Constructing scalable, funding-neutral EA communities (in the UK)

(This is the rough transcript/summary of a session I am delivering this weekend at EA in the Lakes, and I will be referring people to this post from it. It begins with a semi-fictional story.)

As a long-time (non-EA) community events organiser, I have a lot of skills and connections in the provision of budget-friendly community events around and near my town. Some young adult approached me at one of them and said they were an “Effective Altruist” and would I please help them learn to organise events for their young adult philosophy group? They would like to do one weekend a year with the uni students and one weekend a year with people from other cities. Well, I can fairly easy bump my 4 weekend residentials a year at the local scout camp, converted church, or YHA up to 6, particularly if it’s for a good cause (they say they do lots of learning about charities), the people are nice and interesting to chat to, and I don’t have to handle any raw meat or eggs in the kitchen.

It’s great to see that the local young adults are getting interested in global issues, getting off their screens to go hang out at mostly-sober community meetups, and thinking really hard about how to make a positive impact in the world (even if I don’t understand some of it). It’s usually quite hard to get young adults interested in that sort of stuff. Maybe I’ll go steal some of their less weird materials to run a session for children’s church about how to spot good charities, or maybe something more about why helping other people who don’t look like you is important.

I hear there’s a bunch of them that are really depressed because they’re worried the world is going to end soon. That sounds like a real bummer. I’ll go run them a nature holiday, maybe that’ll cheer them up.

Enough about me. This is about a problem in the EA community and a speculative method of solving it.

Problem: EA (in the UK, everything here is UK-oriented, please apply to other countries at your own risk) is bottlenecked by the fact EA events are structured in ways that make them a huge net recipient of infrastructure funding. This means EA events need to be individually grant-funded, which means applications to run events need to be evaluated, which means applications to go to events need to be evaluated to ensure sufficient expected impact for an attendee to justify the cost, which means you’re turning away interested people from participation in the EA community—both the people who apply and are rejected, and the silent massess who would rather not apply than risk a painful rejection. You’re also disproportionately turning away effective givers who quite frankly will look at the cost spent on their attendance and rather sit at home and have it be donated to fight malaria.

I have absolutely nothing against CEA for this, and I’m glad they’re prepared to shell out thousands per for things they consider extremely high-impact. Please don’t take this as a “destroy EA Global”. But:

Solution: if we absorbed some norms from hobbyist rather than professional events we’d probably be able to do 20-50 person funding-neutral community events which would:

roughly pay for themselves via ticket prices
scale and copy way better to newer organisers than the big stuff
actually reach the effective giving sphere who partake in EA as a social rather than professional community
and break down the idea of EA as something you can only go to if you’re EA enough to have a load of EA money spent on you.

A bunch of people have poked me about this individually since I set up EA in the Lakes without an external grant. While I have several reasons to think that particular one is unrepeatable-by-others cheap, many of the norms I’m operating on are norms which are fairly widespread in other events-based communities that don’t operate with large grant pots. I have attempted to vaguely bullet-point the relevant ones below and encourage people already interested in events community-building to consider them.

Things to consider for lower-cost community events organising:

Get experienced non-EA volunteer community organisers helping out with your stuff. (see: the intro to this post) Seriously just ask them, I’m sure various people would say yes if they believed it was for any good cause (and if you can’t explain EA as a good cause what are you doing), and they don’t need to put in much work in order to set you on the right track. Show up to their stuff and be a helpful young adult. Community organisers of all stripes are extremely used to teaching helpful young adults how to organise things.
Tap into local knowledge of where and how hobby groups meet at low cost. Turn up to things, ask how they made it happen, say thanks, copy. For residential hire you’re targeting £25 or under per bed per night, which is eminently achievable if you get away from the fancy holiday hire sphere into the community holiday hire one. As a starter, where’s your local scout camp? Did you know the YHA does exclusive hire for groups? https://www.yha.org.uk/exclusive-hire . You can probably get cheaper if you build some relationships with faith-based communities, but that’s going to be way more upfront work (especially if you’re resolutely atheist). [EA in the Lakes is at a Quaker site, I’m a site trustee now, and I’m rather excited about Christians for Impact maybe getting us some more of this in future.]
Learn to bulk-cook whole food plant based food. If you already know, go teach your EA friends. If your EA friends already know, go run something together and do the cooking on a rota. You need a level 2 food hygiene certificate to do groups catering which is an online test that’s maybe £15 per cook to check you know that cross-contamination is bad etc. Seriously why does nobody* in EA know how to cook—this is mildly horrifying for a community that’s ostensibly vegan-adjacent, you’re all gonna get health problems.
If you really can’t cook, get a vegetarian/vegan hobbyist semipro caterer in. £20 per person per night is about the standard these days. A lot of them are keen on non-meat non-egg cooking because it lets them avoid handling raw meat and raw eggs, and will happily do you a vegan or vegan-adjacent menu. You can find them by turning up to lowish-cost hobbyist events and asking who’s doing the cooking and what their rates are.
Include low-cost arts, nature, and other hobbyist activities EAs tend to like in your event programme. All sorts of “we make arts out of raw materials” requires the cost of the raw materials (cheap) and feeds the EA urge to create things. Go for a walk. Do an “EA Summit” (by which I mean climb a hill). Do a “cooking class”: have a group help you make the chocolate truffles for dessert. Also meals and nights away (at low cost, see above) are inherently community activities. EA by itself is fulfilling but draining, and community activities recover from that but drain social battery, and breaks/downtime recovers from both. Energy management is key—this could be its whole own post, but at minimum intersperse your activity types, have scheduled breaks, and make it clear attendees can always take extra breaks (or organise 1-2-1s). Plus, the additional activities often make it possible to sell tickets for higher prices, which means you can make your event cost back.
Get attendees to make much of the programme for you. State a theme, have a section on the booking form asking what kind of stuff they would run on that theme. Suggested themes: “EA”, “Nature”, “Art”, “Community”. EAs tend to naturally end up running stuff of interest to EAs.
Providing meals and nights away means non-locals don’t have to eat out or book accommodation to attend. Daytime-only events are a huge hidden cost on travelling attendees, we’ve been through this whole debate in the live roleplay sphere endless times over. You want them to give you that money so you can spend it far more efficiently than they can. You can always do cheap (or free) day tickets for locals if you’re worried about pricing them out by higher costs for accommodation.
Sponsor tickets. Have the top suggested event ticket price be significantly above the cost per attendee. There are plenty of people who are, we shall call them relationally altruist, and happy to pay extra to go on holiday/to a cool meetup with some nice people for a good cause (funding less fortunate attendees who couldn’t otherwise afford to go to such a cool thing). £120 per person per night for a holiday is the standard for many UK holiday budgets, so you can justifiably charge £250 top-rate for a weekend and people will turn up if they like it and like you. Some of these people may be effective givers in your area, all the better because they’ll work out it’s technically a donation to EA infrastructure and maybe shell out even more. Literally a few sponsors will pay for a massive chunk of your whole event if you get your costs down enough. It takes a while of organising to find and build relationships with sponsors—expect more payoff here the more events you run.
I am also going to be up-front about the fact that one big way to make an event really cheap is to not pay yourself for organising it. However it is possible in other communities to do paid organising this way if you have the skills while still being entirely ticket-funded, and I’d want to see that (eventually) cropping up in EA too. If it does, we’ve made it and are earmarked for massive community expansion I reckon.
* I am exaggerating for dramatic effect, and please know that if you are an EA who does know how to cook I really appreciate you.