Back in 2015 there were no funds available for local community building, no funds from CEA or community grants or EA Funds etc. There was general scepticism about if it was worth funding such local work.
Kudos and many thanks go to Alex Gordon-Brown for initially suggesting that he could fund a local community organiser and to Kit Harris for initial funding and to many others in the London community for additional contributions.
This seems to have been a great call (although I might be bias as it was my job). Certainly since then there has been a massive scale up in resources for local community organisers all around the world. There has been a focus on community and in-person outreach as a particularly effective way to spread EA ideas without the message becoming garbled (i.e. it is more high fidelity). And of course the London community grew a lot. But it took individual donors actively pushing for this to happen, and funding it when others were sceptical, in order to lead the way.
Early EA community building in London.
Back in 2015 there were no funds available for local community building, no funds from CEA or community grants or EA Funds etc. There was general scepticism about if it was worth funding such local work.
Kudos and many thanks go to Alex Gordon-Brown for initially suggesting that he could fund a local community organiser and to Kit Harris for initial funding and to many others in the London community for additional contributions.
This seems to have been a great call (although I might be bias as it was my job). Certainly since then there has been a massive scale up in resources for local community organisers all around the world. There has been a focus on community and in-person outreach as a particularly effective way to spread EA ideas without the message becoming garbled (i.e. it is more high fidelity). And of course the London community grew a lot. But it took individual donors actively pushing for this to happen, and funding it when others were sceptical, in order to lead the way.