I am an Australian with an entrepreneurial spirit based in Barcelona. I have a background in linguistics and English teaching, but now I’m doing community building for our EA Barcelona city group and really enjoying it. I’m also a music artist, producer and video maker on the side.
Melanie Brennan
Karma: 93
EA Barcelona: Our first year of impact
Very well written and eye-opening post, thanks Will!
Something I’d be really excited to see, and that I think would be really useful for community builders when doing outreach/speaking to people very new to the movement:
Information flow:
Someone could create a guide to what EA is, in practice: all the different projects, and the roles they fill, and how they relate to one another.
Someone could create something like an intra-EA magazine, providing the latest updates and featuring interviews with core EAs.
Someone could take on a project of consolidating the best EA content and ideas, for example into a quarterly journal.
I’m super excited for P4A 2024!
Idea for community builders: Try to get a group of your community members together so you can all film your videos at once, followed by a fun activity. It reduces the overall time each person spends on filming and makes the process much more collaborative and enjoyable, as well as amplifying your impact significantly. We are going to do this with some members of EA Barcelona this weekend and I’m feeling much more motivated than last year when I just filmed at home alone.
Vamos a por ello!
Nice one, thanks for sharing your experience and the discussion questions. I am thinking of trying this out with my local group, will let you know how we get on :)
This is simply amazing, I can’t thank you enough!
Wonderful! Many thanks :)
Thanks Neil, I’ve left some suggested changes (mostly just additional questions I found worked well) in your doc :)
Hi again! We finally did it ;) Your discussion questions were really helpful, thanks again for sharing them. I’d also love to make a few suggestions to them, if possible?
Thanks for your reply, Ada. I completely understand what you mean, and it’s true that sometimes the focus is too much on getting to work for the most famous international EA orgs and not enough on local orgs, companies, charities, etc. Thanks for sharing (and clarifying) this insight!
Some interesting things to reflect on here, thanks for sharing! Quick question: When you wrote:
“If you could not collaborate with any EA organizations in the future, what organizations would you want to collaborate with? Or would you do any collaboration?”
..did you mean to write it in the negative, or did you mean “If you could collaborate with any EA organizations in the future...?”
Thanks in advance for the clarification!
I can confirm that the EAGxLatAm was indeed thoroughly awesome! Also that might have been me who spoke to someone from CEA but just to clarify, I said that it was “one of the best experiences of my life”, not“the best weekend of my life” - that would be a big claim and hard to prove… however it’s definitely up there! And it may have been someone else who did really say that, in which case, sweet! :D
I’m sorry to hear that, Aderonke, that must have been really tough. Maybe as group organisers in quite “internationalised” cities, we should expect some amount of transience as the norm. A potential upside of this that someone pointed out to me the other day, is that maybe people discover/get involved in EA in our kinds of cities, but then they take it with them wherever they go. So while it’s a shame for us to lose some members, the involvement they have with our groups may help them to start or strengthen EA communities in other places too one day. Just a thought!
Thanks, Milena! Yes, cat teammates serve a noble purpose too ;)
I would love to have a chat with some of the CBs from Germany about the language barriers we each face, and transient groups. I’ll reach out soon via the Groups slack :) Cheers!
Thanks for your support, Jaime!
Yes, I think a team brainstorming session would be useful. The more voices we hear on this, the clearer it will be what needs to happen to improve the situation. Let’s discuss this soon in Slack!
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Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts on this incredibly complicated topic. It’s easy to see the care you took in writing such a personal, nuanced reflection on what has happened in your part of the world, and you’re very brave for doing so. My heart goes out to you and your loved ones that have been so terribly affected.
It’s interesting to hear how your usual “EA thinking” hasn’t helped you much in your current situation. Perhaps other models of thinking and acting are necessary in crisis situations. And for those of us who are fairly removed from this particular case, it definitely doesn’t feel “right” to dismiss attempts to help/donate to foreign aid given that it’s comparatively less cost-effective than giving to the usual Givewell recommended charities. I think as a community of people whose goal is primarily to help others, we ought to do more. And I would agree with you that the suffering happening in your region, or in wars in general, is somehow on another level, both in terms of the direct experience and the trauma it leaves behind, than the suffering created by disease. However, as someone who’s been fortunate enough to escape both, I can only speculate.