I have received funding from the LTFF and the SFF and am also doing work for an EA-adjacent organization.
My EA journey started in 2007 as I considered switching from a Wall Street career to instead help tackle climate change by making wind energy cheaper – unfortunately, the University of Pennsylvania did not have an EA chapter back then! A few years later, I started having doubts about my decision that climate change was the best use of my time. After reading a few books on philosophy and psychology, I decided that moral circle expansion was neglected but important and donated a few thousand sterling pounds of my modest income to a somewhat evidence-based organisation. Serendipitously, my boss stumbled upon EA in a thread on Stack Exchange around 2014 and sent me a link. After reading up on EA, I then pursued E2G with my modest income, donating ~USD35k to AMF. I have done some limited volunteering for building the EA community here in Stockholm, Sweden. Additionally, I set up and was an admin of the ~1k member EA system change Facebook group (apologies for not having time to make more of it!). Lastly, (and I am leaving out a lot of smaller stuff like giving career guidance, etc.) I have coordinated with other people interested in doing EA community building in UWC high schools and have even run a couple of EA events at these schools.
Is there perhaps too much emphasis on punishment and not enough on prevention? Skimming through comments there is a lot of talk about reporting and dealing with situations. But I have a feeling there are too many of these situations occurring in EA. I feel like there is a lot of work to do in terms of culture and here I think CEA cannot be expected to do this alone. I think the onus is on us males to e.g. really make it clear whenever we overhear conversations that are inappropriate to make this clear, no matter how uncomfortable that makes us feel or if the person making the inappropriate comments has power. I am happy to work with people if there is a group of males that want to get together e.g. a pledge and collect signatures or some other initiative that could give people more comfort in combating bad culture (just DM me).
Also, I think there is a distinction to make between EA in general and people employed by EA orgs. For the former, as we are a big tent, I do not expect us to be able to have as low “case numbers” as e.g. McKinsey. But for employees in EA orgs I expect us to be best in class. We are after all altruists and should take this part of our identity seriously.
Lastly, and as others have pointed out, there seems to be unnecessary reputational risks from associating with EA. While I feel most strongly about the suffering of survivors, I am also concerned that high caliber people in EA are afraid to associate with a brand that has a reputation for sexual misconduct. It might also make it harder for all of us needing to reach out beyond EA to make people trust us.