On CEA (where I’m Chief of Staff) and its website specifically:
I’m glad that you think the What is CEA page is quite good, thanks!
The site is in a slightly weird position because it appears very high in searches for “effective altruism”, so the front page needs to cater to that audience, as well as people who land there because they’re actually interested in CEA itself. We expect the interested-in-CEA crowd to be more likely to stick around, so the page is designed to prioritize the new-to-EA crowd (i.e. redirect them to EffectiveAltruism.org).
We were in the process of commissioning a redesign of the site a few months ago, but that is now on hold pending us finding a new Exec Director and potentially pursuing a new strategy.
Thanks for raising this. I agree that the dial has shifted somewhat toward funding constraints for non-mysterious reasons, and I’d note that this is true across different cause areas. CEA is funding constrained too! Our Interim MD has framed this as the start of EA’s Third Wave.
I’ve been leading internally on how we might unconstrain CEA itself, and (in its very early stages) thinking about how we might coordinate fundraising activities between EA meta (~movement building) orgs. But I want to be explicit that there are a couple nearby things CEA is not currently doing and hasn’t been in recent history:
Fundraising for non-CEA projects
Giving What We Can used to be part of CEA, but was spun out in 2020, and this has been outside our remit since then
Luke and Sjir recently wrote about funding constraints from a GWWC perspective
Grantmaking to non-CEA projects
Similarly, EA Funds was spun out of CEA in 2020
The bulk of our current grantmaking is to the groups and EAGx conferences we directly support and their organizers
The dashboard is accurately capturing the fact that we have not (yet) made any big strategic changes to our programs intended to address funding bottlenecks. But it does disguise the fact that we’ve done some things within existing projects, including launching an effective giving subforum (later shut down) and supporting an Effective Giving Summit. I’m confident that there are more things we could do to move the needle here, although I’m less confident that they would be more impactful than our existing programs, even in the new funding environment.
There is important work to be done figuring out the costs and benefits of a more money-oriented approach, but I’d caution that it’s unlikely CEA makes any major changes to our current strategy until we appoint a new CEO. Worth noting, though, that we’re open to pretty major changes as part of that process.