up CEA was Oxfordshire Community and Voluntary Action—https://ocva.org.uk/ They give free sessions for people setting up charities to come in and ask questions—whether that’s about how to write their constitution, or what groups there are around which are looking to fund new charities.
Supporting embryonic charities often feels like an exciting proposition donors / foundations, because it feels like you can have strong counterfactual impact. So there are various organisations around which look specifically for charities that are at really early stages, eg The Funding Network—https://www.thefundingnetwork.org.uk/about-us