This is a transcript of my opening talk at EA Global: Boston 2024. I discussed how EA can build lasting change by learning from both our successes and setbacks. I outlined three essential elements for creating enduring impact: grit to persist through challenges, humility to learn from setbacks, and courage to share our stories.

Key Points:

• The EA community’s role in lead elimination showcases how patient, persistent work can create lasting change through building coalitions and inspiring others to act, culminating in initiatives like USAID's Partnership for a Lead-Free Future.
• Animal welfare campaigns show the importance of sustained commitment—taking a decade of work before achieving widespread cage-free commitments with an 89% implementation rate.
• From the FTX crisis to failed projects documented on the EA Forum, the EA community's willingness to examine setbacks transparently helps us to learn from our mistakes and build more resilient institutions.
• Awareness of EA remains low, with only 1–2% of Americans familiar with EA. By more actively sharing our stories and principles, both as institutions and individuals, we can inspire others to join in creating positive change.

You can also watch the full talk on YouTube.

Lead elimination: A case study

Last month at the United Nations, U.S. First Lady Jill Biden launched the Partnership for a Lead-Free Future, a collaboration between the US Agency for International Development and UNICEF to end childhood lead poisoning in low- and middle-income countries.

Lead elimination is a flagship EA cause, yet none of those names or institutions are traditionally associated with effective altruism. But make no mistake, EA is at the heart of this success story. USAID’s press release talks explicitly about the “neglectedness” of a solvable—one might say tractable—issue affecting one-in-two children in LMICs. 

The First Lady would go on to make the connection more explicit. In her remarks, she had some praise for an important EA organization that contributed to the partnership. She stated: 

"I'm also grateful to Open Philanthropy, which has been at the forefront of the fight against lead poisoning in children for so many years." 

Moments like this deserve celebration. But I also think there is a risk in being captivated by big wins and famous figures. Jill Biden was on stage for about eight minutes, and I’m grateful to her for elevating the cause. However, the real story of EA's impact isn't found in eight minutes on a UN stage. It's found in the years of patient work that made those minutes possible. EA’s contributions to the Partnership for a Lead-Free Future were five years in the making. So, I want to take us through a brief history of EA’s role in lead elimination, because I think that the history of moments like these matter most for what they can teach us about building lasting change and an EA that endures.

EA’s identification of and support for lead elimination as a policy intervention dates back at least to 2019, building on foundational work done by others outside of the EA ecosystem.

• In 2019, GiveWell awarded a grant to IPEN, the International Pollutants Elimination Network, to fund campaigns in Southeast Asia to regulate lead paint.
• Later, in 2022, GiveWell would partner with EA Funds and Open Philanthropy to fund Pure Earth, an organization dedicated to reducing lead pollution in lower- and middle-income countries.
• Elsewhere in the EA ecosystem, in 2020, the Lead Exposure Elimination Project, often known as LEEP, was incubated by Ambitious Impact (then known as Charity Entrepreneurship). They received Open Philanthropy funding in 2022. By 2023, a follow-up study on their early work in Malawi had demonstrated a significant reduction in the availability of lead paint.
• Building on this success, Ambitious Impact incubated another lead-focused organization this year, Lead Research for Action.
• In parallel, a 2021 research report from Rethink Priorities, commissioned by Open Philanthropy, estimated the social costs of lead exposure globally are on the order of $5–10 trillion every year, most of which come through neurological damage to children.
• This foundational research helped catalyze action in 2023 when Open Philanthropy launched a program on lead exposure.
• Then, this September, Open Philanthropy announced LEAF, the Lead Exposure Action Fund, which will co-fund the Partnership for a Lead-Free Future.

The Fund is a collaboration with other funders, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. This represents a new phase in this journey: It’s an example of experimentation, with this being Open Philanthropy’s first collaborative fund and the power of building a bigger coalition. The Fund plans to allocate over $100M between now and 2027, a dramatic increase on the $15m per year of philanthropic funding that has been directed to lead poisoning until recently.

This work continues to build on what others in the EA community have accomplished before, with LEAF funding organisations like LEEP and Pure Earth, as well as others like the Center for Global Development and Pahlé India Foundation. And of course, behind each of these organizations are so many other people, many of whom are part of our community, from the staff who set up processes to research and incubate charities at Ambitious Impact, to individuals who donated to GiveWell and EA Funds, to the community builders who helped motivate people to work on pressing issues like lead.

James Snowden, one of the lead grantmakers for LEAF, who also made lead-related grants at both GiveWell and Open Philanthropy, told me that "the effective altruism community played a crucial role in the Partnership coming together." 

This is how lasting change happens: We didn't discover the dangers of lead exposure, but through patient, persistent work, we shone a spotlight on one of the world’s most pressing problems and inspired others to act, up to and including motivating the world's most powerful institutions.

