Thank you for sharing a very personal story, I think it will lead to even more improvements to the overall process and community health.
As someone that was accepted to EAG with basically no EA accomplishments, I do strongly believe that admissions are not about “worthiness” but about “how much would going to EAG help you or others do the most good”.
Looking at the application, as a random nobody, I personally agree with the CEA decision (even ignoring the fact that they probably have a lot more information).
Not sure about discussing why in a comment, but happy to do it if someone would find it useful.
Edit: I really liked this paragraph
Let’s create a warmer community and be present for one another. There are many out there that have the capacity to listen and appreciate your unique talents. EA is a huge global community with different niches. Don’t leave just because one part of the community couldn’t/wouldn’t accept you.
And the fact that you actually found a solution/improvement (the gather town space) to solve your needs, I wish I had more of this mindset!
As other comments have noted, a lot of the proposals seem to be bottlenecked by funding and/or people leading them.
I would recommend people interested in these things to strongly consider Earning to Give or fundraising, or even just actually donating much more of their existing income or wealth.
If the 10 authors of this post can find other 10 people sympathetic to their causes, and each donate or fundraise on average 50k/year, they would have $1M/year of funding for causes that they think are even better than the ones currently funded by EA! If they get better results than existing EA funds people and resources would flock to them!
If you think the current funding allocation is bad, the value of extra funding that you would be able to allocate better becomes much higher.
Especially if you want to gather funds for work on climate change, I suspect fundraising would be easier than for any other global cause area. Instead of asking Moskovitz/Openphil for funding, it might be even higher EV to ask Gates, Bezos, or other billionaires. Anecdotically, when I talk to high net worth people about EA (non billionaires), the first comment is almost always “but what about climate change, which clearly is the most important thing to fund?”
I disagree with a lot of of the content and the general vagueness/EA Should of this post, but I appreciate the huge effort that went into it and here I am trying to be constructive. I might write a less constructive comment with all my disagreements at some point if I can think of a way that could inform more consequentially useful criticism.
After reading most of the post, as a person that is in EA to give money/support, and not to get money/support, it’s not clear to me how can I help you.