Leading Australia’s key place to engaged with effective giving and the effective altruism community in Australia.
GraceAdams🔸
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Sites like archive.is often cache articles :)
We got an op ed published in a major Australian newspaper today in response to the recent wave of media about EA: https://www.afr.com/technology/trump-calls-effective-altruism-a-dangerous-ideology-it-s-not-20261007-p6135s
Thanks Zach for writing on behalf of CEA.
EA Australia is also not going to be platforming Manifund for the foreseeable future.
This is a great comment and very true!
I guess in my writing of this, I was assuming that doing good is table stakes—but I think you’re right to call this out explicitly!
very exciting!!!
We enticed a real life comedian onto our podcast:
I’m going to rattle off some loose thoughts (mostly just speculation and intuition) - but I think this deserves a deeper interrogation another time:
- I think Australia’s takes on EA and to some extent evidence-based development are influenced by Peter Singer. Many university educated people are aware of Peter and his work—this is an outlier globally! I think this has driven outsized early interest in effective altruism
- I think the fact that Australia has more economic/social equality than other comparative countries like US and UK probably means that Aussies perceive ourselves as “lucky” comparative to other countries—and I think are less likely to default to “charity begins at home”. (I don’t think this is sufficient to drive action, but maybe is a useful factor)
- A high proportion of Aussies are either first or second gen migrants—I wonder how that interacts with seeing/feeling the need—I think there’s lots to explore here—for example some of my Indian / Chinese friends think that development is likely best done through growing the economy as this is how their parents moved from poverty to wealth.
I just watched it and have a lot of tears after the beautiful heart-felt ending! I have family who’ve also worked in slaughterhouses and animal farming, and I think you brought this together in a way that feels compassionate. I think it’s a really well done film! Congratulations!
Thanks so much, Leonie! I totally agree!
Congratulations, Jack! I’m looking forward to watching it!
Thanks Jacob! Give this a go: https://anchor.fm/s/11209b150/podcast/rss
Thanks so much Paula!
Thanks so much! Spotify linked above and we’re looking into broader distribution!
We’ve funded it from our general budget! Let’s catch up at EAG London (if you’re going) and we can chat more!
Thanks for writing this Lincoln! I see love as the foundation for all my interest in altruism, and have been thinking more about how to incorporate more of the messaging of love in my communications about effective altruism (as well as living up to my value of love as much as I can in other domains).
I’ve been really enjoying All About Love by bell hooks—who talks similarly about love as the key for social progress. I hope to write more on my reflections about love and effective altruism soon.
You shouldn’t have had to go through any of this. I deeply value you sharing your experience and reflections, recognising the personal toll it can take, on a number of fronts.
I am angry at CEA, their response (and lack of) feels unbelievably bad.
As a woman who leads an EA organisation, I have a lot of thoughts and feelings that I cannot properly express at the moment.
You deserved better, women in this movement deserve better.
This is a great call out! It was featured in a longer report that we shared directly with other effective giving orgs, but wasn’t called out explicitly as a single post.
I’ll share this again with the effective giving orgs :)
Thanks for writing this!
At EA Australia (Australia’s effective giving fundraising and community building org), our recent impact evaluation found that in 2025 for every $1 spent on operations, we counterfactually moved $9 to effective charities ($5 was a conservative estimate).
You can read more about this in our blog post, which links the google sheet calculations and detailed reasoning for our model. It’s been based on GWWC’s impact evaluation toolkit.
At the moment, my belief is that we are quite constrained by funding, and would be growing much faster with more resourcing over the next few years. Happy to talk with larger potential donors on this if anyone is interested and will be publishing a summary of our 2026 strategy on our website soon.
One of the reasons to have community members contribute to funding our operations, is the stability that having many smaller donors over few major funders. This makes us much less vulnerable to a major donor shifting direction in future.
We would love to be able to support more of our operations and growth from smaller donors and a variety of sources, and additional funding now would be spent on increasing our staff capacity (currently 4.5 FTE across effective giving and community building) to enable further growth!
In case I’ve convinced anyone, our donate form is here.
Rowan, this is enormously sweet! I just logged in to the EA Forum for the first time in ages and I’m really honoured! Being public about my health has felt like a tough decision but knowing that it’s resonated with you and others makes it feel really worth it!
Yet more great EA media coverage in Australia on a podcast from the major youth radio station: https://www.abc.net.au/triplej/programs/hack/effective-altruism-kidney-donation-hu-pennington/107238206