Effective Altruism Forum
EA Forum

Hide table of contents
by Jonah Boucher
3 min read 3

15

Building effective altruismGiving Season (2024)Marginal Funding WeekEffective altruism outreach in schoolsAnnouncements and updatesEducationFunding request (open)
Frontpage

Leaf empowers talented teenagers to become the next generation of global problem-solvers by offering scalable, online fellowships that equip them with the skills and knowledge to address the world’s most pressing challenges. In 2024, Leaf supported hundreds of students through our fellowships, with over 1,600 completing our courses.[1] 

We aim to double the number of applicants, course completions, and Fellows (top ~7% of applicants; our most intensive support) in 2025 while rolling out a more cost-efficient model, and testing new courses to reach new audiences.

We seek (Manifund page here) £70,000 ($90,000) to enable Leaf to keep operating and expanding in the next 6-12 months. We’re really excited about Leaf’s model and plans, but our continued operation is uncertain without your funding support!

Why should Leaf exist and expand?

Simple theory of change.

In conventional educational systems, teenagers don’t have structure or mentorship to explore how they can do good. The incentives and encouragement for smart teens are all about getting into uni. and demonstrating their intelligence, rather than making use of it to help others. And yet they’re already making decisions relevant to their potential positive impact, like what subjects to study at university, what sort of internships to get or projects to pursue, and which problems to find out more about.

After years of iteration and experimentation with the model of Leaf programmes, we are excited about cheap and scalable online fellowships to help meet this need for impact-focused support.

Top 10 track record highlights from Leaf’s 2024 online programmes

  1. One-third of our 3,500+ summer applicants completed a five-week course with us (despite only ~200 being offered full fellowship places).
  2. The Fellows are an exceedingly smart bunch. The median score of 2024 Summer Fellows on the IQ/GMA test developed by Spencer Greenberg & SparkWave was 95th percentile; i.e. they scored higher than 95% of adults that the test was developed on.
  3. They’re also diverse; ~half are female and ~two-thirds select ethnicities other than white.
  4. We have likely supported more students who will go to top universities to spend 10+ hours exploring how they can do the most good than the whole UK EA uni group ecosystem.
  5. Feedback to date has been highly positive, with similar likelihood to recommend scores (averages ~9/10) than EA Global, Non-Trivial, and EA Virtual Programs.
  6. The majority of Fellows report changes to their career plans and the majority report changes to their views about the world’s most important problems. (Longer-term behavioural data pending surveys early next year!)
  7. We tentatively estimated that we were generating engagement more cheaply than 80,000 Hours, and creating connections more cheaply than the Centre for Effective Altruism.
  8. The fellowships are selective so we can provide direct support for the most promising individuals, but we also offer the online content as ~zero-marginal-cost by-products to achieve wide reach, with over 1,600 completions (5+ hours of content) in 2024.
  9. We’ve focused on refining the model in the UK to date, but expect the model to be scalable internationally, e.g. to reach talent in Europe, the US, and LMICs.
  10. No major disasters! (We take participant safeguarding and wellbeing seriously.)

For further information about the programmes and the claims above, please contact me (EA Forum message or jonah@leaf.courses) with a message about your background and interest and I will send you the link to our 35-page report from earlier this year.

You can help save Leaf

We have enough remaining funding from our most recent EAIF grant to run a cohort in summer 2025. We are asking for £70,000 ($90,000) to expand the capacities of our Managing Director (me!) and additional part-time contractors to:

  • Improve the existing 3 subject-specific courses (maths, biology, history) plus our cause-specific AI course and test the feasibility of adding 1-3 additional courses (we’ve already piloted biorisk, with possible courses in economics, animal advocacy, or s-risks).
  • Experiment with measures to ~halve costs per completed accepted participant via streamlined marketing and switching from ‘tutorial-style’ discussion calls (~5) to ‘seminar-style’ discussion calls (10-30).

  • Secure Leaf’s future. We have contacted several funders but so far have nothing confirmed beyond our reserves (one explicit rejection; no feedback given). Leaf’s future is uncertain and your donation will help us commit fully to Leaf’s next steps without needing to pursue alternative job options for the sake of personal and financial security.[2]

Financial details, alongside more conservative or more ambitious proposals (£30k - £150k) are available upon request.

(We are also currently exploring sponsorships from partner organizations to whom we can direct our applicant pool and most promising fellows to subsidize our cohort costs with the value we provide elsewhere in the EA ecosystem.)

Please contact Jonah Boucher (jonah@leaf.courses) for further details. We also welcome feedback and questions in the comments!

  1. ^

     Given Leaf’s limited capacity, places to our fellowships are competitive. We offer varying levels of participation so that while our most exceptional applicants will receive a higher level of support, discussion, and recognition, everyone who is interested in the programme (and meets our eligibility criteria) will be able to participate in some way. In 2024 we had around 250 Fellow completions, 250 Finalist completions, and the other ~1,200 were Independent Learners. Further details on each of these levels of participation here.

  2. ^

     In the event that we decide to wind down Leaf in the coming year, we will return/donate all remaining funds to the EA Infrastructure Fund.

15

0
0

Reactions

0
0

More posts like this

Comments3


Sorted by
New & upvoted
Click to highlight new comments since:
John Salter5
0
0

I think this post would be more compelling if you shared more data (e.g. cost per participant, leading indicators of impact), how much money you got from EAIF etc

Reply
Jonah Boucher8
0
0

Thanks John! Happy to share a few of the specific metrics behind the track record highlights, and we can share more data and reasoning docs. by request. From our spring 2024 programmes (latest analysed data) we estimated:

  • £5.15 per hour of direct engagement
  • £26 per connection made by Fellows and Finalists
  • £199 per completed Fellow
  • £1,237 per highly engaged EA

We hope to roughly ~halve costs/Fellow this coming summer based primarily on larger discussion group sizes and lower facilitator costs. 

