Ben Williamson

Karma: 2,329

Currently Director of Recruitment for Ambitious Impact (AIM), working to find exceptionally talented and dedicated new founders for our programs, including our flagship Charity Entreprenurship Incubation Program. We offer training, mentorship, and funding for multiple high-impact career paths, launching organisations such as LEEP, FEM and the Shrimp Welfare Initiative.

Previously, I was Director of Partnerships and Field Operations for the Maternal Health Initiative (https://maternalhealthinitiative.org), a global health charity training healthcare workers in lower-income contexts on family planning counseling. I co-founded MHI in September 2022 with Sarah Eustis-Guthrie out of the Charity Entrepreneurship Incubation Programme.

Prior to that, I founded Effective Self-Help (https://effectiveselfhelp.org) a research organisation studying the most effective ways people can improve their wellbeing and productivity. I’ve also worked about 20 jobs before all this mostly much less relevant to impactful work, from music festivals and call centers to vineyards and youth counseling.

Ben Williamson 22 Nov 2024 6:47 UTC
4 points
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on: ben3536′s Shortform
AIM is looking for a freelance copyeditor to help us maximise the quality of our published written work, including our website and research reports. We’d be particularly excited to receive applications from students or early-stage professionals with existing knowledge of EA and a desire to test their fit with communications work. Job advert here.

Ben Williamson 25 Oct 2024 15:35 UTC
4 points
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on: AIM is hiring for 4 roles
The initial application deadline for these roles has been extended until November 3rd (next Sunday). If you’re interested in any of the positions and on the fence about applying, please reach out. I’d love to understand why and answer any questions you may have.

Ben Williamson 2 Sep 2024 11:31 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Chris Rouse’s comment on: AMA with AIM’s Director of Recruitment (and MHI co-founder), Ben Williamson
We definitely have done this and we look to recommend late-stage applicants for consideration for potential job opportunities at AIM-incubated organisations where this is a good fit. I think exposure to a startup organisation—whether non- or for-profit—is a great way of getting a better sense of personal fit for founding yourself

Ben Williamson 2 Sep 2024 11:28 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: NBjork’s comment on: AMA with AIM’s Director of Recruitment (and MHI co-founder), Ben Williamson
I’m glad you found this useful! It’s something we’ve tried to highlight more this cycle. A purely personal recommendation would be a grounding in Stoicism—e.g. reading some of Ryan Holiday’s books. Founding requires a lot of grit and perseverance, and some of the principles of stoicism and exercises for practicing these are the most practical guidance of finding on how to cultivate these traits.

Ben Williamson 2 Sep 2024 11:24 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Tori’s comment on: AMA with AIM’s Director of Recruitment (and MHI co-founder), Ben Williamson
Excellent question! Running an organisation really stretched my strategic thinking and ability to choose a coherent path through a lot of uncertainty. Your time, and the time of everyone who works for you, could be used on seemingly 100 different highly valuable things. Often you don’t have robust information to differentiate between these and decide which to prioritise, making it easy to try and do too many things simultaneously. I think one of the biggest lessons I learnt from MHI is being ruthless in prioritisation—choosing a very small number of things and doing these as well as possible. It’s easy to choose to ⁸⁰⁄₂₀ a whole lot of stuff instead that all seems necessary but in hindsight you could have, and should have, scrapped maybe 75% of it.

I’d like to think this is a skill I got a lot better at with time, and that this sort of strategic thinking and prioritisation applies to almost any kind of role—e.g. it’s a big emphasis for me at the moment in thinking about the many different ways AIM can look to recruit and selecting a few key avenues to execute.

Ben Williamson 2 Sep 2024 11:17 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: AxellePB 🔹’s comment on: AMA with AIM’s Director of Recruitment (and MHI co-founder), Ben Williamson
Thank you! This is something we’re thinking about at AIM in terms of fostering an openness to shutting down amongst our charities where this makes sense. Strong public examples certainly helps. I think providing evaluation and research support to charities so that they can draw conclusions on impact they’re confident enough in to make shut down decisions makes a differnce.

