Self investment I think community builders should do

This is a crosspost from the new Animal Welfare Alignment Newsletter by Anima International. You can subscribe on Substack if you are interested in following these efforts. Audio reading also available on Substack. The goals of this post are to: 1. Raise a question I see as crucially important to the goal of aligning AI to animal welfare...

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Let's taboo the V-word

lincolnq·3d ago·8m read

“How long have you been v*g*n?” This is one of the most common icebreakers at animal protection events. It’s a baseline assumption, and it mostly holds true: if you’re out advocating for animals not to be tortured or abused, realistically these days you are v**n, or close. And it makes for good conversation. It seems fairly safe to assume when you meet strangers. But this assumption is hurting the movement in a way which we don’t always notice: someone new comes into the sp...

Spiro: an update 2.5 years on and a fundraising ask for expansion

Habiba Banu·10h ago·6m read

Summary Back in November 2023 I posted here to launch Spiro and raise our first $198k. Two and a half years later this is an update and a fundraiser for the next step. The short version: we've now reached over-5,900 people with TB preventive medicine, including over 3,000 children under five years old. Our early results have held up well an...

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Self investment I think community builders should do

Rest (~10% of time)

Holiday - Community Building Grants are made in the expectation that people work ~normal working hours for their location. This includes taking holiday, without needing to “pay back” the hours. For people on other types of grants, I also think that the level of holiday that optimizes productivity for most people is >0
- Example: EACH (EA Switzerland) make it explicit in their work contracts that they must take a certain amount of time off

Self development (~10% of time, more for those new to effective altruism)

Cause prioritization - If community builders are to be persuasive when they make the case for effective altruism, I think it is important that they have thought through their own opinions on cause prioritization. I would not be persuaded that I should invest a lot of time in learning and making detailed prioritizations if the person encouraging me had not done so themselves. Additionally, I think it’s motivating to feel you are working on something that is truly aligned with your values, and if you aren’t taking time to revisit the implications of your values, I don’t think this can be true.
- Example: The coaching pilot for city and national groups led to multiple group leaders committing to re-evaluating their cause prioritization
Learning - In the recent post Bad Omens in Community Building the author explains “...in the first session, foundational arguments were laid out, and he was encouraged to offer criticism. So he did. According to him, the organisers were grateful for the criticism, but didn’t really give him any satisfying replies.” This seems bad, and I think it is worthwhile investing in learning to reduce incidents like this.
- Example: In April and May of this year I read the texts for EA Cambridge’s AGI SF

Improving working practices (~5%)

Predictions - As CEA’s CBG manager, I get to read the strategies and plans of many different groups. It is exceedingly rare that these strategies or plans make explicit predictions about the impact that they will have. Planning is hard, and by not making predictions, community builders are depriving themselves of a major source of information about their planning.
- Example: EA Netherlands make predictions about tactical decisions that they are uncertain on, to try and improve over time
Working on the collaboration or ways of working - For community builders that work in teams, I think it is important to take time to review how the collaboration is going. What do you enjoy about working together? What parts of the collaboration are frustrating? Are there things you can change to collaborate better in the future?
- Examples: Organisers sharing their self perception of: Strengths, weaknesses, how they like to receive feedback, personal development objectives (and how the rest of the team can support this); Habit tracking; Identifying and tracking growth areas

Taking the above into account, this then implies 75% of your time should be on object level community building.

What I suspect is blocking self-investment

Start-up-ness: Community builders are working in small organisations without fully defined processes, which can lead to a sense of "as soon as we get things under control, we'll rest / focus on ourselves"

Possible mitigation: Announcing self-investment in your strategy, to put this on equal footing with other commitments

Community pressure: It is difficult to say no to community members, which can cause a long list of projects, causing self-investment to be deprioritised

Possible mitigation: Part of my motivation to write this post is to make it common knowledge that community builders should self-invest, and community members should be understanding of this. I think community members will understand when community builders prioritise self-investment

Planning challenges: It is difficult to plan projects that haven’t been done before, especially for people with less professional experience. As such, community builders that intend to spend 75% of their time on direct community building may misjudge how much work takes 75% of their time

Possible mitigation: Booking time with productivity and professional coaches seems like it would often be a good investment of community builder time, and would help to address some of these planning challenges