Tee

• TeeFeb 11, 2020, 11:54 AM

  5 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: In­tro­duc­ing An­i­mal Ad­vo­cacy Ca­reers

  Lauren, I’d like to echo Niel’s sentiment here. Concerted efforts at cultivating EA-aligned talent (via training and launching projects) has always been something Rethink Charity has advocated for. Great to see you taking real strides in addressing this. Please reach out if RC and I can be of any help

• TeeDec 4, 2019, 11:43 PM

  28 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Habryka [Deactivated]’s comment on: EA Lead­ers Fo­rum: Sur­vey on EA pri­ori­ties (data and anal­y­sis)

  FYI Rethink Charity and associated projects were also not invited, including Rethink Priorities and LEAN. We were also invited to forums in previous years

• TeeAug 26, 2019, 5:18 PM

  3 points

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  in reply to: EricFriedman’s comment on: Re­think Grants: an eval­u­a­tion of Dona­tional’s Cor­po­rate Am­bas­sador Program

  It’s great to see more efforts to evaluate and promote top giving opportunities. Rethink Grants seems promising and I’m interested in seeing where it goes.

  Hey Eric, we appreciate the kind words and thank you for taking the time to bring some of these things to our attention.

  How do donors know if they are fully funded?

  Great question—were RG to continue on, the idea was for us to be quite involved in the fundraising process for recommended projects. If Donational were interested in continuing with the CAP, we would likely engage in a joint fundraising effort where we would take special care to keep key funders and the wider public in the loop regarding fundraising milestones and progress. This could even take the form of a public fundraising campaign in certain cases.

  Have you seen the write-ups of ImpactMatters?

  We have! In fact, Luisa Rodriguez, one of the Rethink Priorities analysts on this report, is a former ImpactMatters research analyst. ImpactMatters was also among the organizations that we drew inspiration from for Our Process.

  To address this, one idea would be to put a lot of the details from the main body into an appendix.

  This could certainly be helpful. I think a lot more could be done to better highlight key reasoning within future potential evaluations, including detailed notes on criteria that were important in the VOI, for example.

  If I’m understanding correctly that Rethink Grants is also doing things to try to make the underlying organizations better, then it might be great to have more details on that.

  That’s correct, and now that you mention it, future reports could expand more on all the possible intervention points that RG would consider for improving the overall quality of projects.I cover quite a bit of that in this reply in a different thread. As an example from this report, in the Potential Issues section, we mention pretty large plan changes from presenting the founder with a BOTEC that we came up with based on a handful of parameters that we considered crucial. Having this all mapped out onto one place would certainly be better.

• TeeAug 7, 2019, 5:02 PM

  10 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Jonas V’s comment on: Re­think Grants: an eval­u­a­tion of Dona­tional’s Cor­po­rate Am­bas­sador Program

  Hey Jonas, apologies about the delay in replying here. Much will depend on whether we move forward with the program based on our own internal assessment of its potential and feedback we received from the community, especially those with an interest in grant making and community building via funding projects.

  We loosely outline our remit and purpose in the introduction section and our current plan is to help potentially promising projects that would clearly benefit from the “early-stage planning, facilitating networking opportunities, and other as-needed efforts traditionally subsumed under project incubation” that we want to provide. Projects can often use assistance of this sort, and similar to some VC models, we hope that conducting a thorough and transparent evaluation of their program will be helpful to show others for getting funding traction. A perennial issue for existing grant makers is a lack of projects or research that are prepared to execute for one reason or another, and RG would hope to put time and resources into making a project ready and fundable. This role is meant to compliment the existing landscape.

  As we mention in the OP, we do not currently fund projects ourselves—our goal is to help improve and recommend worthy projects to existing funders at this point. Given that many of the methods in this report are widely applicable, RG could also investigate and evaluate projects on behalf of existing grant makers or individual funders in cases where our interests align. In this case, were a potential funder interested in looking into a “shovel-ready” or existing project, we could be contracted assess it more thoroughly.

