What CEA does

We help to create spaces for people to discuss the ideas of effective altruism. We hope that these discussions help them figure out how to apply the principles to their own lives, and that our community supports them in their future careers, research, or donations. We want these to be welcoming spaces where people can figure things out together and help each other work out how to take action.

We are especially focused on getting more top students and young professionals interested in the ideas of effective altruism. We think that these principles are particularly useful to people who are still figuring out how they can best contribute, and who still have the potential to enter many different career paths. Part of this is getting guidance and support from more experienced community members.

Currently we work in four main areas:

• Groups: We support local and student effective altruism groups around the world with advice, resources, and funding.
• Events: We run Effective Altruism Global, a series of conferences for people to deepen their involvement with the community, and we help run community-organized conferences through EA Global X.
• Forum: We run a Forum featuring discussion of the latest research and thinking in EA, questions and advice, and regular “Ask Me Anything” sessions with leaders in the field.
• Community health: We support community members via a contact person who can help work through community or interpersonal problems, and we work to improve the diversity, welcomingness, and culture of effective altruism.

We also maintain some other online infrastructure for the community:

• We run a website aimed at introducing people to effective altruism and collating some of the best resources.
• We produce the Effective Altruism Newsletter with help from Rethink Charity and a team of volunteers.

Additionally, we are currently incubating the following projects, which are focused on effective giving - encouraging and facilitating people to give more to high-impact causes:

• We support the community of 4000+ people who have taken the Giving What We Can pledge to donate 10% of their income to the most effective organizations they can find.
• We run Effective Altruism Funds, philanthropic funds in specific cause areas managed by experts.

Summary

CEA-wide progress in 2019

Larissa Hesketh-Rowe left CEA in January 2019, and Max Dalton was appointed Interim Executive Director.

Following this change, we focused on improving the execution of our programs by increasing staff accountability, changing management structure, and consulting the community more. We believe that we have made significant progress on these issues (although we haven’t yet fixed all issues that we’re aware of, and there may be issues that we are unaware of). For a more detailed discussion, please see this post which reflects on the causes of past issues and the progress we’ve made towards address them.