EA in the Lakes - Reflections

This is a set of personal reflections from running EA in the Lakes, a lower-cost retreat in the northern UK. (We've also got some great photos of reflections in water sources, if that's more your thing.)

--

The organising team: I was the organising team. To be fair, my housemate (who works in mental health) was going to come along and do participant welfare / shuttle driving but then had to be at counselling supervision, and my backup event cook friend got a paid cooking job that weekend as well. The perils of volunteer organising! Never mind, I can organise, cook, welfare, first aid, and drive if I have to (don't plan to do this). I appointed a couple of helpers on free tickets from our EAs for content-based query handling and extra super-boring logistics work like bin emptying.

To anyone in EA thinking of solo organising, my advice is don't. Have your first event be done with a good co-organiser: that way you learn a lot more. I spent three years on organising teams before I did my first solo thing (and even then, there is never and should never be "pure solo" in any community event).

If you're still keen on solo organising, then my advice is: to run an event like this you need someone on content, someone on core logistics, and someone on welfare/query handling. These all take very different mindsets. You can combine them, but then you have to be prepared to switch mindset on the fly. For example, core logistics is about large-batch efficient scaling things, whereas welfare/query is about individualised and considered responses to people's needs. Do one with the mindset of the other and you'll end up alienating people or making way too much work for yourself. On this retreat I leaned a little too hard into logistics brain, and I had feedback that my task allocations sometimes came off mildly condescending and I was not as fully present as a community member as would have been optimal (although I also had feedback the opposite way). I concur with this - I was often bouncing between trying to get a bunch of interlinked tasks done on time and taking breaks to temper/conserve my energy, for I am somewhat of a hypomanic introvert. It's just not a good experience when the group leader isn't able to be maximally present and there for you: I've been on the other side of this many times.

--

Pre-event thoughts: Invites were very easy - first come first served, after all people were paying for their attendance, they don't need to justify a grant receipt and I don't have to evaluate them. Slapped the advert up on the EA Forum events calendar and waited until it filled. I constructed the programme around attendee session offers plus trips to various lakes. It was an extended 4-night bank holiday version of the normal 3-night weekend format I run there - I don't usually do Keswick, just Loweswater and Ennerdale. Payment was via a PayPal pool or direct to my event organising bank account for those who can't do PayPal. I didn't bother with a payment deadline as it's just extra work for me - but maybe I should have (even with a refunds policy, having paid increases sense of personal investment in the event). Alas, as a volunteer events organiser with a full-time job and too many hobbies I am extremely lazy on not doing anything that does not actually need to happen, like payment chasing. Probably next time I'll ticket it and put up with payment processing fees.

Finances: We ran at about £60 per person for site food and my petrol (i.e. consumables), plus a bit extra that went on various reusable kit (e.g. portable WiFi) I now have stored in my house. This totalled about £1.1k or so with a take-in by tickets minus refunds of about £1.2k, in line with my aim to balance. [Surplus was donated to CEEALAR as per our charity election (we determined by counterfactual that it's like donating to the EA Infrastructure Fund).]

This did not include travel costs which for the people coming from e.g. London or Oxford rather than locals topped £100+ each for Railcarded train tickets. This is a significant point in favour of upping the event budget somewhat, but that one is complex - I'd actually be better off aiming for more local EA engagement and fieldbuilding in my advertising, I think.

--

Post-event thoughts:

Very good at engaging and inspiring effective givers. Somebody signed the 10% pledge (good for you, I know you read the forum - put that diamond on your name). We had a couple long-time pledgers who hadn't been to in-person EA stuff in ages, as well as a few who still participate regularly. We had an effective giving community-builder and got a great session about further actions for effective giving outreach.

The level of effective givers in attendance was sufficiently high that it became a culture of evaluating EA rather than feeling like EA was evaluating us. This is a good culture to have at at least some EA events, I think. My thesis on why various places struggle to engage effective givers is that they don't understand that dropping EA grant cash on a community-building event makes effective givers no more likely to go. Effective givers in the UK, who are almost always over £200 a year in donations even if they're a minimum wage 1% trial pledger (and very often way over this), have a sense of personal fungibility between their own money and EA grant money that eclipses the budget of this kind of stuff. In some cases it will straight-up put them off an event if they feel they won't get personal value equal to what was spent on them. I, at least, also find EA's norm of application evaluation to be mildly personally insulting. I experience it as a direct challenge to my "EA credentials" as well as a two-way relational altruism breakdown (happy to take, unhappy to give)  and a total waste of both mine and the evaluator's time (I also feel this way about small grant applications*). To engage effective givers you have to back up and start from an entirely different engagement model than "put in cash, evaluate applications to ensure effective use of cash, get out engagement".

At the same time, the event disproportionately attracted EAs who couldn't afford a holiday. More than half of attendees paid £60 or less, mostly because they self-rated that £120 (plus travel) was too expensive for a 4-night catered holiday. Many of them picking this option were local so spendy travel wasn't the barrier - suggesting that what currently exists of EA North is on average living close to the breadline, and that external grants in the right hands really could get fieldbuilding work done here. I chose this bar because this is the same bar as CEEALAR's grantee/patron bar. It's not a high bar. If you're below it, you probably can't afford holidays like this one at all. So if I got myself a grant pot or pledge waivered*, and started handing out cheap-to-run free EA holidays I could do a whole bunch of connecting up and engaging the local area, because I'd be catching people with an experience they wouldn't otherwise get in their life. (Whether I, personally, am up for the work involved is debatable, but there's always other people I can upskill and then pay...)

