April 2023 update: This post is no longer up to date and contains outdated information. Since 2022, EA London has been rebranded to EA UK - you can see why we rebranded here. Read the broader landscape post for EA UK (which also covers the EA landscape in London) for more up-to-date information.
Effective Altruism London Landscape
A key point is that it’s hard to know exactly what defines someone who is a member as we have no formal membership, and there are varying levels of interest and engagement. Within London there are people who are interested and engaged in EA but not ‘part’ of EA London, i.e. not in any of the Facebook groups, not on the mailing list and not going to events organised by EAL. They may still be quite engaged by having friendship groups that were involved in EA at university or working at an EA related organisation but that is a minority. Most people will be engaged via their careers/donations/reading but without a link to others interested in EA or the main EAL community.
I would guess that less than 10% of people who are aware of effective altruism in London are engaged with EAL in some way. For people who are highly engaged I would guess 50% but these numbers are quite uncertain.
A Brief History of EA London
EA London was started by Sam Hilton in 2012 as a volunteer project, mainly consisting of monthly socials and occasional talks. In 2016 Sam took a year out to set up EA London as a registered charity and work as a full time community organiser, funded by people in the EA London community after a few strategy meetings where we thought that this might be a useful experiment to try.
At the end of 2017 Sam went back into the civil service and Holly Morgan and I worked part time for EAL. In 2019 we were funded by a grant from CEA for me to work on community building full time as Holly took time out to do self study. The strategy has shifted over time from raising awareness and trying to increase attendance. There is now a focus on increasing the amount of valuable connections people have as a result of EAL actions, including to other people, resources and research so that they can hopefully make better career/donation/volunteering decisions. There is an overview of our current strategy here.
What EA London Has
- 1 full time employee
- 4 trustees
- Registered charity status, allowing gift aid and regranting to other EA organisations
- Website with links to sub-communities and resources
- Mailing list of 2200 people with about 50% opening the newsletter each month
- Facebook group with 2900 members and a page although it is rarely used
- EA UK Slack with 530+ members and more usage than the Facebook group
- Community directory with 150+ people on who are happy to be contacted
- 10-30 informal volunteers at various times over the year, mainly people that run their own sub-communities or an event
What EA London Does
- Maintain the website, Facebook and charity infrastructure
- Monthly newsletters
- 1-1 discussions, usually focused on careers or learning more about EA
- Helping connect people to jobs/resources
- Supporting EA organisations and sub-groups with marketing, feedback and connections
- Acting as a funnel for various groups and to help onboard people who are new to EA London to find relevant ways to get involved
- Occasional events, but mainly supporting others who want to run events
Effective Altruism Groups in London
Here is a summary of the various groups in London, generally most are not that active or have a meetup every so often, with exceptions for groups that are quite specialised like finance. Student groups vary in activity depending on who is in the committee that year.
- Career
- Cause
- Student
- Other
- Social - one of the more active groups with 1-4 events a week
- Flatsharing - to my knowledge there are roughly 20 homes with at least 3 people sharing who have an interest in EA
- Coworking - used 2 to 4 times a month pre pandemic
- Christian - this is a global group but has an event every few months in London
In the last few years there have been more EA related organisations being created or moving to London. They rarely have public events and so interaction with the wider community is limited.
- EA Meta
- Global Development
- Animal Welfare - Most of these are the UK based teams
- AI Alignment
There are some remote staff in London for various EA related organisations, such as Animal Charity Evaluators, Centre for Effective Altruism, GiveWell, Sentience Institute, Our World in Data and Rethink Charity and Giving Green.
Summary
It may be best to see effective altruism in London as mainly individuals interested in EA, with a subset of people who are parts of various networks, maybe working in tech or finance and may want to stay up to date with EA news but would only come to an event once every year or two but are much happier engaging when a relevant topic comes up or the chance to help someone in their career path. There is an even smaller subset of maybe 100-200 people who regularly go to events once a month or so, usually within a subgroup. Over time EA London has shifted our strategy to consider that most of the value may not be from attendance or online engagement and have tried to fill in gaps not covered by existing organisations
Thank you for writing this! This is a useful overview of active groups for me, because I intend to move to London in September to study at LSE and now need to think about ways to engage with the community there.