Some additional thoughts on this:
How should the decision making on local community building funding be distributed across people and organisations?
I think it’s reasonable that at the current scale of granting for local community building (~1 FTE, ~$1 million/ year, ~30 grants / year) the majority of the decision making is housed within one organisation, and that the majority of the decision work is contributed by one person. This level of specialisation and centralisation seems reasonable to me because I think that:
Making good decisions requires a bunch of different components such as context on the EA community, the route to value of EA groups, how to do grantmaking etc. and these can be hard to achieve without a person / organisation specialising for this purpose.
There’s a possibility of funding harmful projects as per Stefan’s comment. I think more decentralised decision would increase the risk of funding harmful projects.
The scope of the programme is relatively narrow and homogeneous, as per Ryan’s comment, which makes it easier to get gains from specialisation.
A lot of the value of having different grantmaking programmes (differing worldviews, different epistemics, contact with different networks etc.) can be achieved by having a specialised decision maker who allocates a some of their time to consulting others.
Should there be more work going into decision making on local community building?
I think more capacity here would be good, though I don’t think that allocating additional decision making capacity to local community building funding decisions is a strong priority relative to nearby alternatives. Within the EA Community Building Grants programme, I think that allocating more capacity to support functions is a higher priority than decision making functions. Within the EA grantmaking space, I don’t feel like I have a great sense of where additional capacity could best be used, though I’d be surprised if this was EA Community Building Grants.
I also don’t think the size of the current budget necessarily warrants additional FTE investment. I think the money granted/ FTE is in a similar ballpark for other small granting projects in the EA space such as EA Grants, EA Funds, though I’m unsure of this.
The above are my best guesses, though I don’t feel very confident in them. In general I think this is a valuable topic to explore, and I’m interested to learn more about grantmaking programmes with different models (like EA Funds) to see if there are improvements that can be made in how the decision making is distributed.
If there are independent funders that are interested in making grants to local community building opportunities, I’d be very happy to chat (harri.besceli@centreforeffectivealtruism.org). It’s possible that I’ll be able to provide useful input on any grants being considered, and I’m also keen to hear if there are any valuable funding opportunities we’re missing.
Hi Jan,
Thanks for flagging your concerns here. The scope of EA Community Building Grants (CBG) doesn’t encompass all funding decisions regarding community building, but is limited to providing funding for people to do part-time or full-time community building with a specific EA group (i.e. at a university, city and national level). We’ve made some grants outside this category, though they account for less than 10% of the total funding we’ve granted out. Within this category of location specific EA community building, the CBG programme likely accounts for the vast majority of funding.
In terms of our process for making decisions on Community Building Grants at CEA, I am the project lead, but other staff and external stakeholders are involved in the process (both in terms of object-level work and by providing oversight). For example, in our last evaluation round:
I conducted the majority of the interviews for grant applicants and the rest of the interviews were conducted by other members of the groups team.
I reviewed the applications, solicited input from others internal and external to CEA, and wrote up decision recommendations and my reasoning for the recommendations.
The decision recommendations were formally reviewed by 2 people at CEA, sent to two external advisers for additional review, and finalised in consultation with CEA’s executive director.
My (quick) best guess is that of the total time allocated to community building grants decision making to date, 70% has come from me, 25% from others in CEA and 5% from people external to CEA.
As Community Building Grants is still a relatively new programme, we’re still experimenting with the evaluation process, and there’s a chance it’ll change going forward, though I expect the amount of consultation of other CEA staff and external advisers to remain relatively similar. I’d be happy to hear any ideas you have on how to to ensure that we take into account a variety of viewpoints—feel free to email me at harri.besceli@centreforeffectivealtruism.org or you can contact katie.glass@centreforeffectivealtruism.org (the head of the groups team).