REACH is planning a free weekend workshop in Berkeley for people who are looking for ways to be more involved with Effective Altruism and have more personal impact. The workshop will be held at the Berkeley REACH on May 18-19.
TL;DR
- Refer friends/colleagues/acquaintances who you think would be a good fit by sending them this application.
- If you want to attend the closing event to help people talk through their experiences from the weekend, fill out this form.
Long version:
The first day of the workshop will consist of sessions on the basic tenets of EA, but will be mostly focused on discussing the ideas as a group rather than being lecture based. We will aim to keep these discussions accessible to people with minimal familiarity with EA by avoiding jargon/defining terms as needed. The facilitators will be people who have been thinking about how to have as much impact as possible fairly seriously for several years, are actively involved in the EA community, and doing direct or meta work. However, they do not claim to speak for EA as a whole or to be experts on all topics. The people currently signed up as facilitators are Stardust (Berkeley REACH), Cody Wild (BERI/CHAI), and Rosie Campbell (CHAI). Note that the non-REACH facilitators are participating in a personal capacity, not on behalf of their organizations.
If you are interested in facilitating for this or future weekend workshops, or know someone who you think would be a good fit, please reach out to Stardust. We are especially interested in additional facilitators who specialize in animal welfare, global poverty, global health, policy, and bio-risks.
The second day will be focused on helping the individual participants find their comparative advantage and come up with steps toward having more positive impact on the world.
At the end of the second day (May 19th), we will have a social event to introduce the participants to highly motivated existing EAs in a variety of careers. This event will include lightning talks by both participants and guests. If you would like to be invited to the afterparty, please register your interest here.
This is the first time we’ve run something like this, so it will be somewhat experimental. We are relying on the community to help us identify candidates for this program who will approach it seriously. We want to start with a relatively small group (at most 10 participants) so depending on interest we may end up turning down or deferring some people who would likely be a good fit; we will keep those applicants in mind when planning future events.
We are committed to building a diverse community. There is evidence suggesting that underprivileged individuals tend to underestimate their abilities or discount the likelihood of being accepted into programs. We do not want the application process to dissuade potential candidates and we strongly encourage interested people to apply regardless of gender, orientation, race, ethnicity, nationality, or background. We will also do our best to accommodate disabilities; if you would need special accommodations, please reach out to Stardust ([email protected]) to discuss options. The building is wheelchair accessible.
The workshop will be free for participants, including vegan and vegetarian meals. We don't promise to provide food that works for everyone's needs, but we do have fridge space that can be used if people need to bring their own food. We can also accommodate some participants at REACH overnight. However, we do not have resources to cover travel expenses, so participants will need to be able to get to REACH on their own.
The application closes on May 1 at 11:59 pm.
It's interesting to see this more formal approach as a contrast to casual meetups. Where did the idea originate? And do you have any plans in place to follow up with attendees and see whether they stay involved afterwards?
At least in the bay area, most folks don't tend to have the availability to come to casual meetups frequently, and most of the existing meetups aren't about the basics of EA or focused on how you can individually contribute.
I heard about the Arete fellowship at the CEA local groups retreat in January, and that got me thinking about better on-ramps to EA that I could implement in the bay area.
I do intend to follow up with post-workshop surveys as well as strongly encouraging folks to join existing meetup groups or start their own.