I wanted to provide an update about the leadership teams of Effective Ventures Foundation USA, Inc. and Effective Ventures Foundation (UK).
On EV UK’s board, Tasha McCauley and Claire Zabel will be stepping down from their trustee roles within the coming weeks. Tasha has served on the EV UK board since 2021 and Claire since 2019, and both originally wanted to step down from these roles approximately a year ago. They decided to stay on to guide EV through a trying time, determine future plans for the organization, and finalize our trustee recruitment efforts. EV UK is extraordinarily grateful for the service that both of them have provided over their tenures, and especially in the months since FTX’s collapse.
To fill their vacancies, Eli Rose from the EV US board will be moving over to the EV UK board, and he will be joined by Johnstuart Winchell before the end of February. Johnstuart is the Founder and Lead of Good Impressions, an organization providing free advertising marketing to effective nonprofits[1]. Before starting Good Impressions, he worked at Google and Boston Consulting Group. To see an overview of all EV UK leadership, please visit this page on our website.
On the EV US board, Nicole Ross will also be stepping down from her trustee role in the near future. She has served on the EV US board since 2022, and as with Tasha and Claire, originally wanted to step down earlier but has stayed on to help with the organization’s governance until we could find new trustees, pass through some legal challenges, and set a course for EV’s future. EV US is immensely thankful for everything that Nicole has given to the organization and the larger EA community during her term. She will remain at EV US in her capacity as the Head of Community Health at CEA.
Anna Weldon joined the EV US board on February 1st. Anna is the Director of Internal Operations at Open Philanthropy, and she previously worked as Director of Human Resources at Buffalo Exchange, a US-based recycled clothing retailer. She’s guided workplaces in the areas of manager development, change management, and organizational restructuring. An additional trustee will be joining the EV US board shortly, and we will make an announcement once their appointment has been confirmed.
Finally, while Zach will be assuming the role of CEO of CEA, he will continue to serve as CEO of EV US. In this capacity, Zach will focus on leading CEA but retain his oversight responsibilities of EV US. I will continue to serve as EV UK CEO, and Zach and I will consult on what is in the best interests of both EV US and EV UK, and I will also be primarily responsible for the EV Ops team. To see an overview of all of EV US leadership, please visit this page on our website.
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Some of Good Impressions’ current clients include projects at EV US and EV UK. While the marketing services that Good Impressions provides are free of charge and therefore this relationship does not meet the bar of a legal Conflict of Interest, Johnstuart will be recused from any decisions that could conflict with his role as a service provider to EV’s projects (e.g. during yearly budget approvals).
I think this would likely be legal. Your analysis is US-focused; I'm not well-versed in other jurisdictions' laws either, so I'll leave that to the side. The California case (and the UNC portion of the Harvard case) involved state action, which is absent here. Students for Fair Admission involved the Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 42 U.S.C. § 2000d et seq., which "prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, and national origin in programs and activities receiving federal financial assistance." In other words, Harvard agreed to play by those rules when it decided to accept federal funds.
As you mention, maybe one could stretch anti-employment discrimination law to cover board membership. But I think there's a fundamental problem with that approach: in this scenario, the EVFs aren't employing anyone! They are deciding whether or not to make grants of EVF assets and IP to wholly independent, newly formed organizations. You'd need a legal authority that made it illegal for EVF to adopt a policy of generally not making these kinds of grants to organizations whose boards were wholly lacking in certain forms of diversity.
That's a tough sell to me, especially as EVF has elements of being an expressive association whose grantmaking decisions would thus be imbued with First Amendment protection. I tend to be pretty protective of non-profit organizations' ability to govern themselves in a manner consistent with their values, and tentatively think it's reasonable to say that an organization that values diversity should be able to have a diverse board if it so chooses.
I am not, by default, friendly to hard quotas. I said "there are a number of presumptive criteria the EVF Boards could set" (emphasis added), not that I would necessarily support deploying each and every one of them. The main point of my comment was actually to observe that the EVF Boards still were in the driver's seat on diversity issues and should not passively deferring to the projects regarding spin-off board composition.
I submit that Board membership decisions should be made based on the organization's best interests (and the public interest), rather than abstract "merit" per se. No one is entitled to be a board member. (I think the argument for an individual entitlement to university admission and especially to desired employment are stronger than for non-profit board membership.) I think a reasonable person could conclude that organizations and the public interest are generally better off when a non-profit's board does not consist, e.g., exclusively of White men like myself.
At the same time, I think that seeing a proposal for a board full of White males would be at least some evidence that the Board selection process had gone awry. Based on priors, what would the odds be that -- e.g. -- the best group of seven Board candidates available just happened to be a group of seven White men (like me)? A recent EA survey had 66% men, 76% White -- although to be fair the numbers were a bit higher for more established EAs. In that hypo: at a minimum, I'd want to see strong reasons to believe that the recruitment and evaluation processes gave everyone a fair and equal opportunity to be selected. I would not merely assume that the selection processes had no disparate impact on other groups or that unconscious bias had not seeped into the process somehow.
I am behind at life (having had major surgery earlier this week), so will likely not be in a position to engage further on this one.