  As for sourcing applications, we mention in the Our Process section that Rethink Grants will begin with an in-network approach to sourcing projects, relying on trusted referrals to help us reach out to promising individuals and organizations. If RG continues to conduct evaluations, we then consider projects on a rolling basis. A project that seems potentially cost-effective, run by a high-quality team, and has room for more funding moves forward through our evaluation process. We decided to look into Donational because it appeared to be a high potential project that satisfied these requirements.

  What links here?

  • Tee's comment on Re­think Grants: an eval­u­a­tion of Dona­tional’s Cor­po­rate Am­bas­sador Program by Derek (Aug 26, 2019, 5:18 PM; 3 points)

• TeeJul 29, 2019, 7:02 PM

  7 points

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  in reply to: Derek’s comment on: Re­think Grants: an eval­u­a­tion of Dona­tional’s Cor­po­rate Am­bas­sador Program

  Hey Oli, thanks for taking the time to come up with these points, and going out of your way to say, “...I think evaluations like this are quite important and a core part of what I think of as EA’s value proposition...and would like to see more people trying similar things in the future.” This is exactly the type of attitude toward agency and attempting to do good that I’d like to have encouraged more in EA.
  
  Point-by-point, I think Derek covered a lot. I also mention in a comment how I was thinking about this evaluation in terms of a contribution to grant evaluation and the EA project space more broadly.

  We might have done better to distill cruxes within our qualitative reasoning, though I do think a fair amount of this is presented in various sections. Agreed that swapping advanced mathematical models for BOTECs is often advisable, but at certain points in the future, I would imagine that evaluators could make good use of methods like these.

• TeeJul 26, 2019, 7:46 PM

  16 points

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  on: Re­think Grants: an eval­u­a­tion of Dona­tional’s Cor­po­rate Am­bas­sador Program

  Thank you to those who had a look at this report. Our team put a lot into this as you might imagine. I’ve been anticipating some commentary in this evaluation along the lines of “this is far too complex/​quantitative for a $40,000 grant recommendation.” We’d agree. We gesture at this in the “The future of Rethink Grants” section at the end of the Executive Summary.

  This could have perhaps been communicated better, but my hope is that readers will come to interpret this report, and the methods employed therein, as additional tools to consider when evaluating grants. There may be occasions where evaluators might find it useful to boost their repertoire by using these methods (or something similar) to potentially make better decisions. Project leads may also get some mileage out of how much we’ve put on display here.

  There are certain instances where key reasoning (see Team Strength section), or quick deferral to experts, or even a simple back-of-the-envelope (BOTEC) calculation will suffice. But as with charity evaluation, we might agree, there are circumstances where intuition and BOTECs are not enough. An example from this report that Derek mentions, the VOI calculation and CEE lead us to a more nuanced conclusion that funding decent-sized pilot was very much worth doing in our opinion, rather than fully funding it from the outset or passing over this opportunity. Our conclusions from just a BOTEC might have been different.

  I think we have good reason to believe that the level of rigor displayed in this evaluation is warranted at times. And when those situations arise, we hope others will reach for this report if they’ve found it useful.

  What links here?

  • Tee's comment on Re­think Grants: an eval­u­a­tion of Dona­tional’s Cor­po­rate Am­bas­sador Program by Derek (Jul 29, 2019, 7:02 PM; 7 points)

Re­think Grants: an eval­u­a­tion of Dona­tional’s Cor­po­rate Am­bas­sador Program

• TeeMar 3, 2019, 8:14 PM

  8 points

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  in reply to: Jonas V’s comment on: After one year of ap­ply­ing for EA jobs: It is re­ally, re­ally hard to get hired by an EA organisation

  Same for Rethink. Definitely appreciate this post and tried to make the application process swift and yet as informative as possible on both ends

• TeeJan 11, 2019, 4:27 PM

  2 points

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  in reply to: Jonas V’s comment on: List of pos­si­ble EA meta-char­i­ties and projects

  Hey Jonas, RC might be interested in touching base with you about this soon!

RC For­ward—Canada’s Effec­tive Giv­ing Ex­per­i­ment: Re­sults & Plans for 2019

• TeeDec 20, 2018, 6:33 PM

  7 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: agdfoster’s comment on: EA Meta Fund AMA: 20th Dec 2018

  I do also think that it’s very valuable for some pots of funding to not be very public as there are some bad incentives and restrictions caused by public work.

