I’m the Finance Director at Animal Charity Evaluators. I co-founded and co-led EA Madison (Wis.) and have been involved in effective altruism since 2013.
Gina_Stuessy
I’m Gina, a software & applications engineer in Madison, WI. I’m also on the board of directors for a local animal rights & environmental protection group, Alliance for Animals and the Environment. Random fact: I used to do synchronized swimming in high school!
Looking forward to it!
Correction: The meetup is starting at 10:30 am.
(Typo: “Except results by the end of the month”—should be “expect”, right?)
For Amazon Smile, there are extensions to have it set up a redirect so that whenever you type in “Amazon.com″ it goes to ”smile.amazon.com″. Is there something similar for this, or do I just have to always remember to use the link I bookmarked?
Is there a way, like in Amazon Smile, to designate the charity it goes to? Can any charity set up a “shop for charity” link like the ones you have for Charity Science?
“I think it would have been smart to do the week before my fundraiser and the week after.”—Do you mean the week before & after your birthday?
Great job! I’m going to encourage Ben to do this for his birthday in February (and then I’ll try it again in August). Mind if we use your wording for the part about the bed nets? I wonder if Charity Science will always match bday fundraisers or if that’s something just for the end of this year?
I read through all the steps but haven’t actually done more than step 1 yet (will do step 2 after Christmas when I’m back to a more normal week). I foresee getting stuck on Step 3, though. One of my goals was to do more activism things. This could involve tabling at festivals, leafleting, whatever else. It’s not something that I would do on a regular basis on a free hour each day. If I find a free hour, I could possibly use that time to plan the activism things I’ll do, but I imagine it’ll be hard to not do that in the mix of the activism-related emailing and planning that I’m currently doing, and to set that aside to a specific time.
Maybe my mistake was that my goal isn’t something I’m not doing currently, since it’s an “I want to do more of this” type thing.
Suggestions?
I think how it works in the US is that you subtract the amount you donated (up to 50% of your income) from your income, and then the tax you pay is some percentage of that lowered income.
Example (over-simplified):
Income: $80,000 --> Taxes (15%): $12,000
Income: $80,000, Donations: $15,000 --> Taxable income: $65,000
--> Taxes (15% (or maybe you'd fall into a lower tax bracket)): $9,750
So in this example, even though you donated $15k, your taxes only went down by $2,250.
Typo in Local Groups section? Showing 2 different numbers for TLYCS.
“78 through The Life You Can Save, 41 through 80,000 Hours, and 38 through The Life You Can Save”
Could you update the link to Effective Animal Activism to their new website & name, Animal Charity Evaluators, and their new top charities, The Humane League, Mercy for Animals, and Animal Equality?
Wasn’t one of your suggestions to find small/unskilled work for EA volunteers to do, to see if they’re ready for a bigger task? I think it’d defeat the purpose of getting EAs involved in a small way to just hire virtual assistants for unskilled work.
(Typo: “People aren’t attracted to marketing, their attracted to people doing a good job.”—should be “they’re”)
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 think you meant for the “calculators” link to go here: http://www.animalcharityevaluators.org/research/interventions/impact-calculator/
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.)
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.”
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...
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 the Boston one different from this? http://www.eagxboston.com/
My boyfriend Ben told me that this article is better understood after reading your previous article. Could you include a link to the previous article in the text of this one?