I also think fostering a culture that places less emphasis on founders as the ultimate driver of success or failure would help. Organisations succeed for a combination of several key reasons—one of which is the talent and skill of the founders—and highlighting some of these other factors more (the idea; the timing; luck!) makes it easier for founders to close an organisation without feeling like it’s a huge personal failure

Ben Williamson 2 Sep 2024 11:11 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Toby Tremlett🔹’s comment on: AMA with AIM’s Director of Recruitment (and MHI co-founder), Ben Williamson
Hey Toby, yeah I’m not best-placed to answer this but a few quick thoughts:
- I think the skills to build and run an excellent organisation transfer quite strongly across, though the day-to-day nature of the work and ‘product’ might differ substantially
- This is a bit of an experiment! We think there could be incredible value to a program like this if we can make it work, but we’re not claiming 100% confidence that this will work as well as hoped
- For a variety of reasons, the number of charities we can found a year currently has a clear cap: the founding to give program offers both an opportunity to scale AIM’s impact, and potentially to help reduce the cap on top charities we can incubate through additional mid-stage funding availability

Ben Williamson 2 Sep 2024 11:05 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: defun 🔸’s comment on: AMA with AIM’s Director of Recruitment (and MHI co-founder), Ben Williamson
I’ll leave out the specific data on this but we were pleased with the number and quality of applicants for this from our first recruitment round earlier this year. I’d say in general we’ve got a mix of more ‘CEO’ and ‘CTO’ type candidates—ones with significant experience in building startups and fundraising, and those with significant technical experience and skill. Possibly a bit of a skew to the former so we’re especially excited for applicants from a more technical side this time around.

Ben Williamson 2 Sep 2024 11:02 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Tori’s comment on: AMA with AIM’s Director of Recruitment (and MHI co-founder), Ben Williamson
I certainly had doubts when I first applied to the program! I was rejected in 2021 and then accepted in 2022: I got further in the process than I expected to in 2021 so in that sense the rejection was actually a source of confidence that this might be a realistic avenue for me in future.

I think applicants tend to believe that they need more prior experience than they do (we’ve had multiple excellent participants in their very early 20s), and perhaps underestimate the value of flexibility, particularly in your organisation’s first 12 months. Several of our organisations have made significant early pivots from what the preliminary research report suggested might be the best path, and people’s preference for which charity idea they’d like to found often changes during the program.

Ben Williamson 2 Sep 2024 10:49 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: huw’s comment on: AMA with AIM’s Director of Recruitment (and MHI co-founder), Ben Williamson
A good question—we try and make our application effectively ‘EA-neutral’ but in practice I expect that our recruitment process is a little skewed in favour of people from an EA background. My guess is that’s down to a greater familiarity with the types of questions or tasks we ask for (e.g. making a weighted factor model), and it being easier to pick up on key things we care about—like a commitment to cost-effectiveness—when people communicate this in an EA way.

Ultimately, we care about finding people who have the base traits we care about—we’re equally open to a 0% or 100% culturally EA cohort if we feel like that’s the best group of people who applied.

Ben Williamson 14 Aug 2024 8:24 UTC
10 points
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in reply to: Denkenberger🔸’s comment on: Presenting five new effective giving initiatives
Cause area focus will be determined by the initiatives themselves so I’ll leave it to any of the founders to comment on this further should they wish to!

Ben Williamson 14 Aug 2024 8:23 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Jason’s comment on: Presenting five new effective giving initiatives
An interesting idea! ~~To my knowledge this is not something we have any plans for~~ (see Luke’s comment below). I can see a world in future where something like this would be useful though as the number of effective giving orgs grows and the levels of success between orgs becomes more apparent

Ben Williamson 21 May 2024 12:41 UTC
1 point
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on: Introducing MSI Reproductive Choices
An excellent writeup—thank you to the MSI team for taking the time as a large existing global health/development org to share this. I’m particularly excited to see the potential cost-effectiveness of last mile programming where the benefits to reproductive autonomy are likely to be particularly strong.

Ben Williamson 25 Mar 2024 10:10 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: ramekin’s comment on: Maternal Health Initiative is Shutting Down
This link should now be fixed!

Ben Williamson 19 Mar 2024 21:15 UTC
4 points
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on: EA “Worldviews” Need Rethinking
This is an interesting and thoughtful post.

One query: to me, the choice to label GHD as “reliable human capacity growth” conflicts with the idea you state of GHD sticking to more common-sense/empirically-grounded ideas of doing good.

