TL;DR I'm going to be setting up an initiative where I offer free stays in a 25-ish person hostel to EA groups for community-building / burnout-recovery purposes. Hostel is Pardshaw Quaker Centre in the northern Lake District, UK. Lots of nice views and lakes. Should hopefully happen by next year. Come along in August to check it out.
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I've noticed a lot of yearning for community in EA recently. Makes sense: if you're working on a world-shattering, life-destroyingly important problem, you'd best well not be doing it alone!
I thought I'd let everyone know about a new initiative I'm putting together to construct a residential retreat space EAs can use in the Lake District, UK. This is off the back of my work with the site as a Quaker, and also off the back of me running a fair amount of weekend events for my various hobbies.
Pardshaw Quaker Centre is a low-cost self-catering events hostel that can sleep up to about 25 people. It's near Loweswater lake in the northern Lake District, not too far from Cockermouth. It's situated next to Pardshaw Crag (was originally built 350 years ago as a wet weather shelter for Quakers worshipping up on the crag), and generally has incredibly nice mountain views. It's basic, functional, and very aesthetic. I'm hopefully going to be sitting on the decision-making board soon. Stuff I've definitely done / am doing:
- I've already run a free weekend retreat for CEEALAR members.
- I'm running EA in the Lakes https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/events/PmgbkEG5DZvj8LSAR/ea-in-the-lakes , which is open to all EAs over the August bank holiday! Feel free to book onto that and come check out the place.
- Running a bunch of other stuff there that's unrelated to EA in order to convince the site I know exactly what I'm doing. (and because this is my hobby)
After this my plan is to mobilise a chunk of Quaker funding to pay the site costs of activist/altruist groups that can show they are really on a path to do some good in the world, and might be in need of a community-building / burnout-recovery residential somewhere nice (that also guarantees bookings for a Quaker building so it doesn't fall into disrepair). Fingers crossed to also get some Quakers (or EAs) happy to turn up and help cook vegan food on the cheap. I imagine it would be rather easy for an EA group to clear the necessary do-goodness and impact bar I set and/or evaluate, thus: free residential retreat space for EAs. What this is going to do is bridge the substantial gap between available EA infrastructure funding for retreats and what it actually costs to run a retreat booking somewhere privately. Events of up to about a week should hopefully be doable, maybe longer if there's a reason it should be longer and you're outside of high summer. I know of a couple other Quaker hostels that have done something like this for other group types (e.g. refugees) and am friends with the people who set up / manage them, so it's a fairly well-worn path for me to tread.
It's not 100% yet, so I'd appreciate it if anyone in the UK who felt like helping kick this initiative off could book onto my August bank holiday lakes weekend for EAs (it's only £120 for a 4-night catered residential, or only £60 if you can't afford that) and afterwards write a testimonial about how nice the place is and how community retreats in wonderful settings really help translate into impactful work in the world etc.. I have to have some user stories for the funding application! In return you get a cheap holiday that's hopefully quite good.
Other than that, watch this space. I'm hoping to have something formally set up by next March or so, but it might take longer (or not work at all). I have to a) get the funding, and b) get the site to spend some of it on making the place maximally suitable for EA groups (audiovisual equipment etc), which might be its own challenge. If you're desperate for something like this for your EA group before then, reach out to me directly and I'll see what can be done to make you a test case.
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I'll hopefully be at the EA for Christians UK away weekend in Kent this year, and I really want to talk to and help you if you want to figure out how your church building could do something like this during its otherwise unused times, as a way of welcoming and hosting those performing God's work in the world and engaging younger people.
(A potential lesson from Wytham Abbey: You don't need to buy a fancy church building, you just need to befriend the people who currently own it!)
On that note - seems like an enormous waste that Wytham Abbey sits empty when it could be used (presumably at very little marginal cost?) while EVF works on selling it.
While I cannot hope to comment on the specifics of EVF's situation, I assume there are aspects of the selling process complicating that.
Being a good landlord of a fancy building does require quite a lot of outreach to potential tenants, not all of whom will be your favourite tenants, and it is quite easy to fall into the trap of thinking that people who aren't your favourite people shouldn't come into your fancy building because they might mess up your fancy floor. This is of course a horrible trap because fancy buildings fall into disrepair from lack of use all the time and from too much use almost never.
I spend a nontrivial amount of time on the upkeep-related decision making circles for fancy buildings and not once have I ever heard the sentence "we have too many bookings and it's hurting our finances".
(Despite hearing lots of worries about the ways this could, hypothetically, somehow be the case.)