I’m the Director of Operations at Animal Charity Evaluators and a volunteer for EA Giving Tuesday. I co-founded and co-led EA Madison (Wis.) and have been involved in effective altruism since 2013.
Gina_Stuessy
Karma: 165
There are a few ways which allow me to get involved in other areas of our organization:
All of our Lead staff have weekly meetings, so in those meetings I can reflect on questions other Leads bring to the group, contribute ideas, etc.
Our whole team tries to allow pretty good visibility of what we’re working on by keeping project- or task-related information in the appropriate place in Asana and by posting brief weekly project updates in Slack.
We have a “reciprocity” Slack channel where we can post if we’d like someone’s help on something, and that can often be someone from a different competency area than the poster’s.
We encourage staff to join projects as Scrum Master, even if the project is outside their competency area
Several months ago, our team all switched over to using Asana. Before that, some were using Asana, some Trello, and maybe some neither. I believe the switch-over went pretty smoothly and there wasn’t much resistance to using the new software. A few things that we did which may have contributed to the good adoption were:
Before selecting Asana, we asked staff to list all the features they’d like in a task management software, did research to compare a few options, and chose the one that met most (or maybe all) of staff’s requested features
We acknowledged that this is a big shift, it’ll take a few months for everyone to get comfortable with it, but that we expect greater efficiency in the long-run; expressed appreciation for staff doing the work necessary to figure out this new tool; reminded staff that this is the tool which meets most/all of their requested features
Wrote a guide about how to use it (I thought this didn’t seem very necessary, since Asana has lots of their own tutorials and instructions, but given Sawyer’s comment, maybe that helped!)
Together as a team over the first few months, we established conventions about how we use Asana, and documented those as a separate section in the guide (new staff read this guide as part of onboarding)
We held frequent (weekly?) coworking sessions for a little while, where we could ask each other questions about Asana and/or share tips
This is really neat, thank you for making it!
Question: Did you take into account the following?:
Culling of male chicks in the egg industry
The lives of dairy cows’ offspring (whether they’re kept for veal or slaughtered right away)
Bycatch and/or the lives of the fishes that are fed to farmed salmon?
And a couple requests:
If you do make some updates, could you consider adding eggs from pasture-raised hens for comparison, too?
And add wild salmon?
I was surprised with how much the brain function choice affects the results, but don’t have a good sense of which function is the best estimate. I wonder if there’s enough of a consensus on that among animal sentience researchers for it to be appropriate to designate one of those options as “experts’ choice” or “most likely” or something?
I am not good at coming up with names for things, but do agree a specific URL would be nice. Maybe “meat impacts estimator” (although it’s not just about meat, but “animal products impacts estimator” or “farmed animals impacts estimator” are pretty long), or some other combination of words like:
animal agriculture, animal products
impact, harms (or specifically “suffering” or “welfare” and climate”)
calculator, estimator, estimate
Saulius, just wanted to comment that while I haven’t devoted the time to read in detail most of your research, I have noticed and greatly appreciated that you have contributed a LOT of useful knowledge to EAA over the past several years. Yours is a name I’ve recognized in EAA since its early days. I am glad that you’re shifting to express your opinions more strongly so that more action can be taken on all of the wonderful research you’ve contributed. I’ve gotten the sense that you take these issues very seriously, are super motivated to address them, and don’t get pulled into more trivial things, and I greatly admire and am inspired by you for that.
Re (6), I hope that you can be proud of what you’ve done and decrease your negative self-talk. Take care of yourself. I’d be curious to hear if meditation ends up helping out with this.
Hi Larks, Thanks for your comment. While our current formula does not take into consideration the type or field of work, it does differentiate between different levels of skill that are needed. So, for example, if we did want to hire someone to do data entry, we might classify that a level 1 position (or maybe we’d need to re-number all of our levels so that that position could be below research associates).
Regarding scarcity, it’s true that our current formula does not take that into consideration. If we find in the future that we have difficulty hiring for a certain position, we may need to seek additional funding in order to raise the base wages for every position or else make adjustments to the structure of our formula.