Building an EA with enduring impact isn't about any one moment in the spotlight—it's about the community of organizations and individuals, many of whom work tirelessly far from any stage but are inspired by shared principles to show up day after day, year after year. And I think that looking at our history shows us three important ingredients to enhance our impact:

1. Grit to stay the course, especially when progress seems slow
2. Humility to learn together, particularly from our setbacks
3. Courage to share our stories with the world

Let me show you how each of these elements can help us build a stronger, more lasting movement. We’ll begin with chickens.

Grit: Cage-free campaigns

The story of corporate cage-free campaigns shows what sustained commitment can achieve. People have been working on these issues since before EA existed, but the EA community recognised the importance, neglectedness, and tractability of the cause, and the attention and resources we've been able to deploy have played a critical role in remarkable successes.

The Open Wing Alliance reported this year that 89% of corporate cage-free commitments with deadlines of 2023 or earlier have been fulfilled. But the history of that number is more complicated.

This graph tells a story about what it really takes to create lasting change. It took a decade of hard work with little reward before success spiralled upwards, but a snowball effect was set off a little before 2015, with enough major retailers and restaurant chains making commitments that others were pressured to follow. Where EA and our allies have led, companies like McDonald's have finally followed.

This year, advocates achieved a landmark victory when McDonald’s announced that 100% of their US eggs are now cage-free. The implementation of over 1,200 commitments like this means that hundreds of millions of hens are now cage-free, suffering less, and living better lives.

But building lasting change means never resting on our laurels. McDonald's are not (yet) the heroes of this story. It's been considerably more difficult to extend the success of cage-free campaigns for egg-laying hens to comparable commitments to improve the welfare of broiler chickens raised for meat. McDonald's publicly holding out against committing to what's known as the Better Chicken Commitment has been a major obstacle.

And McDonald’s hasn’t been the only one slow to act. The UK and Germany have relatively high cage-free rates, over 70% in the UK and over 95% in Germany. But in 2022, barely any major retailers in either country had committed to the major components of the Better Chicken Commitment for broiler chickens, which include reducing overcrowding and raising slower-growing breeds.

Then something remarkable happened—the same pattern of persistent effort leading to breakthrough began to repeat itself. In 2023, 6 top UK retailers committed to reduce overcrowding, and this year, top German retailers committed to slower growing breeds. Together, these efforts are expected to improve the lives of over 400 million chickens per year.

This is what building lasting change looks like. If you walk away, the opportunity to iterate, improve, and increase impact is lost. But advocates knew that if they stopped, the problem of animal suffering wouldn’t walk away with them. Each person who stayed committed to this cause was making a choice—a choice that their principles and the welfare of millions of chickens mattered more than temporary discouragement or setbacks. This is what I mean by grit.

Critically, though, grit is something that animal activists have demonstrated not just in failure, but also in success. They have to, because campaigns are oftentimes a two step process. First, campaigners have to succeed in getting corporations to take a pledge to implement reforms. But that’s not enough. Even after that initial success, they have to keep working to make sure corporations make good on their pledges and implement reforms.

This long-term perspective is especially crucial for EA as a young movement. Older movements have seen many ups and downs, but for many people who have only engaged with EA for a short period of time, it can seem like we only know one of either success or failure. 

I remember that at the height of FTX’s popularity, many people acted as if EA had found an infinite well of money, claiming that raising funds was no longer important. You could then talk with some of those same people a month later after FTX’s collapse, and you’d think that EA was terminally over. While I believe it’s a strength of many people in this community to update their views based on new information, I worry that we often only see the present trends, neglecting the potential for both failure and success. 

Building an EA that lasts means taking the long view. A lesson we can all learn from animal welfare advocates is that grit across time is a key component of impact. Sometimes, no matter the ups and downs, it’s worth standing by our principles and staying the course.

Humility: Learning from setbacks

Grit alone isn't enough. Being willing to act under uncertainty and take appropriate risks is a core part of the EA ethos, which is oftentimes formalized with approaches like Open Philanthropy’s hits-based giving. That means that sometimes, we will fail. But failure doesn’t have to be the end.

Failure represents an opportunity to learn from our setbacks and share those lessons with others. Part of what I think is so unique and inspiring about EA is that it's not just an approach to doing good, but also a community that helps others do good on their own journey. When we face setbacks—whether in animal welfare campaigns or in our own institutions—we have a choice. We can stay defeated by these difficulties, or we can choose to learn from our failures and help the community as a whole learn and improve.

Let me show you what this looks like in practice. Take the Center for Effective Aid Policy and their Forum post from July this year. Imagine sitting down to write about a project you poured your heart into that didn’t work out and shut down. Now imagine writing about that with such clarity and insight that it becomes the highest karma post of the year on the Forum so far. In the post, co-founder Mathias Kirk Bonde details a variety of lessons learned, such as the amount of competition around influencing aid funding, the importance of experience, and the difficulty in finding political champions.

