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Thanks for this post! If it weren’t for making friends with people in the EA community it’s very unlikely I’d have made a career change to the direct work I’m doing and less likely I’d still be donating (certainly not at the level I have).

I like that you have specific suggestions for how community builders can act on this too 😀

I think supporting friendships in a group can be useful, but this tends to be what most community organisers are already focusing on.

There are downsides like being perceived as a friends group which make it harder for new people to get involved. Also some of the most impactful people may not be looking for new friends, but are looking for advice on where to donate/​work/​volunteer their time.

I’ve written about how group organisers should try to focus more on the wider network than just a tight knit club.

This will also depend on the size of a group, smaller groups probably benefit from strong friendships to begin with, but as the group grows, too many close friendships might limit future growth.

This seems very plausible to me. Personal connections repeatedly appear to be among the most important factors for promoting people’s continued involvement in and increased engagement with EA (e.g. 2019, 2020).

That said very few EAs appear to have any significant number of EAs who they would “feel comfortable reaching out to to ask for a favor” (an imperfect proxy for “friend” of course).

Anecdotally, EAs I speak to are usually surprised by how low these numbers are. (These are usually highly engaged EAs with lots of connections, who therefore likely have a very unusual experience of the EA community).

And yet these numbers are themselves almost certainly a large over-estimate of the total community, since respondents are themselves more likely to be highly engaged, and have more connections. So fewer people from groups with less connections are in the survey and plausibly those who are in the survey are disproportionately likely to have personal connections.

Among our respondents, >60% of the most highly engaged EAs (e.g. EA org staff and local group leaders) have >10 connections, and >70% have 5 or more. Conversely, a majority of the least engaged half of respondents (levels 1-3) have <2 connections, with 0 being the modal response.

Of course, these responses are from 2019, so it is quite possible that the situation has changed since then.

I think a bottleneck to this is often that having the explicit goal of trying to make the members of your EA group become friends can feel inorganic and artificial. The activities you suggest seem like a good way of doing this in a way that doesn’t feel forced, and I’ll probably be using some of these ideas for EA Ireland. Thanks for writing this wholesome post up!

Wonderful post...I was in a similar community to EA with lots of local chapters meeting all over and online forums...and we found this friendship thing happening that was both personally fulfilling and also led to new things being created, exactly as you’ve posted here, and we coined the term, “Generative Friendship” to describe it. It’s a real genuine friendship, but also generates something good in the world. I’ve always loved this term.

This is great. It is friendships that kept me anchored in EA when I was in my earning to give phase