Hey Jacob, not new this year. The EA GT team has done an email list at least the past 2 years, but I bet all 3 past years they were involved in the Facebook match.
This year we also have an option for pledgers to receive text reminders (U.S. phone #s only).
Prepare for Counterfactual Donation Matching on Giving Tuesday, Dec. 1, 2020
I’m not sure that the same set of behaviors/processes will be best for all organizations. At ACE, we did a “culture survey” (~staff morale survey, but broader) and got specific feedback about potential areas for improvement.
Donating (selling) eggs can make someone a good amount of money, too. So it’s also possibly a good idea for ETG reasons.
Re: Table 7 and the sentences “As seen in Table 7, personal networking did not come out as the top source for actually getting people involved in EA, though it remains within the top five. Once introduced to EA, it would appear GiveWell, books and/or blogs, and 80,000 Hours are the three most potent ways to keep engage new EAs.”
The Personal Contact # is higher than the 80k hours # in the table (442 > 423), so either the sentences or the table need to be corrected, I think.
I get the same thing.
Is the Boston one different from this? http://www.eagxboston.com/
Amy, are you involved with EAGx events at all? I’ve had trouble reaching people at CEA regarding EAGxMadison. If you are involved in that, and could email me at gstuessy@gmail.com that’d be much appreciated! (And sorry this is off-topic; I didn’t see a way to message you directly through the EA Forum.)
Is there any reason this info isn’t yet up at https://www.eaglobal.org/events/ ? I know some other people were looking for info on EA Global this year...
Typo(s?) 7th full paragraph, not counting the bolded sentences
“However, it’s likely that people in the developing world will eat not eat as much meat as people in the developing world for quite some time and that some fraction of the meat they do eat will not come from factory farms.”
I co-founded the Effective Altruism Madison local group back in Oct 2014. We’ve had monthly meetups averaging 8 attendees per event (some regulars, some new people). Including my boyfriend and I, 6? of us at least have taken the Giving What We Can Pledge. I also encouraged my friend to coordinate an EA group at the local university here, and his group is off to a great start! (We also have a third EA group in the Madison area, at a large health tech company, that I can’t take any credit for.)
I founded and led a farmed animal committee for a local AR org almost 2 years, educating thousands of people about the cruelties of factory farming and giving them information about veg options. The org worked on a wide range of animal issues, but since farmed animal advocacy is considered most cost/time-effective, I worked to really strengthen and focus on that area.
I’m the lead coordinator of Madison WI’s veg fest, which more than doubled in size and drew over 4,000 attendees last year. (This event is also pro-veg advocacy and supporting those who are already veg.)
Since 2011, I’ve donated over $45k to hopefully increasingly effective charities—I believe my selections have gotten better each year.
(5. Way back in 2009 I helped my boyfriend, Ben West, figure out what he had to do to graduate college, which allowed him to earn lots of money at his job, which allowed him to save up and start a company, from which he hopes to donate a LOT to effective charities https://80000hours.org/2015/12/interview-with-ben-who-expects-to-donate-eight-figures-for-charity-through-tech-entrepreneurship/ We continue to encourage each other to do the most we can.)
I think you meant for the “calculators” link to go here: http://www.animalcharityevaluators.org/research/interventions/impact-calculator/
All vertebrates have similar physiological pain receptors (http://philosophyforprogrammers.blogspot.com/2010/11/who-feels-pain.html), and it seems like there’s only a (possible) significant difference in ability to feel pain when you get down to invertebrates, like insects.
I recall hearing from Alex Barry at the EA Summit a couple years ago who, at the time, was leading Cambridge EA (iirc) and they had an absolutely incredible rate of engagement from volunteer organizers/members contributing time to the EA group’s events and activities. And huge numbers of them. IIRC, he said the key for them was to have one basic requirement: the organizers had to commit to checking and responding to Slack daily. That way, they’d know write away if someone didn’t have time to keep working on something, and they’d quickly find someone else to do it.