I think it takes an incredible amount of humility and altruism to take the time to write up your personal failures, and to share them online for anyone to see and comment upon. And I think it takes a special community to respond to that humility with kindness, curiosity, and celebration.

EA is now in a phase where learning by doing is even more important. There is still a lot of valuable work being done figuring things out from first principles, discussing ideas online, and conducting randomized control trials to select the most cost-effective interventions. But more of our projects now require us to act in highly complex environments with unpredictable counterparts, whether we’re trying to influence policy in the near term, like the Center for Aid Policy or LEEP, or working to reduce the likelihood of catastrophic risks in the longer term. Having an impact in these domains requires us to take action with less confidence in advance about what will work.

That means setbacks aren't just inevitable—they're essential for our growth. I think we should be suspicious of an EA that never fails as an EA that isn’t ambitious enough. We’re not here to look good; we’re here to do good—and often, that means learning by doing and learning from failure.

The trick, then, is to fail well. To have a clear hypothesis for impact. To robustly test that hypothesis with a good-faith attempt. And then, if and when we fail, to do our best to understand why, and to help us and others learn from it.

Learning from the FTX Crisis

Speaking of learning from setbacks, it’s November, so it’s time for our annual reminder about controversies involving men named Sam.

It’s now been two years since FTX collapsed, and during that time, setbacks and shortcomings have been especially prominent in many of our minds. Two years ago, if we had looked only at what was right in front of us, we might have thought the end of EA was nigh. While many in the EA community were victimized by Sam Bankman-Fried’s fraudulent behavior, I also think the ensuing crisis exposed broader issues and weaknesses in the EA community and its institutions. The EA community made mistakes both before and after the collapse of FTX that made us less resilient than we could have been.

But the measure of a movement isn't just whether it faces crises—it's how it responds to them. From our vantage point two years later, at a global EA conference with over 700 attendees, we can see that we’re far from any end. We experienced failure, but we also faced up to it and found opportunities to learn and improve. 

On the EA Forum alone, community members have written dozens of posts about FTX and the lessons we ought to learn from it. I don’t think there is or will ever be a consensus on what went wrong or what the right response from the community should be. But regardless of the answers each individual comes to, I think there’s something valuable about a community that stares failures in the face and then, instead of running away from its mission, asks how it can learn and grow.

Institutional Reform

Some of the learnings I know best are from my experience stepping in as the interim CEO of Effective Ventures in the aftermath of FTX’s collapse. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Effective Ventures, it’s a set of umbrella institutions that historically provided incubation, fiscal sponsorship, and operational support for many impactful EA organizations, including 80,000 Hours, Giving What We Can, and the Centre for Effective Altruism. It was an institutional cornerstone of the EA community.

EV has a history of being both incredibly impactful and incredibly flawed. Those flaws included the fun feature of having not one, not two, but three different organizations called the Centre for Effective Altruism at the same time. If any of this sounds confusing, you can do some light reading with my recent 34-page forum post, which only takes 56 minutes to read.

The key thing to know now is that EV had received funding from FTX. While nobody at EV knew about the fraud, FTX’s collapse put a significant strain on EV’s financial and operational infrastructure; it shone a spotlight on many of EV’s shortcomings, including insufficient staffing, inadequate financial expertise, and conflict of interest policies of questionable thoroughness. These issues were among the reasons that we decided to shut EV down and spin out its various projects.

But what matters isn't just what went wrong—it's how we responded as a community. Consider:

• I’d estimate that over 50 people meaningfully contributed to reforming EV’s governance and operations. Even though EV was shutting down, remaining functional was an essential task to support our projects until they could become independent. Oftentimes, this came at significant personal cost, like volunteers who worked as board members or consultants or employees with minimal job security given EV’s impending winddown. Nonetheless, people took these opportunities because they knew they could help others. Many of these people embody what it looks like to have a community built on the principles of altruism.
• But they didn't stop at just fixing what was broken. They contributed not only to implementing changes but also to helping others learn from the mistakes of the past. While my name was on the Forum post sharing reflections about EV, over a dozen people took part in contributing to writing and refining lessons learned from EV’s history. Internally, EV’s operations team took the time to write up and advise many of the now and soon-to-be independent projects on how they could set themselves up for governance and operational success, even though EV’s staff would no longer be involved in those organization’s day-to-day affairs. By making the process of learning communal, the team was able to magnify the growth that came out of the pain.
• And others have continued to pay it forward. Projects that were once part of EV have gone out of their way to share their own lessons learned, such as Longview, which used to be part of EV and generously took the time to write up advice for other organizations looking to become independent, based on their own lessons learned as they spun out of EV. 

