Since 2018 I have been working with Charity Entrepreneurship, now as a Senior Recruitment & Digital Media Manager. Prior to joining CE, I obtained my PhD in Philosophy, specializing in the moral status of animals, and published a book on the topic in Polish. My professional experience includes working as a Project Manager and PR & Marketing Manager for startup projects affiliated with Michał Kiciński, a Polish billionaire and investor who co-founded CD Projekt, the company behind the popular video game series, The Witcher. I had the pleasure of building a Pay What You Want eBooks portal and opening a trendy vegan restaurant in central Warsaw as part of my work with Michał. I have also worked as a Communications Manager for ProVeg International in Poland. For over 23 years, I have been a vegan and dedicated animal activist.
Ula Zarosa
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“one particular disgruntled ex-employee”—I am not an ex-employee, but happy to confirm working with you is not a pleasant experience for an employee. So there are at least two people in the EA community. I expect if CEA investigates, there would maybe be more?
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I would be very curious if there were any complaints about Nonlinear founders’ work ethics sent to Community Liaison, that would confirm the points brought up here?
It would be great if the community at least investigated things that were brought up here in the comments, and actually talked with ex-employees about their experience.
My experience working with Katherine Savoie (this is the previous name of Kat Woods) was very negative.
Based on the gossip below, it looks like a pattern other people also experienced. I wonder if Community Liaison has investigated?
The gossip below seems well known in the community, hopefully CEA is already looking into it?
However, I am not sure how such a gossip could affect accepting funding from Nonlinear. It seems like this is beneficial to longterm projects? So I see no need to mix the two things.
My only concern with Glassdoor is that their review removal policy is unclear. They have removed mine and my friend’s reviews of a nonprofit we worked for. The reviews were nonoffensive, but they were negative, as the experience working for the org was quite bad, and equally, the org was not creating any significant impact. So both things combined made it not a very friendly workspace.
It’s not clear to me why the reviews were removed, but I spotted that there is an option to report a review. So I wonder if an org can also game the system by encouraging multiple people to report negative reviews.
I also worry that people with negative experiences are more inclined to leave reviews. So, e.g. an org can have one negative review and zero positive because satisfied employees didn’t feel motivated to post (didn’t have the urgency to warn others).
So I wonder if there is a healthy way to encourage reviews in general. Probably this post is one since it does not come directly from an employer.
I agree with the rule that this kind of reviews would be beneficial. If I had read my former employer’s reviews now, I would not have gone to work with them (I would avoid months of ineffective work in hostile conditions and burnout). Thanks to the org having a sufficient number of reviews on Glassdor now, you can see the inefficiencies at work mentioned, the lack of impact-focus, and not great treatment of employees, which would be a significant warning for me.
Again, positive reviews, talking about hard work, impact focus, kind colleagues (that, at the moment, I would leave for CE if I was leaving the org) would probably encourage me to apply because I care for impact but I also care about working with intelligent and kind people in an ambitious, startup work environment.
Basically, I would just copy the EA Hub if you want to create something useful.
For me, the filter system is extremely important. The ability to contact people via LinkedIn (where everyone is), via direct message.
I mean one can be using EA Hub for everything: contacting potential mentors, contacting experts in the given area for research purposes, contacting people “open to job offers”, contacting people who can advise you. I mean there is no other place, where we can see what people’s interests are and reach out to them based on that.
Let’s look at the filters—maybe I am looking for an editor in the UK time zone—I can filter through “open to job offers”, “interested in communications”, “interested in specific cause area”. I mean isn’t this amazing? Everyone should be there. It’s the easiest way to connect for useful, impactful stuff.
The most impactful thing is that EA Hub is open. I know that different orgs have huge people databases but because they collect their data for the organization, they can’t share it under GDPR. EA Hub, therefore, is extremely important, it allows the connections that are not facilitated anywhere else.
Why you just don’t take over the management of EA Hub if the current team can’t afford to run it any longer? I mean building a similar system will take you ages, no? Like, people are already there. Are you going to ask each person to come to your new system? Are you going to transfer people’s profiles to the new system? As I understand it, it took a very long time (years) to build the EA hub and its functionalities. I can’t imagine you will be able to create a whole, equally useful thing, fast.