I think one or maybe two people overlapped these categories (i.e. they give a significant amount to effective charities and can't afford £120 holidays). However they were mostly two very divergent attendee bases with, I am sure, two very different types of life outside of EA event participation. I did my best to erase any distinctions between them and not let anyone figure out exactly who was who, but practically a bunch of us talked about our giving so in some cases it was obvious. I hope we managed a culture of inclusion rather than exclusion. I haven't seen any feedback about issues with this, though I note that as someone who falls lightly on the effective giver side I might not be felt to be a safe person to feed back to.

I think the event format of valuing lower-cost activities (relevant both to people who don't unnecessarily spend because skint and to people who would rather give than unnecessarily spend) helped to inherently erase distinctions, as well as attracting both ends of a wide financial spectrum which is a pretty amazing feat of community-linking. So I'd double down hard on that. It's things like bouldering (on the local crag), swimming (in the local lake), and running an EA Summit (climbing Fellbarrow).

We were less good at professional worker connection, which is the main thing CEA tends to measure. Mainly because there were few of us and we didn't specialise into a cause area or sort applications. This was not a format aimed at EA workers, so I didn't bother optimising for it (though I could have done, for instance dedicated rather than informal 1:1 time). We did however have many self-reports of increased mental health and burnout reduction, both from effective givers and EA workers. And we had lots of social connection (everyone put at least 4 connections down on feedback - I don't think you can really sustain more than 4 social connections off of a single weekend and beyond that it's much more about quality than quantity, so I put that as the top click-button option). We also had a couple people actively using the weekend as a team building collaboration opportunity before a work thing the week after. Practically I didn't bother strictly measuring worker impact because we're cheap enough that even if it were grant-funded only a handful of hours of increased productivity from e.g. burnout reduction would justify attendance by an EA worker. Events aimed at EA workers tend to be way more spendy (roughly 10x), probably because it's assumed EA workers increasing in productivity are as impactful as 100% of their salary rather than 10%. So if this event were aimed at EA workers we'd have a massive head start on the cost-efficiency front.

Rated personal value not including travel was about £200 each on average for those who filled out the feedback form - higher for the effective givers than others, which makes sense due to income-related reasons rather than being a statement about who actually got "more" out of it. At a cost per of about £80 and a top ticket price of £120, this is a pretty good multiplier. It's my theory that running events with higher personal value than cost targeted at effective givers leads on average to more effective giving, so personal value minus full attendance costs (no matter ticket price) is a good rough metric to optimise on for an event aimed at effective givers.

--

Personal reflections on organising for EAs in general: EAs do not tightly orient to event attendance like various other communities I organise for. What this means is that there were more drop-outs, less car use and carsharing, less collaboration on all getting the same train, more organiser queries. At the same time, the average level of EA dietary requirements is low (other than the vegetarianism/veganism which is fine because practically it's not people grumping over there being no meat) and there's a lot less criticism of organising work. What criticism exists is disproportionately likely to actually be useful rather than just someone having a bad day and reaching out for something to blame it on.

EAs are super great at self-organising: you put them in a room for two hours with a topic idea while you make lunch and they'll rate the resulting attendee-led discussion 8.61/10. I'm used to needing to structure events extremely carefully to give myself enough time to cook without attendees getting bored (admittedly, this is much more of a problem with children). EAs are also super helpful and will do tasks you assign them to, often to considerately high standards (such as the getting of all the woodlice out of the firewood box, for insect welfare reasons). In many ways we're a pretty easy community to run stuff for. I'm used to way more (correctly and incorrectly) opinionated people who help out way less, and need way more supervision to check up on if any work you give them was done right or not.

The event was lacto-vegetarian, with about half the attendees requesting vegan meals. I received both a lot of positive feedback on keeping the cow milk in for principles-first EA reasons, and also a lot of requests that the event be made fully vegan. Ultimately I'd continue to come down on the side of keeping some dairy around for events at this specific location that aren't animal-advocacy focused, being as it's basically impossible to discreetly walk to the nearest shop, but I can have a think about strategically reducing it to avoid bothering people. (There's a backyard eggs honesty box down the road, possibly from those chickens, but I don't think anyone actually bought any.) Also, I reckon this spot would work absolutely great for vegan animal advocacy retreats, being as there's some animals around to spark discussion.

One other minor negative thing to note: The 4-night format didn't add much and was tough on my energy by the end. Keswick is also pricey as it has many things you can spend money on (not just trees rocks hills and water). Thus it falls outside of the lower-cost activities strategy. Also a bunch of people either arrived late or left early which implies that they weren't feeling a 4-night event. I'd go back to 3 nights, I think. Either that or I go build some more beds and do a facilities upgrade to try to go for 7-night kinds of events, which are of a different organising style - more relaxed and co-creative, intended for organisational energy-neutrality rather than energy-burn, aimed at people with nowhere else to be in the weekdays.

Somebody putting "more likely to donate a kidney" on the feedback form as an EA-relevant impact outcome does make me lean towards dialing back a bit for now, though. I feel very uncertain about the degree to which I would like to feel personally responsible for having inspired an altruistic kidney donation.

--

Future stuff: I am a site trustee. I can now let EAs rent the place at £150 a night for a 25-person hostel. EA in the Lakes will be back next year, along with some other things maybe depending on who else nearby is interested in EA retreat organisation that I can pull into my orbit. Watch this space.

--

* I really hate grant applications. As a giver they're just relationally awful - what am I doing, giving my money away and then pleading for it back?! For small-time EA spending where GiftAid is less relevant I'll just take it off my pledge money. For larger stuff I'd want a grant for GiftAid reasons and I'd hate every moment of applying for it. I'm not saying these feelings are rational, but I am saying they exist.