Even during the process of implementing reforms, I don’t think we got everything right. But I do think the process of learning from those mistakes revealed something special about EA: The way we can learn as a community. We don't just weather storms; we use them to build stronger foundations for the future.

Courage: Communicating our story

This brings me to our third essential element for building lasting change. Looking at the examples I’ve shared, from lead elimination to chickens to institutional reform, a pattern emerges. At some point, we need to open ourselves up to communicate with others in the community and with the wider world.

Building a movement that lasts isn't just about what we do—it's about inspiring others to join us. And we have a lot of work to do there: Despite both the scandals and the successes we’ve experienced in recent years, the reality is that very few people really know who we are, what we care about, or the work we do.

A study conducted by Rethink Priorities this year showed that the overwhelming majority of Americans still don’t know about EA. By most realistic standards—the permissive or stringent ones labeled on the chart—it appears as if somewhere in the range of 1-2% of American adults are familiar with EA. If 98% of American adults haven't heard of EA yet, that means there are about 250 million chances to make a good first impression.

Part of why we’re still so unknown is that the EA community has historically underinvested in communicating our own stories. I think it’s time for that to change.

I’m often struck by an interesting paradox in the EA community. Here is a group of people who care deeply about working on some of the world’s most critical problems and believe that not enough other people are dedicating resources to addressing them—and yet, we’re often so hesitant to promote our principles and work.

Yet progress in lead elimination and animal welfare commitments demonstrate that, when we do share our stories effectively, we can inspire others to act and work alongside us. 

That’s part of the reason why organizations like CEA and Open Philanthropy have taken this year to invest heavily in our communications capacity. CEA is excited to build foundations that can help this community communicate the good it does.

But building a lasting movement isn't just about institutional communication. It’s also in your hands. Everyone in this room has the power to spread the ideas they care about and magnify their impact, as we know from data about why people take the 10% pledge.

Giving What We Can tracks the primary source cited by people who take the Pledge to donate 10% of their income to the organisations that can use it most effectively, and in 2023, 43% of pledges came from people who were inspired to pledge either by people they knew or an EA group they participated in.

That’s part of why I took the pledge earlier this year. For years, I’ve cared about the principles of effective altruism and participated in effective giving. But I realized that by not signing the pledge, I was missing an opportunity to make those principles legible to others. Building lasting change means making our commitments visible. Signing helps to magnify the voice of a community and set of principles that I care about. It helps inform and inspire others so they can participate as well.

If you’ve already taken the pledge, consider talking with others in your life about how they can give effectively during this end of year giving season. Think of it this way: person to person communication is so powerful, it has somehow convinced thousands of people to give away 10% of their income for the rest of their life, in exchange for a tiny pin. 

There will soon be 10,000 people who have taken the 10% pledge, and when that 10,000th person pledges, it won’t just be a number. It will be a milestone in building a movement that lasts—a celebration of 15 years of Giving What We Can as an organization and individuals around the world putting their principles into practice. 

And it doesn’t have to stop at the pledge. Think about what brought you to EA and how you can pass along the same positive energy to other people in your life. Talk about your giving, what you work on, what you've been reading. Talk about how these ideas and values have changed your life.

Looking forward

Building an EA that lasts requires us to have the grit to look beyond any single moment of triumph or setback. It comes from a community that can learn and grow together. It comes not just from living according to our principles but by communicating them, recognizing that the actions we take today can have the ability to inspire others.

I believe in EA, both the principles and the people. I believe effective altruism has been a beacon for thousands of people to do more good. And I believe that EA can continue to be a beacon for thousands more, and that the trajectory of EA can have enormous implications for humanity’s moral future.

Effective altruism has been around for a little over a decade, and looking at what we've already built together, I know we can create even more lasting change.

I believe in the next decade; we can eliminate lead paint in dozens of the world’s most populous countries and prevent millions of young people from being poisoned.

I believe in the next decade, corporate cage-free commitments can become ubiquitous across high-income countries, the majority of not only egg-laying hens but also broiler chickens in those countries can be freed from suffering, and new campaign organizations can be established in every large lower- or middle-income country.

I believe that in the next decade, we can make 10% pledges widely known and understood by the public. We can communicate about effective giving in a way that causes many prominent public figures—actors, athletes, politicians—to agree with us on the merits, to want to associate themselves with EA, and to take and promote the pledge.

I’m here, and you’re here, because we want to dedicate ourselves to solving the world’s pressing problems. We should know that by their nature, signing up to address them isn’t easy. But building lasting change isn't a solitary endeavour. Part of the value of being in this community is that we don’t have to do so alone. Together, we can work through challenges, together we can learn from our past, and together we can grow to have an even greater impact in the future.