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
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