I run Training for Good, an impact-focused career organisation incubated by Charity Entrepreneurship in 2021. We run fellowships that enable talented professionals to enter careers in policy and journalism such as the EU Tech Policy Fellowship and the Tarbell Fellowship.
Cillian_
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Introducing Training for Good (TFG)
Your specific idea for an entrepreneurship training programme for high-schoolers sounds like a really interesting one.
I’m somewhat sceptical that such a programme targeting high-schoolers is the right approach to solving this skill gap though. The entrepreneurship gap seems like an important but difficult one to solve (eg. see Longtermist Entrepreneurship Project). Charity Entrepreneurship has had success in this area, but they’ve typically targeted graduates & people further along in their career. I would imagine that most high-schoolers would neither be in a position to found an organisation right away or have the necessary skills to do so.
It’s definitely possible that such a programme could help develop skills for high-schoolers (perhaps even by founding and running their own small-scale project) in the hope that they’d later use these to found an organisation. However, in this case, it seems very difficult to assess the success of the programme (as the feedback loops would be quite long) and I’d suspect that very few trainees would ultimately go on to found high impact organisations.
I definitely could be wrong here though and would be interested to hear your thoughts?
[Question] What are the most impactful roles that EAs are currently not entering (and why)?
Training for Good is currently developing a training programme for aspiring EA grantmakers. Although it’s still in development, we’re hoping that the programme will end with a “capstone project” in which trainees make real grant allocations (funded by external donors). This would give donors the opportunity to support future grantmakers.
I’ve sent you a PM about this but keen to chat with anyone else that might be interested.
Apply to Negotiating for Good [Feb 26 - Mar 12]
It’s mainly designed for the for-profit case but I’d be excited to see academics working on important topics use this programme to negotiate for non-monetary benefits that could increase their impact!
Although some of the content would not be 100% relevant, most of the tools we cover are cross-applicable to any negotiation. The basic framework of the programme would also allow participants to replace “salary goal” with their alternative negotiation goal.
Apply for Professional Coaching
Thanks for the question Miranda! We think coaching could be beneficial to a lot of different people. A few groups we had in mind that might particularly benefit from this coaching include:
EAs leading organizations (both non EA and EA orgs)
EAs managing (small) teams within EA orgs / EA chapters
EAs outside of EA orgs that work in roles where human interaction is very important for relative success. Examples might include policymaking, grantmaking or some E2G roles
Early career EAs currently on high impact career trajectories (eg. on track to enter an 80k priority path)
However, I’d encourage anyone who’s on the fence or that doesn’t quite fit into the above groups to just go ahead and apply—or feel free to reach out to me directly cillian [at] trainingforgood [dot] com and we can chat about it
We’d be pretty excited to see applications from group organisers. I think it’s a really important role and imagine that coaching could help multiply the impact of a lot of organisers!
A way around this could be to provide e-books and audio books instead of physical copies. Would also make the distribution easier.
(In the UK at least, it’s possible to borrow e & audio from your local library using the Libby app)
Selective grantmaker fellowships (in the format of a 6-8 week course) organised by an organisation that’s either focused on upskilling EAs (e.g. Training for Good) or grantmaking specifically. This would almost definitely need to be run by at least one experienced grantmaker for it to be worthwhile.
We (Training for Good) are actually developing a grantmaker training programme like what you’ve described here to help build up EA’s grantmaking capacity. It will likely be an 8 week, part-time programme, with a small pot of “regranting” money for each participant and we’re pretty excited to launch this in the next few months.
In the meantime, we’re looking for 5-10 people to beta test a scaled-down version of this programme (starting at the end of March). The time commitment for this beta test would be ~5 hours per week (~2 hrs reading, ~2 hrs projects, ~1 hr group discussion). If anyone reading this is interested, feel free to shoot me an email cillian@trainingforgood.com
It seems that FTX’s Regranting Program could be a great way to scalably distribute funds & build the grantmaker pipeline.
We (Training for Good) are also developing a grantmaker training programme like what James has described here to help build up EA’s grantmaking capacity (which could complement FTX’s Regranting Program nicely). It will likely be an 8 week, part-time programme, with a small pot of “regranting” money for each participant and we’re pretty excited to launch this in the next few months.
In the meantime, we’re looking for 5-10 people to beta test a scaled-down version of this programme (starting at the end of March). The time commitment for this beta test would be ~5 hours per week (~2 hrs reading, ~2 hrs projects, ~1 hr group discussion). If anyone reading this is interested, feel free to shoot me an email cillian@trainingforgood.com
Thanks for writing this up Ollie!
I’m designing a grantmaking training programme for Training for Good at the moment and have spoken with ~20 grantmakers across different cause areas over the past few weeks. Just wanted to add that your perspective seemed to be broadly shared by others working in the space—ie that to be excellent at grantmaking you need to be an excellent generalist with a strong object-level understanding of a specific field first.
If anyone reading this fits Ollie’s description and is interested in exploring grantmaking, let me know. (We’re looking for 5-10 people with experience in a relevant EA problem area to participate in an 8 week scaled down beta test of our programme starting at the end of march. Time commitment would be ~5 hours per week).
Very excited to see this!
For anyone interested in applying for these roles, Training for Good is running a beta test of our grantmaking training programme starting w/c 28th March. We’re looking for 5-10 people with relevant experience to participate in an 8 week scaled down programme. Time commitment would be ~5 hours per week.
Here’s a very rough overview of the programme for anyone who’s interested. It will culminate in a “capstone project” which could hopefully be used in your application for these (or other) roles as an example of your thinking & work.
If you’re interested, send me a message here or an email cillian@trainingforgood.com
Apply for Red Team Challenge [May 7 - June 4]
$100 bounty for the best ideas to red team
Yep, it’s possible to apply as a team (of up to 4 people). Though we expect that most people will apply as individuals and that we’ll assign them to a team.
It’s also possible to apply with an idea that you’d like to red team. Though, again, we expect most people to apply without an idea and will provide a suggested list for participants.
Thanks for flagging this Kaleem, it should now be fixed. Let me know if you’re still having issues :)
I imagine we’ll continue to run Red Team Challenge somewhere between 1-4 times per year moving forward (though this largely depends on how well the first iteration goes).
Great question Jack!
We don’t have much data on the tractability of convincing mid-career professionals to switch into EA careers (though we’d be excited to see any evidence supporting or contradicting this if it exists). Our main reason for targeting mid-career professionals over promising high-schoolers is that we think the information value of doing so is higher. This group possesses a lot of relevant skills and has typically been quite neglected by EA outreach, so we’re excited to test out this approach. If we found that drawing experienced professionals into EA career paths was very tractable, we could envisage running similar programmes in the future to fill many other skill gaps.
I do agree that week-long retreats engaging promising high-schoolers seem really valuable though. There’s quite a few programmes like this already (eg. SPARC, ESPR and Leaf ) and Open Philanthropy is excited to fund more such projects if others are interested in pursuing this!