All of Alex Catalán Flores's Comments + Replies

Charity Entrepreneurship (CE) is looking for a Director of Outreach to manage and run a team that creates and maintains talent pipelines online and in person.

Salary: Between £34,000 and £47,000 gross per annum

Location: London, UK (preferred) or remote (employed locally via Employer of Record)

Deadline: Accepting rolling applications until a suitable candidate is found

Suggested skills and/or requirements: See job ad on our website for detailed description. 

About CE: Charity Entrepreneurship is on a mission to cause more effective charities to exist in t... (read more)

Hi Jeff, here is CE's Conflicts of Interest policy. We're still waiting for a couple of pieces of advice to come through so the text will likely change and we'll post an updated version. In saying that, there likely won't be wholesale changes. 

2
Jeff Kaufman
1y
Thanks!

Hi there. As promised, here is CE's Conflicts of Interest policy. We're still waiting for a couple of pieces of advice to come through so the text will likely change and we'll post an updated version. In saying that, there likely won't be wholesale changes.  

7
ElliotJDavies
1y
I'm curious what "does not permit" means here, since below this is written fairly modest steps.  I.e. I am aware Joey (executive director) has dated several members of staff (and still does at point of writing). Do I understand correctly Joey was not permitted to do so, but since presumably he has followed the steps described in the COI, he is permitted to continue?   To be clear, I am new to COI's so this might be normal, plus I can see COI are not designed as a guide for good workspace culture, but to specifically mitigate a certain form of mismanagement (i.e. what would colloquially be called "corruption").  Somewhat related question, do you expect any individual board members have COI in that all are previous founders of CE incubated charities. I am not sure I can point to any direct harms from this, but it does pattern match onto a Revolving Door. The Effective Altruism space is large, so it does seem suboptimal to have only board members that were previously in a subordinate role to the directors of CE.  Probably not all of my thoughts here are related to COI, but more towards unhealthy  culture around CE and the way it operates. 

Hi Ofer, apologies for the delay. We're doing one final round of review and will be publishing it very soon. I will send you a link as soon as it's published. 

Thank you Jeff for the post. I’m Alex, Director of Operations at Charity Entrepreneurship. We have a COI policy in our staff handbook, but you're right to say that our COI policy isn't public at the moment, so thank you for the nudge. Recent events made us think that we could take this opportunity to review our policy and potentially strengthen it even more, particularly by comparing it to others’ policies in this post. We will take a look and can commit to publishing it on our website before the end of the month. 

Ofer
1y15
0
0

Hi there!

Has Charity Entrepreneurship published its CoI policy? (I didn't find it on CE's website.)

One question others in the community might be wondering is the extent to which the inquiry will require connected organisations and/or projects to provide information to the Commission. Will the Commission ask anyone outside of EVF UK to provide information and/or documents (e.g. grantees)? Should people let you know if such a request has been made? Questions like that. I suspect you don't have answers to these yet, so I'm sure it's something that will be answered in due course. 

Wanted to also quickly recognise the mammoth effort that yourself and also EV Ops will likely need to put in in the coming months. I also haven't experienced such an inquiry, but I suspect it's a lot of work. All the best!

I commend you on your moral leadership and I join everyone else in the comments in expressing gratitude for the tremendous good you've done so far. However, I'm curious about your decision to resign. I get the moral justification, but surely there are many grantees with many questions who'd be able to get better answers were you still within Future Fund. Something as simple as access to documents or previous emails would enable you to better support grantees who are likely in significant distress. Why did you see it as imperative to resign effective immediately? Why not at the very least see out your notice period? 

9[anonymous]1y
How does it take moral leadership to distance yourself from and condemn massive fraud? Even entirely selfish actors would do the same. 
7
Markus Amalthea Magnuson
1y
I'm curious about this as well. Does leaving immediately not impede the chances of getting a better (I'd never dare say "full") picture of what went down? Additionally, in terms of accountability, I guess now we'll never know or have records of (from emails etc.) who knew what and when.

At least one person has gotten word from them that these payouts are on hold for now. This seems very worrisome and suggests the legal structure of the fund is not as robust or isolated as you might have thought.

If it turns out that committed funds were not liquid, that the legal structure wasn't robust, and that grants promised won't be honoured, that won't just be 'really bad' - it will be egregious. 

Suvita is looking for a Head of Operations / Head of Administration and Finance

Suvita is a startup nonprofit working to increase uptake of routine childhood immunisations in India. We are impact-focused and currently deliver two evidence-based programmes to boost attendance at vaccination appointments.

We’re seeking an operations specialist who will lead on delivering and strengthening Suvita’s operations across administration, finance and programmes. You will cover domains such as HR (onboarding & offboarding, contracts, policies), compliance (f... (read more)

Not an answer, just wanting to say thank you for asking this question! The same question had been percolating in my mind for some time but couldn't quite put it into words, and you did so perfectly. Thank you!

Brilliant post. I have been reading about and dabbling in evidence-led HR for some time, and on my to-do list was writing this exact post for the forum (although I suspect mine would've likely been of a significantly lower quality, so I'm not mad at all that you beat me to it) 

How can an organization effectively use intelligence tests & personality tests in hiring, while avoiding/minimizing legal risks? I know that many are rubbish, but are they all varying degrees of rubbish, or are some of them noticeably better than the rest? How good is Wonder

... (read more)
1
Joseph Lemien
2y
I'd be open to that. I don't have any posts like that on my docket at the moment, but I'll keep it in mind. If nothing else, I'd be happy for you to share a Google Doc link with me and I can use suggesting mode to  make edits on a draft of yours.
1
Joseph Lemien
2y
I haven't come across it, but this is just the kind of thing I was hoping someone would refer me to! Thank you very much. I've had many concerns about The Validity and Utility of Selection Methods in Personnel Psychology: Practical and Theoretical Implications of 85 Years of Research Findings, mainly about the data used, and I am very happy to see an update.

OP -- I'm curious to hear your thoughts about investing greater energy into making goals more 'legible', as you put it. It strikes me that organisational alignment via loyalty + compensation + culture + management + hiring is circumventing the main problem, which is that the organisation's goals aren't clear. 

For example, couldn't an organisation whose North Star is to “do research to determine priorities for making the long-term future go well" create alignment by breaking down that overarching aim into its constituent goals? I'm spit-balling here, b... (read more)

If you're up for a long-winded take on what I called "underspecified goals," and how they make alignment fail, I wrote about this question on Ribbonfarm quite a while ago.

Couldn't agree more, Rob. Perhaps my perception is coloured by my own experience and circle of friends, but there certainly seems to be a subset of people out there who genuinely enjoy scaling organisations. I think this is particularly the case in the for-profit sphere, where feedback loops are sometimes instantaneous thus leading to increased satisfaction among the scale-up types.