I first encountered EA in late 2022 and in the summer of 2023 joined the Intro EA Virtual Program as my first real exposure to EA concepts and the EA community.
Over those weeks in the course, diving into different EA topics, ideas and thoughts and getting to discuss them with my facilitator and fellow attendees, my connection to it grew.
As personal background I will share that I began feeling a desire to help the world around 2014, soon after finishing undergrad. This desire first pushed me to start volunteering for local organizations in small efforts, such as picking up trash in neighborhoods, assisting non profits with various manual labor type tasks and mentoring young adults. But those activities didn’t satisfy my need. I tried a different strategy, which involved me changing careers to becoming a teacher and thereby getting to help others directly through education, and acquiring purposeful and family supporting careers. That worked for a few years, but afterwards I realized that it wasn’t satisfying in every way I needed. The impact as a teacher was very individual, and thereby minimal in a grand scheme. I however, felt pushed to help in a greater scale.
I think that’s one of the main reasons EA calls to me. It’s about helping the world, and it looks at not just my town, but the world, not just those alive now, but in the future too.
From a professional perspective my background is in engineering, program management, logistics, operations & consulting in the Aerospace, Defense and Manufacturing industries. I have also worked in Higher Education focused on training and workforce development.
In Spring 2023 I decided to take some time in the upcoming summer to figure out what I would like the next professional chapter of my life to be in order to do something that had that global impact. I was undeniably a bit rudderless, but what ended up giving me direction was learning more about EA. With that extra time in the summer I was able to commit and attend the intro program. Since the program ended I also attended my first EA conference (EAGxNYC) last month and met, interacted and connected with altruists in person for the very first time. (It was a great event and experience)
The net effect is that I am now committed to shifting my career towards high impact and EA related work.
I see folks talking about increasing the “fun” below, and I think that is worthwhile indeed. Fun should really be a component of anything in life. In New Orleans there’s huge parades/parties after someone has passed, or even after a tragedy, because fun, connection and positivity aligns with hope and celebration.
There is also a staleness in the sense that EAs seem to want to communicate/speak/write in a very standardized way that is simply not interesting prose to grab or hold attention, therefore it’s just down to the interest in the subject/context that’s important. I see the same problem in live presentations in the EA space often (this is not exclusive to EA events btw)...the context is great, but if you really want to have an impact, the context is simply just one part of the formula of communicating effectively. I think seeing more personality in the writing on the forum would be beneficial. I’ll take my own advice here and make it a point to consider a lesser barrier when engaging on the forum, and allow some personality through on my own posts.
As an easy and direct action that may increase exposure, here’s one idea: create something that EAs that meet in whatever capacity would like to connect with. By this I mean something like a monthly ice breaker, that groups that meet either in person or online can go to on the Forum once / month say at the beginning of each of their meetings just to kick things off or potentially to close things out rather than an ice breaker. In this way you get folks who are already in the EA mindset and dedicating time to EA adjacent matters, to interact.
Last comment is related to bringing EA into the wider world that has not heard about it, or doesn’t know much about it, rather than increasing engagement by current EAs. That’s obviously a huge task, maybe one question forward on it is, who are the EA forums “competitors” and why do those folks participate there but maybe not here? This is a big task I know
I’m a big fan of the forum however, including the digest emails and the highlights and the annual recap etc, so y’all are doing a great job in my mind and thank you for the work and dedication.