Hi William! Great idea.
Hope it’s still possible to submit these!:
I love the EA movement—the community, values and work that goes on is just very aligned with me personally. One thing that stands out though is that every organization either recommends, was born out of, or has sent staff members to work at, seemingly every other organization within the movement—the OpenPhil/GiveWell/Good Ventures group, the 8ok/CEA group, some others like CFAR and so on. Do you see this as a risk, or a positive in terms of maintaining some unity around the overall mission?
Related to this, several entities have been set up just in the past few years around EA—centers, projects and so on. Are there plans to expand further, and is there a key piece of the puzzle that you’ve been wanting to put in place for some time within the movement? Obviously 80k was the ‘career advice’ piece, but perhaps there are others?
Coming from the humanitarian sector I can see very strongly how EA principles and thinking would benefit the system. However, one thing that I do notice is that EA seems to be focused on influencing only a few areas of financing—philanthropists, foundations and altruists. But there are others, like institutional or govt donors, corporate CSR departments, or even the general public. In my experience working for humanitarian/development aid organizations, we had hardly any income from philanthropists or foundations. And if we did, it was more locally connected individuals/board members with a link to our organization. My question is have you looked at actively expanding your audience for the research you do and communicating the principles behind EA more widely, and therefore have more impact? Given that impactful giving is our collective goal, it would seem to me that having a specific strategy to target all levels of nonprofit financing would be wise.
Geographically if you’re interested in EA there’s few places to look—Bay Area, London, Vancouver, Australia, Berlin … am I missing one? Other than EA communities, are there plans to expand operations to new areas? And are there similar movements that you know of, though maybe not using the label of EA (or in a different language!), that have sprung up in different parts of the world?
Thanks for your time! If I’m too late to the game in submitting—only saw it today—happy to chat by email or Skype.
Regarding the third point, do I understand that what David is suggesting is that dollars spend on campaigning for candidates focused on poverty reduction programs/spending will in the long run be more beneficial than dollars spend on funding organizations working on the problems that such candidates may focus on?
My main follow up question is therefore which are the priorities countries/hemispheres? Is he referring to candidates who have a focus on foreign aid, or candidates who have a focus on poverty reduction domestically—in other words, socialist?