TL;DR
NOVAH (No Violence At Home) was incubated by Charity Entrepreneurship (now Ambitious Impact) in 2024 to test a promising idea: preventing intimate partner violence through edutainment, in our case a serialised radio drama. Over the past two years we have produced and aired two seasons in Rwanda.
We are currently evaluating our second season through a randomized controlled trial with 2,400 couples in Rwanda in partnership wi...
I am writing up two charity ideas I’ve wanted to investigate, but haven’t been able to, in the hopes someone will investigate them further. If you end up investigating either, I'd be most interested to see what conclusions you come to!
Vulture preservation as a global health intervention
Since the mid 1990's the vulture population in India has been rapidly declining. The reason is due to a few chemicals which are fed to livestock, which is highly poisonous to vultures.
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Summary
1. With new funding potentially entering the effective altruism ecosystem, we wanted to estimate how much more the wild animal welfare (WAW) movement could productively absorb. We asked organizations with a public, dedicated WAW workstream to estimate their own room for more funding (RFMF). Although this does not capture the whole movement, we believe it captures a substantive fraction of it.
2. Summed across the five organizations that took part, the estimates point to...
I guess the first question is do you like academia? Or do you like research? The two aren't always the same. Personally, you couldn't get me to do a job in academia if you paid me - which is funny because they barely pay anyone! I love research, I love complex cutting-edge stuff, but I hated hated hated academia. I never thrived there. The corporate environment, however, has been my natural space. It may be the same for you - have you tried different types of organisation? I can tell you from experience that research-centric corporate life is much slower paced and more secure than academia, with the downside of less creative freedom during work hours (until you get to mid level).
Honestly more than anything it sounds like you just maybe need a rest. People think a rest is a career-killer but it absolutely isn't. And even if it was, it'd be much less of one than a burnout is. Maybe take a couple months to decompress - though I understand that financing such a rest is rarely easy.
I do a lot of hiring outside of academia and honestly a lot of your major worries are something I don't even look at in a CV anyway. Don't feel like you'd sabotaged or blown anything because you haven't. Even within Academia, we all have our stuff. You'd be surprised how many well-known academics have had 'wobbles' that aren't public knowledge.
Feel free to inbox me if you need more detailed advice. I'm not US based so unlikely to be useful for specifics, but always happy to hear spitballed ideas :)