People often tell me that they wish they had more insight into what I actually do in my role on the Community Health team. I’ve finally gotten around to writing something thanks to @Dion🔸 , who has been asking me for quite a while to write about what I do, and emphasising that this is something people would be interested in reading. I also sit opposite @Toby Tremlett🔹 who’s running career conversations week – thanks for the encouragement to write this, Toby.
People often seem to write these when they’re hiring. To clarify, we don’t currently have an open hiring round, but you can express interest on CEA’s form here.
What am I aiming to do with my job, and why?
I’m a Community Liaison on the Community Health team at CEA. The Community Health team aims to strengthen the effective altruism community’s ability to fulfil its potential for impact, and to address problems that could prevent that. We do this by advising community members who have encountered conflicts, unfair treatment, or other problems affecting their involvement with EA. We advise organisations, events, and groups in EA on establishing good cultures and dealing with problems that come up in their spaces. We sometimes provide guidance on risk management and prevention, especially for more sensitive projects like programs for high schoolers.
Why am I doing this?
There’s a lot of suffering in the world, and I have felt very confused about how to even begin tackling it. EA was (and continues to be) a helpful way for me to orient to this. I’d seen it have a meaningful impact in many areas, which makes me really want EA-aligned projects to succeed.
No community is without its problems, and naturally, EA has its own. I personally was tracking various community health style dynamics and concerns before joining the team. I’d done a bit of work thinking about safeguarding at an event with high-schoolers, I’d been a contact person at some events, and sort of chronically worried about various community things people would tell me as their friend or that I observed myself.
When I was very new to EA and junior, I’d assumed that smart people had good reasons for their choices, or that if I noticed a problem I wouldn’t necessarily be listened to. I also didn't feel super agentic about fixing problems then. But as I spent more time around EAs, and realised that there were a lot of places where things could be improved, the idea that I could actually potentially shape people’s experiences to be good ones felt motivating, and I saw an opportunity to actually do that in this work.
So what do I do?
My work is mainly a mixture of advising EA community members and other CEA staff. It can really vary. It’s fairly reactive but there is still some room for bigger overarching projects, they just tend to be squeezed in around our core case work, advising and meta-type work.
One way to get a feel for what I do is to look at the past ~7 days, which I’ll write about below. You can also check out our website, which includes information about working with us, and some example situations we can help with.
What I’ve worked on in the last ~7ish days
- Had some meetings with someone who had concerns about some things another community member had said, and been hurt by them. We talked through what happened and explored potential next steps.
- Advised someone on a project they're considering running. This involved me doing some background research to properly understand their proposal, and writing up a bunch of concerns I’d identified, as well as some mitigations I thought would be important to make it go well if they do decide to proceed.
- Briefly checked in with someone who seemed upset in some Forum comments.
- Corresponded with someone about an org governance concern they raised.
- Talked to a group organiser about an issue related to their group.
- This specific thing would be too identifiable to put on the forum, but often this looks like talking about how to handle a group member who’s causing problems, how to handle a conflict in the group, or how to make their group more welcoming.
- Posted a response to a message about circling in a slack channel, reminding people to check in with themselves about how much they want to share with people from the same professional space.
CEA related work
Much of my work time goes to helping CEA-wide projects, and CEA coordination like organisation-wide meetings, retreats, and Slack, or doing things like manning the career fair stall at EAG.
In my day to day CEA related work, I tend to focus more on events because I used to work on the Events Team.
This past week, I:
- Reviewed some EAGx feedback forms and followed up on various community health concerns that attendees raised in the form.
- Met with my colleague to talk about speaker selection for a conference, and if/ how I might be able to help them get more women to speak at it.
- Gave input on some community health decisions related to upcoming EAGx events
- Thought about who would make good local ‘Contact Person’ for an upcoming conference
- Worked on a doc about improvements to travel support funding that might help tackle something we’re concerned about
Last week was a bit atypical with various folks out of office, so there was a bit less meta last week than normal. I’ll talk more about a normal week.
- Reviewed a past case with my manager to identify what went well, if there was anything to do differently next time, and if we wanted to circle back and take any further steps now some time had passed.
- I have 1:1 meetings with my manager, where we talk about a mixture of object level updates, how I’m doing emotionally, productivity, and feedback.
- We normally have a weekly casework check in to get input from each other on case or advising related decisions, and a monthly check in that is focussed more on process and systems.
- We normally have a ‘Thorny Thursday’ meeting where we discuss a ‘thorny’ issue either in the community or related to our work. For example, ‘Red teaming X thing CEA is doing’ or ‘mental health support for group organisers’.
