This post was co-written by the EA NYC team: Arthur Malone, Alex Rahl-Kaplan, Megan Nelson, and Rocky Schwartz

This post is part of the new Forum Sequence EA in NYC. Our central thesis is that NYC is already home to a flourishing EA community and we recommend that the EA community as a whole invests more into leveraging the city's unique impact potential. We explore how we came to believe this below and in subsequent posts.

Introduction

In May of this year, EA NYC turned ten, and in August New York will host its first official EA conference, EAGxNYC (applications still open until July 31)! Inspired by these milestones, we’re sharing a series of posts detailing our community, our approach to community building, and our larger goals.

We've found that EAs outside of NYC often know surprisingly little about our community here. This contrasts the EA Survey consistently finding that NYC is the city with the third-highest number of respondents. And while some in the community joke we should keep EA NYC low-profile, lest we get invaded by EAs from other locales, NYC itself is far from low-profile by its very nature. And we actually really love newcomers! So we’d like to spotlight the incredible work being done here and hopefully provide some context and guidance for other local groups as they grow.

The first post in this new sequence is about our community health infrastructure and can be found here. And, if this series inspires you to check out our little town, we’ve also just published a guide to visiting NYC.

A group photo from EA NYC's 10th birthday and Annual Picnic!

In future posts, we intend to cover questions including:

What makes a location an EA hub and is NYC one?
What EA-related work is underway in NYC?
What is EA NYC's current strategy and programming?

We also welcome feedback on topics you would find valuable for us to cover.

To kick things off, let's first take a stab at answering a foundational question:

What makes NYC important to EA?

New York City has an overwhelming presence in relevant EA domains. The statistics below only gesture toward the available resources. In NYC, no one industry dominates; and as we'll show in later posts, in the EA NYC community, no one cause area dominates. Instead, NYC is a massive, dynamic metropolis positioned for high-impact initiatives that cross cause areas, industries, and academic disci...