I would consider just buying/taking over and promoting creating accounts there. Treating it like LinkedIn for EAs.
You can just create one bigger page like EA community, part of this page will be the forum, part of the page will be EA Hub, and part of the page will be EA Work e.g.
If you will have a skilled full-stack developer, they can probably nicely put this stuff together.
It’s very common in the startup world that each new developer hates working on other developers’ code, and says: oh I will better build something new. But it’s very common later for them to underdeliver or take ages. It would be sad if all this work that is already done, and the database of amazing people that signed up, just vanished or was stopped from developing.
Maybe there is a third way to go about it? What do you think?
Hi Grace, as you know, I think this is really great video, and I think you lead it super well, and I would gladly watch more content with you like this. I was wondering if you are at liberty to share the cost of making this video—it looks very good, professional, great image, and audio quality. And if not too much trouble, I am assuming this is part of the bigger campaign—including ads etc. I would be curious after you run it, if you will be able to share learnings. I think at EA, we shy away a bit from creating public-engaging content and big social media campaigns, I will be very curious to have a good case for this working, as I can imagine, e.g., other giving multipliers could follow the route. Overall a big fan of the approach you have been taking with your communications lately. I am hoping it really will hype effective giving and get more pledgers to emerge in the long run.
This is super exciting and very much needed. Farmed animal welfare is still super neglected, funding is far too small, and there are not enough EAs working on this cause area. Hopefully, we all can help in getting this book a lot of hype, so maybe it will even inspire new people to join the movement.
“CEA told us that they are unsure if they will pursue any of those specific ideas.” I think the huge value of EA Hub is that tons of EA people have a profile there and that I can search through their interests, experience, and try to contact them with relevant opportunities or connect. Would be great if this was kept alive since it’s very valuable. It would be terrible if e.g. the site stopped working and there would be no alternative for it. As I understand it, you will keep it going until there is a strong alternative. So maybe another 2 years? I think things go very slow in the EA space, so just maybe worth taking this into account, and making sure the hub stays alive. Also in this transition period, I would be afraid that people will be discouraged to add their profiles to EA Hub, with no alternative to it really. And that would be a loss I think.
Thank you for your comment, Nick. I used the word “reach” because it is difficult to objectively measure the impact of some of our charities, given their age. We wanted to give people a sense of their current progress despite this. Reach can also give a sense of the potential scale of the intervention. We also tried to include some estimated cost effectiveness to show the sense of level of impact per dollar. However, overall we do agree with the general sentiment that, sadly, people tend to look at more vanity level metrics like reach, funding, etc. Of course, many of our organizations will need to run an RCT (which some are already planning) before we can get a real sense of their impact, and we believe our organizations are committed to do this.
We indeed agree that Fortify Health has done a really great job, but we had to limit the number of charities we could talk to for this post, and some charities were more cautious about being associated with the EA movement. Feel free to check our website for updates.
It would be amazing if you keep on working on farmed animals. Your work on it so far was extremely helpful and partially lead to the creation of some cost-effective charities. The field is also extremely talent-constrained, and I want to cry whenever I hear “I was into animals but now I want to work on AI” at EA conferences. I know you can still change your mind but just want to say, that counterfactually it seems to me that you are much more needed on the farmed animals side than you will ever be on the x-risk reduction.
I am super impressed with the people working at the charities we helped to start via CE’s Incubation Program, to name a few:
1) Fortify Health, who got an $8.2 million GiveWell grant for scaling their work. I highly recommend following their social media, a lot of cool updates on their progress: https://www.facebook.com/fortifyhealthfoundation
2) Fish Welfare Initiative, who already improved the lives of over 2 million animals. They have a great newsletter and updates on their blog: https://www.fishwelfareinitiative.org/blog3) Lead Exposure Elimination Project, mentioned in almost every interview Will MacAskill did recently :) they have really great map on their website that shows where they work and what stage of work they are at: https://leadelimination.org/projects/
All 3 were created by young graduates, who were not afraid of a startup world and took a chance on a more risky but also very rewarding and impactful career. I am so impressed with the Co-founders, teams created, and the progress they made so far.