  Yep, I think that’s right. We (entities within the community) can improve from historical examples of simply not declaring anything on this front or the reasoning behind it.

  E.g., I’m (currently) quite happy currently that EA Grants doesn’t have to justify each grant publicly.

  +1 though our post-decision feedback could be better in some ways.

• TeeDec 20, 2018, 4:26 PM

  14 points

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  on: EA Meta Fund AMA: 20th Dec 2018

  Will things like Donation Data trends play into the committees decision-making?

  (e.g. CEA received ~4x the donations of any other charity due to an individual donor, yet they received a sizable grant from this group. I realize that this fact doesn’t automatically disqualify them as a valuable donation target.)

  Manifold reasons for full disclosure—I contract for CEA, run a meta org that is a candidate for funding from the fund, have received funding from some individual members of the committee, biased toward resourcing valuable smaller projects etc.

• TeeDec 19, 2018, 11:18 PM

  13 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: EA Meta Fund AMA: 20th Dec 2018

  Hey Alex, as I wrote to Jamie with the AWF AMA, I don’t have a directed question but I deeply appreciate this level of transparency and hope it exerts pressure to raise the water level on grant making transparency more broadly

• TeeDec 19, 2018, 9:52 PM

  9 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: rafa_fanboy’s comment on: EA Meta Fund AMA: 20th Dec 2018

  I would imagine this should play into it: “£13.3m boost for Future of Humanity Institute” https://​​www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/​​grant-announcement/​​

• TeeDec 19, 2018, 4:53 PM

  14 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: An­i­mal Welfare Fund AMA

  Hey Jamie, I don’t have a directed question on AWF per say, but I deeply appreciate this level of transparency and hope it exerts pressure to raise the water level on grant making transparency more broadly

• TeeMay 31, 2018, 3:38 AM

  6 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Rohin Shah’s comment on: Why Groups Should Con­sider Direct Work

  An example is that EA Yale will likely be helping Rethink with reporting on the EA survey. Also see a lot of what EA NTNU has been up to. Richenda will have to forgive me because my memory is fuzzy on this, but I remember hearing of a university group that pressured a college make their annual donations to effective charities. All of these seem high-value to me and are not mutually exclusive with pledges, career changes etc.

Please Take the 2018 Effec­tive Altru­ism Sur­vey!

• TeeMar 15, 2018, 3:39 PM

  6 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Tee’s comment on: EA Sur­vey: Sex­ual Harass­ment Ques­tions—Feed­back Requested

  In response to the comment that was deleted below, we do not intend to ignore this issue.

• TeeMar 14, 2018, 4:38 PM

  19 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: EA Sur­vey: Sex­ual Harass­ment Ques­tions—Feed­back Requested

  I interested Tee Barnett and Peter Hurford in adding sexual violence questions to the survey. Therefore sexual violence definitions need to be created.

  Thanks for your dedication to this issue. I’m compelled to point out that that briefly speaking about a particular issue in an informal manner should not be seen as an endorsement on behalf of myself or Rethink Charity.

• TeeMar 12, 2018, 7:54 PM

  6 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Ervin’s comment on: An­nounc­ing Re­think Pri­ori­ties

  Ben West asked this question in the EA Facebook group late last year, and I believe EA Funds has updated since then: https://​​www.facebook.com/​​groups/​​effective.altruists/​​permalink/​​1606722932717391/​​

  It’s not clear what the optimal amount of funding for resurrecting LW should be, but according to the EA survey (run by Rethink), LW had been a top source for introducing people to EA until recently: http://​​effective-altruism.com/​​ea/​​1h5/​​ea_survey_2017_series_how_do_people_get_into_ea/​​

  Qualifying this by clarifying that I’m the ED of Development for Rethink Charity – I would say the lineup of projects offered by Rethink (SHIC, LEAN, RC Forward and Rethink Priorities, EA Survey) should be among the most competitive funding options for community building, especially considering our reach and impact on a comparatively low budget: https://​​rtcharity.org/​​monthly-donor-briefing-03-2018/​​

  What links here?

  • Ervin's comment on How to im­prove EA Funds by Henry Stanley 🔸 (Apr 4, 2018, 10:58 PM; 18 points)