Reply
John Salter4
0
0

This is helpful, thank you!

Reply
More from Jonah Boucher
99
EA covered on "Stuff You Should Know" Podcast
Jonah Boucher
· · 8m read
3
3
View more
Curated and popular this week
 ·  · 5m read
 · 
[Cross-posted from my Substack here] If you spend time with people trying to change the world, you’ll come to an interesting conundrum: Various advocacy groups reference previous successful social movements as to why their chosen strategy is the most important one. Yet, these groups often follow wildly different strategies from each other to achieve social change. So, which one of them is right? The answer is all of them and none of them. This is because many people use research and historical movements to justify their pre-existing beliefs about how social change happens. Simply, you can find a case study to fit most plausible theories of how social change happens. For example, the groups might say: * Repeated nonviolent disruption is the key to social change, citing the Freedom Riders from the civil rights Movement or Act Up! from the gay rights movement. * Technological progress is what drives improvements in the human condition if you consider the development of the contraceptive pill funded by Katharine McCormick. * Organising and base-building is how change happens, as inspired by Ella Baker, the NAACP or Cesar Chavez from the United Workers Movement. * Insider advocacy is the real secret of social movements – look no further than how influential the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights was in passing the Civil Rights Acts of 1960 & 1964. * Democratic participation is the backbone of social change – just look at how Ireland lifted a ban on abortion via a Citizen’s Assembly. * And so on… To paint this picture, we can see this in action below: Source: Just Stop Oil which focuses on…civil resistance and disruption Source: The Civic Power Fund which focuses on… local organising What do we take away from all this? In my mind, a few key things: 1. Many different approaches have worked in changing the world so we should be humble and not assume we are doing The Most Important Thing 2. The case studies we focus on are likely confirmation bias, where
 ·  · 2m read
 · 
I speak to many entrepreneurial people trying to do a large amount of good by starting a nonprofit organisation. I think this is often an error for four main reasons. 1. Scalability 2. Capital counterfactuals 3. Standards 4. Learning potential 5. Earning to give potential These arguments are most applicable to starting high-growth organisations, such as startups.[1] Scalability There is a lot of capital available for startups, and established mechanisms exist to continue raising funds if the ROI appears high. It seems extremely difficult to operate a nonprofit with a budget of more than $30M per year (e.g., with approximately 150 people), but this is not particularly unusual for for-profit organisations. Capital Counterfactuals I generally believe that value-aligned funders are spending their money reasonably well, while for-profit investors are spending theirs extremely poorly (on altruistic grounds). If you can redirect that funding towards high-altruism value work, you could potentially create a much larger delta between your use of funding and the counterfactual of someone else receiving those funds. You also won’t be reliant on constantly convincing donors to give you money, once you’re generating revenue. Standards Nonprofits have significantly weaker feedback mechanisms compared to for-profits. They are often difficult to evaluate and lack a natural kill function. Few people are going to complain that you provided bad service when it didn’t cost them anything. Most nonprofits are not very ambitious, despite having large moral ambitions. It’s challenging to find talented people willing to accept a substantial pay cut to work with you. For-profits are considerably more likely to create something that people actually want. Learning Potential Most people should be trying to put themselves in a better position to do useful work later on. People often report learning a great deal from working at high-growth companies, building interesting connection
 ·  · 17m read
 · 
TL;DR Exactly one year after receiving our seed funding upon completion of the Charity Entrepreneurship program, we (Miri and Evan) look back on our first year of operations, discuss our plans for the future, and launch our fundraising for our Year 2 budget. Family Planning could be one of the most cost-effective public health interventions available. Reducing unintended pregnancies lowers maternal mortality, decreases rates of unsafe abortions, and reduces maternal morbidity. Increasing the interval between births lowers under-five mortality. Allowing women to control their reproductive health leads to improved education and a significant increase in their income. Many excellent organisations have laid out the case for Family Planning, most recently GiveWell.[1] In many low and middle income countries, many women who want to delay or prevent their next pregnancy can not access contraceptives due to poor supply chains and high costs. Access to Medicines Initiative (AMI) was incubated by Ambitious Impact’s Charity Entrepreneurship Incubation Program in 2024 with the goal of increasing the availability of contraceptives and other essential medicines.[2] The Problem Maternal mortality is a serious problem in Nigeria. Globally, almost 28.5% of all maternal deaths occur in Nigeria. This is driven by Nigeria’s staggeringly high maternal mortality rate of 1,047 deaths per 100,000 live births, the third highest in the world. To illustrate the magnitude, for the U.K., this number is 8 deaths per 100,000 live births.   While there are many contributing factors, 29% of pregnancies in Nigeria are unintended. 6 out of 10 women of reproductive age in Nigeria have an unmet need for contraception, and fulfilling these needs would likely prevent almost 11,000 maternal deaths per year. Additionally, the Guttmacher Institute estimates that every dollar spent on contraceptive services beyond the current level would reduce the cost of pregnancy-related and newborn care by three do
Recent opportunities in Building effective altruism
45
The CEA Events Team is Hiring for Three Program Lead Positions
OllieBase
· · 3m read
0
0
7
Funding and job opportunities, events, and thoughts on professionals (Fieldbuilders newsletter #8)
gergo
· · 3m read
0
0
9
An International Collaborative Hub for Advancing AI Safety Research
Cody Albert
· · 6m read
0
0
View more