TL;DR: We are excited to announce our Research Training Program. This online program is designed to equip participants with the tools and skills needed to identify, compare, and recommend the most effective charities and interventions. It is a full-time, fully cost-covered program that will run online for 11 weeks.
Apply here!
Deadline for application: July 17, 2023
The program dates are: October 2 - December 17, 2023
So far, Charity Entrepreneurship has launched and run two successful training programs: a Charity Incubation Program and a Foundation Program. Now we are piloting a third - a Research Training Program, which will tackle a different problem.
The Problem:
- People: Many individuals are eager to enter research careers, level up their current knowledge and skills from junior to senior, or simply make their existing skills more applicable to work within EA frameworks/organizations. At the same time, research organizations have trouble filling a senior-level researcher talent gap. There is a scarcity of specific training opportunities for the niche skills required, such as intervention prioritization and cost-effectiveness analyses, which are hard to learn through traditional avenues.
- Ideas: A lack of capacity for exhaustive investigation means there is a multitude of potentially impactful intervention ideas that remain unexplored. There may be great ideas being missed, as with limited time, we will only get to the most obvious solutions that other people are likely to have thought of as well.
- Evaluation: Unlike the for-profit sector, the nonprofit sector lacks clear metrics for assessing an organization's actual impact. External evaluations can help nonprofits evaluate and reorganize their own effectiveness and also allow funders to choose the highest impact opportunities available to them- potentially unlocking more funding (sometimes limited by lack of public external evaluation). There are some great organizations that carry out evaluations (e.g., GiveWell), but they are constrained by capacity and have limited scope; this results in several potentially worthwhile organizations remaining unassessed.
Who Is This Program For?
- Motivated researchers who want to produce trusted research outputs to improve the prioritization and allocation decisions of effectiveness-minded organizations
- Early career individuals who are seeking to build their research toolkits and gain practical experience through real projects
- Existing researchers in the broader Global Health and Well-being communities (global health, animal advocacy, mental health, health/biosecurity, etc.) who are interested in approaching research from an effectiveness-minded perspective
What Does Being a Fellow Involve?
- Similar to our Charity Incubation Program, the program focuses on learning generalizable and specific research skills. It involves watching training videos, reading materials, and practicing by applying those skills to concrete mini-research projects. Participants learn by doing while we provide guidance and lots of feedback.
- You will also focus on applying skills, working on different stages of the research process, and producing final research reports that could be used to guide real decision-making.
- Frequent feedback on your projects from expert researchers
- Regular check-in calls with a mentor for troubleshooting, guidance on research, and your career
- Writing reports on selected topics
- Opportunities to connect with established researchers and explore potential job opportunities
- Assistance with editing your cause area report for publication and dissemination
What Are We Offering?
- 11 weeks of online, full-time training with practical research assignments, expert mentoring, feedback, and published output
- "Shovel ready" research topics that are highly promising yet neglected
- Stipends to cover your living costs during, and potentially after, the program (Please reach out if you have dependents or childcare costs, to ensure financial constraints don't hinder your participation)
- Our complete researcher's toolkit, including templates, methodologies, and resource access
- Connections with established researchers
Fellows Leave With:
- An understanding of generalizable research methodologies and experience applying them
- A handbook on “How to do research for change”
- A portfolio of published intervention reports
- A portfolio of charity evaluations shared with CE charities and other aligned organizations, making them decision-relevant
- Opportunity to directly use your research to affect decisions of CE charities, foundations, and other organizations
- Certification in Intervention Comparison and Charity Impact Evaluation
Ongoing Support:
- Job search and application assistance to help you land a role in an impact-focused organization or research field
- Access to concrete opportunities within the EA ecosystem and the wider research community
- Membership in the CE community and access to our extensive network
Application Process:
The application process consists of four stages. We encourage everyone to apply to Stage 1, as it is the best way to assess your fit for the program. Subsequent stages require increasing time investment, but only if we believe it is worth pursuing.
The team behind this program:
- Karolina Sarek is the Co-founder and Co-Executive Director of Charity Entrepreneurship (CE). For a long time, she was the Director of Research at CE. Karolina also serves as a Fund Manager at Effective Altruism Animal Welfare Fund and is a board member and advisor for various EA nonprofits and think tanks.
Before CE, she co-founded an organization to improve the impact of nonprofits and social enterprises, worked on measurement and evaluation, and was a researcher in for-profit companies and academia. At the age of 22, she became a university teaching fellow.
- Erik Hausen was previously a Research Manager with J-PAL and with Michael Kremer’s (Nobel Prize winner in economics) research team. Additionally, he has been a Senior Research Advisor for Charity Entrepreneurship and co-led the GiveWell-incubated organization Charity Science Health (which later merged with Suvita).
- Leonie Falk is the Lead Research Analyst for Global Health, Development, and Well-being at Woodleigh Impact, a charitable foundation committed to funding the most impactful organizations. She also previously co-ran the EA Cause Innovation Bootcamp. She is a graduate of Charity Entrepreneurship's Incubation Program and has previously worked with non-governmental organizations in India and Kenya.
This is really exciting, nice work on putting it together. Do you have any plans to put the teaching materials (even if that’s just a reading list) online at any point? I think I’m not the right sort of person to do the course but I’d love to slowly work my way through a reading list in my own time.
This is exactly my thought right here. I would like to go through the materials but full time is too rapid for me currently.
Thanks Shakeel! I think a big value of the program would come from applying learned skills to practical projects and getting a lot of feedback and guidance from expert researchers when doing so. With those sorts of skills, it is best to lean into learning by doing. That makes it somewhat harder to make “public goods” material that will bring a similar amount of value to the program.
That being said, we are planning to write a research handbook similar to the one we have for the charity incubation program. We probably won’t publish version 1 developed for the upcoming program in October, but we hope to publish version 2 made next year. :)
Makes total sense — thank you, and looking forward to the handbook!