.impact is now Rethink Charity

I’m Tee Barnett – and in the last couple of months I’ve transitioned into the Executive Director role at .impact. I wanted to reintroduce myself and brief everyone on significant developments over here, including our rebranding, unification of major projects, and staff updates. You can reach me here if you’d like to chat about it!

Rebranding 

.impact and Students for High-Impact Charity (SHIC) are teaming up to form Rethink Charity, a rebrand intended to invite curiosity from the wider public about how to do good, and that more accurately articulates our approach to movement building by supporting novel projects.

.impact is the organization responsible for creating and maintaining LEAN, the EA Hub, the EA survey, and a host of other projects, and SHIC is the only global network of classes and extracurricular clubs dedicated to bringing effective altruism primarily to high-school students.

You will likely see more .impact-branded materials transition to Rethink Charity in the coming weeks. The branding of our prioritized projects, including SHIC, will remain (more on that below). Rethink Charity will also retain the “.impact” name as a project that more closely resembles its origins – a space for independent, volunteer-led effective altruist projects around the world.

Prioritized Projects (LEAN, SHIC and P2Ps)

Our newly unified lineup of initiatives facilitate interpersonal engagement from the bottom up. Each of our prioritized projects bring more people into the fold and engage those who are ready to get more involved. The bulk of our resources will go toward these three very strong grassroots initiatives:

- The Local Effective Altruism Network (LEAN)

- Students for High-Impact Charity (SHIC)

- Online peer-to-peer (P2P) campaigns and Impact Missions

These projects will interplay and constitute an escalating “ladder of engagement” designed to make effective altruism more accessible and strengthen community infrastructure. For example, coordinated P2P campaigns inherited from Charity Science will continue to be run by LEAN and SHIC groups. In the past, these fundraisers have counterfactually raised ~$200,000. and we see P2Ps and other impact missions (i.e., coordinated effective action) as an integral part of local and student group potential moving forward. In prioritizing these three projects, we’re looking to facilitate lifelong engagement with EA from high school until well after university graduation.

Rethink Charity will also continue to run several other important projects:

• We will provide tax-deductible international donations to effective charities through our representative legal entities and the facilitation of organizational partnerships   

• The EA Survey will remain an important annual initiative.

• The EA Hub will play an even more prominent role for EA community building by absorbing the .impact Hackpad project registry.

• The Effective Altruism Newsletter, local group newsletter, and forthcoming EA mentorship program are among the roster of joint projects we created and maintain, through collaboration with the Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) and cultivation of a substantial volunteer force.

• Rethink Charity and our team of volunteers continue to maintain other platforms and services often used by the effective altruism community, including the EA Wiki and EA Forum.

You can learn more about each of these by clicking on their respective links above.

Staff Update

With the expansion of major movement building projects under the Rethink Charity umbrella, we’ve had to take on more staff and invest further in our volunteer infrastructure in order to have the requisite administrative bandwidth.

Our two most prominent board members, .impact co-founders Tom Ash and Peter Hurford, have been very active in overseeing this transition and rebranding. The Executive Director of SHIC, Baxter Bullock, is now running the project on a full-time basis and has become an integral to the functioning of Rethink Charity operations as well. We brought on Richenda Herzig, formerly a part-time .impact coordinator, for a full-time position as Manager of LEAN. And Catherine Low, a founding member of Effective Altruism New Zealand, is the new part-time Manager of Community, a position largely responsible for orchestrating our considerable intern and volunteer network. Haryshwaran Ilanghovan has stayed on as our Head of Technology for all Rethink Charity projects. Feel free to browse their bios here.

I’m very bullish about our prospects moving forward. The foundation laid by .impact and the fusion of these major projects into Rethink Charity makes for a very strong EA movement building lineup.

Tee Barnett

Executive Director

Rethink Charity (formerly .impact)

[email protected]