Isn’t the capacity growth argument presuming a belief in the importance of long-run effects/longtermism? A common-sense view on this to me feels closer to a time discounting argument (the future is too uncertain so we help people as best we can within a timeframe that we can have some reasonable level of confidence that we affect).

Ben Williamson 21 Nov 2023 19:19 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Jason’s comment on: CEA is fundraising, and funding constrained
For sure! Though my rough take would this would add up to maybe $60-70k all in? (perhaps I’m undershooting average salary estimates based on UK numbers)

Ben Williamson 21 Nov 2023 17:50 UTC
18 points
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on: CEA is fundraising, and funding constrained
$110,000 for a single community builder in Boston seems awfully high?

I’m guessing this is meant to include budget for event delivery on so on, but I think it would be worth being explicit in that given the perception at times of very liberal spending within community-building and that this is cited as an example of a marginal donation to CEA.

Ben Williamson 20 Nov 2023 16:03 UTC
5 points
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in reply to: Aidan Alexander’s comment on: Maternal Health Initiative—Marginal Funding & 1st Year in Review
I definitely agree with and share the concerns over government adoption as a silver bullet of sorts on the charity’s side. Outsourcing all the costs when the government’s money and resources are more counterfactually precious than the charity’s is not the way we want things to go!

Our aim is closer to your last sentence: government adoption to leverage the cost-savings from delivery through their existing systems of training/data collection/material distribution, with MHI continuing to pay for the costs involved that the government wouldn’t incur anyway.

Ben Williamson 15 Nov 2023 13:32 UTC
20 points
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on: How would your project use extra funding? (Marginal Funding Week)
Marginal funding estimates for the Maternal Health Initiative, a global health organisation working in Ghana founded through Charity Entrepreneurship. We’ve written up a more extensive discussion of our funding and our work in a separate post. These are my personal thoughts with a particular focus on marginal donation value.

Estimating what our marginal funding is likely to look like is challenging as an early-stage organisation. The range of possible total fundraising scenarios over the next few months appears quite large.

While we’re looking to raise $300k, there are plausible scenarios where we raise under $100,000 at the low end and over $400k at the high end. $250,000 is the budget we estimate needed to deliver the programming we would like to through 2024, building off our existing partnerships and aggressively pursuing the possibility of government adoption of our changes to care.

For a rough model of the relative marginal value of different total fundraised amounts, see below (we are not expecting to raise all this money from the EA community):
- <$100k: MHI downsizes, running as a skeleton organisation applying for larger grants that would allow us to implement new projects, using our current programming results as evidence for this. Credibility with partners and the government is affected as we have to delay work and walk back loose commitments made to 2024 programming.
- $100-250k: MHI neither contracts nor expands, likely running a smaller version of our planned 2024 programming to adjust to our lower budget. This would likely reach around 50% fewer facilities and consequently roughly 50,000 fewer women. The likelihood of government adoption of our programming is uncertain in all scenarios, but is likely significantly reduced if we struggle to deliver results with sufficient statistical power or geographic coverage.
- $250-400k: MHI is able to deliver the best version of our 2024 programming, focusing more of our co-founder time towards programming rather than fundraising work. Towards the upper end of this bound, we may be able to fund additional stakeholder engagement and contractor/consultant support to maximise our government engagement and the likelihood of program adoption.
- >$400k: Funding over this threshold likely would primarily be directed towards additional runway and 2025 programming, possibly allowing us to expand in Ghana earlier than projected in anticipation of delivering programming on a national level.
What links here?
- Meet the candidates in the Forum’s Donation Election (2023) by Lizka (28 Nov 2023 14:23 UTC; 67 points)

Ben Williamson 14 Feb 2023 18:49 UTC
16 points
6 ∶ 3
in reply to: Ariel Simnegar 🔸’s comment on: Valentine’s Day fundraiser for FEM
[disclosure: I work for a family planning organisation (MHI), these views are my own].

It’s eminently reasonable to hold philosophical views that call into the question the work of an organisation such as FEM.

I worry though that it’s somewhat against the spirit of EA and worldview diversity to suggest that donations to other charities may be more appropriate based on views that are not consistently shared across the community?

Is there not the risk of a double-standard here given people with person-affecting views may view donations to a good number of longtermist projects as a harmful misallocation of resources by prioritising future lives over present ones?