A Q1 update and 2018 in review

By Baxter Bullock and Catherine Low

Since launching in 2016, Students for High-Impact Charity (SHIC), a project of Rethink Charity, has focused on educational outreach for high school students (primarily ages 16-18) through our interactive content. In January 2018, we began implementing instructor-led workshops, mostly in the Greater Vancouver area. Below, we summarize our experiences of 2018 and explain why we are choosing to suspend our outreach operations.

Summary

2018 saw strong uptake, but difficulty securing long-term engagement - Within a year of instructor-led workshops, we presented 106 workshops, reaching 2,580 participants at 40 (mostly high school) institutions. We experienced strong student engagement and encouraging feedback from both teachers and students. However, we struggled in getting students to opt into advanced programming, which was our behavioral proxy for further engagement.
By the end of April, SHIC outreach will function in minimal form, requiring very little staff time - Over the next two months, our team will gradually wind down delivered workshops at schools. We plan on maintaining a website with resources and fielding inquiries through a contact form for those who are looking for information on how best to implement EA education.
The most promising elements of SHIC may be incorporated into other high-impact projects - The SHIC curriculum could likely be repurposed for other high-impact projects within the wider Rethink Charity umbrella. For example, it could be a tool for engaging potential high-net-worth donors, or as content to provide local group leaders.
We believe in the potential of educational outreach and hope to revisit this in the future - While we acknowledge the possibility that poor attendance at advanced workshops is indicative of general interest level in our program and/or EA in general, it's also possible that the methods we used to facilitate long term engagement were inadequate. We think that under the right circumstances, educational outreach could be more fruitful.
SHIC will release an exhaustive evaluation of our experience with educational outreach in the coming months.

2018 in review

In late 2017 we made a strategic shift towards a high-fidelity model of student engagement through instructor-led workshops. We tested this model throughout 2018, with our instructors visiting scho...

EA Education