- Spent a little bit of time gathering some information for monitoring and evaluation of our impact.
What’s brilliant about my job?
- I get to see people caring incredibly deeply and trying so hard. So many EAs just really care and are really thoughtful.
- A lot of my job is interacting with really lovely people all over the world.
- Sometimes I can chat to someone for a while and seem to really help them.
- I can’t stop people from ever having bad experiences. But hearing that someone felt comfortable, or even excited to stay in EA because of the help they got from our team feels really meaningful to me and can be very rewarding.
- I like it when talking to our team allows a group organiser to feel more confident taking an action to make their space better that they hadn’t previously felt empowered to do.
- I really enjoy finding creative solutions and mitigations that people haven't considered.
- My job has a lot of variety and surprises that I find very engaging.
- Even a similar sounding situation will have nuances or things that might change the advice I give. I get to learn about a lot of different places, organisations and ways of doing community. I’ve learnt about various mental health issues and interventions, different cultural contexts, and read a bunch of papers on topics relating to gender and inclusion. There’s a lot of different things happening across the community, and even just thinking about orgs, or groups, or events in one day can provide plenty of variety.
- This variety also comes from a lot of events and travel.
- I’ve been lucky enough to spend time in the Philippines, Mexico, and across Europe and the USA in order to attend EAG/x events and community builder retreats. It really feels like such a privilege, and something 10 year old me would have been SO excited to hear that I do as part of my job.
- My job is also very flexible - having colleagues in the USA, Europe, and New Zealand means that I can kind of choose which working hours make sense for me.
- I really appreciate getting to work with such a wonderful team.
- I resonate with what @Lizka wrote about CEA’s team values here, and there are just so many deeply lovely, very smart people at CEA that I’m constantly learning from.
- This is particularly true of the community health team itself. I learn so much from all my colleagues, and have been so inspired by the levels of deep care and integrity they bring to their work and altruism more broadly. It feels a bit trite to say, but I really do think I am a better person not just in work, but in life from having spent time with them. We also manage to laugh a lot, and bring a lot of joy and love into work that could feel very heavy.
What’s difficult?
Note - I don’t touch on productivity, or mental health type challenges in this post. This doesn’t mean I don’t have them!
Things I more or less expected:
My role sometimes involves raising concerns that slow down colleagues or external stakeholders, like if I flag a downside of a program they’re planning to run. I try to be problem-solvey where I can, and try to unblock people as much as I can, but this is sometimes difficult to navigate.
Sometimes I will hear about a very sad thing, and that just can make me sad.
It can feel like I’m doing ‘meta, meta’ work. Dealing with a lot of uncertainty about impact certainly makes me wonder if I’d be happier doing more direct work. I miss more directly working on the Summit on Existential Security for example, because watching and facilitating the experts share ideas and make decisions meant I could still see how my work was upstream of good things happening in the world. In Community Health, often a sign of success is not hearing or seeing something happen.
Things I underestimated how tricky they’d be:
- This job has been weird and hard mostly in ways I wasn’t quite expecting, that stem from trying to shape and look after a thing that I’m also part of.
- e.g. I feel some pressure to behave in an exemplary way myself, which can feel tiring or stressful.
- In some ways people have a lot of insight into my work, as fellow members of the community. It can feel challenging to try and write for an audience that has diverging opinions on how our community should be.
- It’s not rare to be in a situation where two people are frustrated, one because they wish I was taking stronger action, the other because I’m taking too much action, by their lights.
- It’s also tricky when there is less legibility in my work, for example not always being able to fully explain my reasoning to someone for confidentiality reasons, even though I want to be more transparent.
- Those are difficult enough when I feel fairly confident in the steps I’m taking or what I’m doing. But I’m a human who makes mistakes sometimes, sometimes I’m less certain that [X] is the right choice, or there are no ‘good’ options to take. Sometimes I really want to do [Y], but I can't. Or really not want someone to do [Z], and can’t influence it. Sometimes things feel clear, but often there are no ‘right answers’.
Some closing thoughts
I really love my job a lot of the time. (Sometimes it’s hard, and I want to run away and start a coffee shop in Cornwall). But overall, I feel inordinately lucky and privileged to do what I do.
My favourite bit of my job is talking to community members. Including the more difficult conversations. Often people are worried that their issue is too minor to tell us, but we’re so glad they shared it. So please do reach out if there’s something you’re concerned about or want advice on. If you’re not sure we have some examples here of what might be good to bring to our team.
Culture is something we all shape; in many ways, it’s all of our jobs as members of the community. I’m curious to hear about ways you think about community health in your work, and community spaces you’re in.