It’s incredible how much can be done and achieved by just 2 willing Co-founders and this amazing EA community of donors, advisors, working professionals, volunteers, and friends.
Why start a family planning charity? (Founders needed)
Probably one of the coolest things I have ever read on the EA forum. Thank you so much, Ren! I was looking for something like this for years now. I always had this thought: how would it be if we treated animal suffering seriously? If we see them as humans for a bit. The conclusion was always: we will devote our lives, freedom, time, and strength to help them on a totally different level than we do now.
This post helped me see the suffering of animals much better than I have ever seen it before while reading hundreds of articles about their experiences. This was such a clever thing to do. This is such a smart post. I am extremely moved and extremely grateful you wrote it. I am not sure if people would appreciate it, but I do very much. It’s so helpful to see this perspective. I don’t feel like I need to do the experiments to benefit from your insights.
I guess it solidifies my focus on decreasing animal suffering as my primary focus area, but it also makes me think more about tradeoffs between different interventions.
Really great thing!
@Ren Springlea I asked my best friend who has 20+ tattoos and two children about her experience of pain (also inspired by @Molly ’s comment). This is what she wrote:
“Having had many tattoos, some of them several hours long and having given birth twice as well as having experienced intense contractions following a termination of a pregnancy, I would not even attempt to compare these pains as they are on an entirely different scale.I have tattoos over all parts of my body, including areas widely thought of as incredibly painful and I had many a session when I felt like my skin was being ripped apart, yet not a single one of them ever came close to what I felt during childbirth.
I had two unmedicated births when no analgesia was used whatsoever and whilst some hypnobirthing techniques along with mental preparation helped a lot the second time around, the pain I felt was still absolutely excruciating and way above anything a tattoo could ever cause even on a tired swollen and bleeding skin in the most painful place on the body.”
Since I come from the EAA side of effective altruism I feel like Lewis Bollard’s podcast is really missing here. I would dearly appreciate it, if when you use the term “Effective Altruism: An Introduction” there was EAA representation included in the introductory materials, especially that in the countries like Poland (where I am from) EA-mind folks are mostly coming from the animal movement and are drawn to EA because of effective animal advocacy.
Or maybe just worth re-naming to: 80,000 Hours Introduction to Effective Altruism?
Already in our content calendar :)
Question: In the past 2-3 years, we have heard troubling news about how employees in the animal movement are treated. Are there any plans of creating a safe, global space for employees, where they could:
Safely complain about their situation.
Seek psychological and legal support.
Could safely share their stories.
Problem: I have two examples in mind:
On 17th April 2020 Anima International shared a post on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/AnimaInter/photos/2521160348151381 where they explain their reasoning for firing their CEO: “However, no matter how much we value her merits, there are issues in regards to everyday behaviour towards employees that we as an organization cannot accept.” Do we know what happened to the employees? Did they get support, help, where they apologized to, compensated?
In 2018/2019 ProVeg International was taken out of ACE standout charities list because of (among others) “concerns about their workplace culture”. What was mentioned is that ACE “received multiple testimonials from former employees with detailed reports of culture and HR problems”. The question is—what kind of support have these employees received? Has the organization apologized to them, compensated them? There was maybe no public reaction from ProVeg, as far as I can recall. Where ACE is mentioning “Much of ProVeg’s staff seems concerned about internal discrimination and the unequal treatment of employees, particularly along gender lines.” Source: https://animalcharityevaluators.org/charity-review/proveg/#comprehensive-review
These are only two examples. I have no knowledge if these kinds of problems are wide and common. My question is: How can the global animal movement protect employees from this kind of hostile work conditions? How can we support them?
I was afraid of you because you were my boss, so I could not criticize your work and behavior, and I was scared to do it for a long time. I also know you as a very manipulative manager (just a subjective experience, no evidence here), so I was very afraid of you, and even given the above response, I still am. On the day you quit, I was about to talk to the leadership about quitting unless I no longer have to work with you. Luckily you quit, and I was able to stay in my highly impactful work. But yeah, I am still afraid of you, and it is very saddening to me there is no investigation into the gossip mentioned below. But again, I am just afraid of the manipulative skills I witnessed and you in general. Hopefully, some people can stand up to you.