Hey—I’m Chana, currently interim head of the community health team. I’m really sorry you had a bad experience. If you’d like to discuss concerns you have with members of the team, you’re welcome to contact me via the forum, my email (chana.messinger@centreforeffectivealtruism.org) or via anonymous form (note that with the form, I won’t be able to follow up). If you’d like to express more thoughts to our team but not in public, we also have a team form that can also be anonymous.
If you still would find it useful to talk to a contact person, you can request to talk to Julia, now or in future (conditional on her capacity).
Flagging that if I was in the same position as the OP, if I had a bad experience with Catherine, I would probably not trust you here either. Just a pretty unfortunate situation all around. :/
Yeah, that would be understandable (and as you say, unfortunate), and I appreciate you flagging. For what it’s worth, I don’t think this would be true of everyone—when I was a teacher some but not all people felt comfortable expressing disagreements with me to my principal, for instance, and I’m operating here off what I think of as the standard thing of talking to people’s managers if they have concerns. But maybe you mean specifically in the realm of confidentiality? Either way, I think there are a few reasons people might just not feel comfortable being able to raise concerns here, and that sucks.
If you have thoughts on things that would make you feel more at ease in this situation (which you’re raising as a hypothetical but isn’t for the commenter), I’d be very up for hearing.
As an anecdote, my previous employer had an external independent counselor/support-person/coach/therapist/something that you could go to if for any reason you didn’t want to go to the company ones. (I don’t remember if they had paid for like 20 hours total, or if there was a cap of one meeting per person). I never looked into it, but I think the idea was that the external person would then report things anonymously or in aggregate, or not report anything and just offer support.
I’m not sure if it would be net-positive for EA (or even doable at all), but as a hypothetical, I think it would make me feel safer about confidentiality if I was talking to someone that was not employed by EA, close friends and colleagues with many senior EAs and grantmakers and so on.
I will not be sharing further information with the team but instead creating a post outling my experiences on the EA forum.
The reason being is, I think, there should be reviews of services provided to the public (ie, the wider EA community) by institutions—this includes the CH team at CEA—so people can make up their mind as to whether to use their service.
I appreciate that I will end up doxxing myself to the CH team and perhaps even harm my future working relations with CEA (as I’ve did some work for them previously) by doing this but I consider this will be net positive in informing the judgement of the wider EA community.
FYI, for those interested, I cannot make a post immediately for reasons to do with this that I also cannot explain. I hope to be able to do so in some weeks.
I will no longer be writing a post as I find it very difficult to write and seeing this Twitter thread of harrasment against those critical of EA is discouraging.
Hey—I’m Chana, currently interim head of the community health team. I’m really sorry you had a bad experience. If you’d like to discuss concerns you have with members of the team, you’re welcome to contact me via the forum, my email (chana.messinger@centreforeffectivealtruism.org) or via anonymous form (note that with the form, I won’t be able to follow up). If you’d like to express more thoughts to our team but not in public, we also have a team form that can also be anonymous.
If you still would find it useful to talk to a contact person, you can request to talk to Julia, now or in future (conditional on her capacity).
Flagging that if I was in the same position as the OP, if I had a bad experience with Catherine, I would probably not trust you here either. Just a pretty unfortunate situation all around. :/
Yeah, that would be understandable (and as you say, unfortunate), and I appreciate you flagging. For what it’s worth, I don’t think this would be true of everyone—when I was a teacher some but not all people felt comfortable expressing disagreements with me to my principal, for instance, and I’m operating here off what I think of as the standard thing of talking to people’s managers if they have concerns. But maybe you mean specifically in the realm of confidentiality? Either way, I think there are a few reasons people might just not feel comfortable being able to raise concerns here, and that sucks.
If you have thoughts on things that would make you feel more at ease in this situation (which you’re raising as a hypothetical but isn’t for the commenter), I’d be very up for hearing.
As an anecdote, my previous employer had an external independent counselor/support-person/coach/therapist/something that you could go to if for any reason you didn’t want to go to the company ones. (I don’t remember if they had paid for like 20 hours total, or if there was a cap of one meeting per person). I never looked into it, but I think the idea was that the external person would then report things anonymously or in aggregate, or not report anything and just offer support.
I’m not sure if it would be net-positive for EA (or even doable at all), but as a hypothetical, I think it would make me feel safer about confidentiality if I was talking to someone that was not employed by EA, close friends and colleagues with many senior EAs and grantmakers and so on.
Thanks for this!
Hi Chana.I will not be sharing further information with the team but instead creating a post outling my experiences on the EA forum.The reason being is, I think, there should be reviews of services provided to the public (ie, the wider EA community) by institutions—this includes the CH team at CEA—so people can make up their mind as to whether to use their service.I appreciate that I will end up doxxing myself to the CH team and perhaps even harm my future working relations with CEA (as I’ve did some work for them previously) by doing this but I consider this will be net positive in informing the judgement of the wider EA community.FYI, for those interested, I cannot make a post immediately for reasons to do with this that I also cannot explain. I hope to be able to do so in some weeks.Retracted: Read this for why.
Really brave of you to do this. It’s important.
Update
I will no longer be writing a post as I find it very difficult to write and seeing this Twitter thread of harrasment against those critical of EA is discouraging.
I will retract my comment.
Speaking personally, I have no idea how to update based on your comment and “retraction” and this just leaves me rather confused.