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Thank you, Julia, for making the EA movement feel like an actual community by and for human beings.
Thank you, Julia, for making the EA movement feel like an actual community by and for human beings.
Sky here, with an update from CEA’s Community Health team:
I was previously listed in this post as an additional contact person. I’m taking extended leave and will be unavailable after July 30 as a contact person. We’ve edited this post to remove my info but we want you to know who to chat with going forward:
Other resources:
Personal note:
I’ve really enjoyed past conversations with many of you about topics we care about: thinking seriously and humbly about impact, media and EA communications, intercultural connections and diversity, mentorship and morale, and more. My C/EA colleagues and many of your peers are happy to hear from you on these topics too.
I’ve been very appreciative of support from CEA colleagues and EA community members while I’ve been managing health issues over the past couple years. I see we’re in a community that wants to help each other, so I hope you do reach out if and when you need it. I’m taking some time to prioritize healthcare now and may return to C/EA as a consultant in the future. Much love in the meantime. I’ll look forward to crossing paths when we do!
[last significant update December 2022]
We, Julia Wise and Catherine Low, work on the community health team at the Centre for Effective Altruism. Part of our work is being contact people for problems or concerns you encounter in the EA community. This is one part of the team’s larger work.
Ways to contact us:
People who encounter a problem in the community often don’t feel up to handling it on their own. It can be helpful to have help from someone with experience in this area and time to dedicate to the role.
Having a central point for collecting information allows patterns to be recognized. For example, imagine that three different people experience a problem from the same person. If there’s no one to collect this data, each case appears to be a one-off incident. But if someone knows about all three incidents, the nature of the problem is much clearer.
What kinds of situations can we help with?
Some types of work we’ve done:
Julia:
I’m a licensed independent clinical social worker, with studies and work that focused on mental health. I got involved in EA around 2010 and joined CEA to work on supporting the EA community in 2015.
My experience includes:
Social work is focused not on blame or punishment, but on reaching better outcomes by reducing risk of future harm and by connecting people with resources and support. This approach is very much the one I use in my work in the effective altruism community.
Catherine:
I was a high school teacher for 11 years before moving full time into EA community building. I ran local and national EA groups and worked on EA outreach projects , before joining CEA’s Groups Team in early 2020 to support EA groups worldwide. I started working for the Community Health team mid 2021.
If you contact us about a problem you’ve experienced or a concern you have, we will do our best to keep it confidential, but there are occasionally some exceptions. We're currently working on a clearer policy — in the meantime we suggest asking us about any questions you have here before you share sensitive information.
[Edited to add: Julia has made two mistakes on confidentiality that she knows of. More info in this comment.]
Here are some possibilities:
We will sometimes offer to discuss with you the possible actions we could take with differing levels of confidentiality, so you can make a well informed decision.
We will sometimes ask if we can share your case with the other community support person so we can get the benefit of their advice.
Exceptions:
If we thought someone was in physical danger, we would act to reduce that danger. That might include breaking confidentiality. For example, if you tell us you're planning to physically hurt someone, we would warn them.
For Catherine only:
In addition, if Catherine thought someone was at risk of serious mental harm, she would act to reduce that harm.
For Julia only:
Because of the rules for social workers where Julia lives, the only time she has a legal obligation to contact the authorities is if you bring her a concern specifically in her role as a social worker (“Julia, I’m telling you this because you’re a social worker”) AND if the concern is about
We’re not the only options for help in the community. For problems that arise in an EA group, it may be helpful to talk to the organizers of that group.
If you’re a group organizer or online moderator and would like help preparing to handle community problems or handling a problem that has already arisen, feel free to contact us.
I’m adding info about some mistakes I’ve made so people can be aware of my track record. While I’ll do my best to keep confidential anything you want to talk to me about privately, I can’t guarantee that I’ll never make a mistake. So far, I know of two situations where I’ve failed to maintain confidentiality.
I tally that in the 6 years I’ve been in this role, I’ve handled about 135 situations where confidentiality was implied or requested by members of the community (not counting more standard situations like internal work emails). Here are the two mistakes I know I’ve made around confidentiality:
It's very important to me that EA is a place where people trust each other, and I really regret both these mistakes.
[Updated specific people 2024] If you know of other mistakes I’ve made that I should learn from, you can contact me at [email protected], or my manager, Nicole Ross, at [email protected]. You can also contact CEA anonymously via our contact form (which goes to our operations staff, but they can route to other staff if you request that.)
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