Thank you very much for taking the time to write this, @Melanie Brennan 🔹  and @Anthony L ! It must have been difficult at this time of turmoil.

First, congratulations on all you (and past CBers) have accomplished in Barcelona and in Spain more generally. Your recap in this post clearly shows that much was done, and I think your sustained work has probably created a lot of positive impact.

Second, I think this post is important for reminding all of us that EA community building is at a strange place: it is clearly important, but it is also very hard to get funding for. Like many other roles in EA, we (counting myself) are precarious workers, relying on yearly renewals and decent-if-you-can-live-frugally salaries. Off the top of my head,  I'd say with confidence that fewer than 50 people in the world do principles-first EA community building as their main source of income. And I think perhaps fewer than 30 have been at it for more than 2 years.

Good luck to both of you, and looking forward to see the switch to a community/volunteering-led system works out!

Agreed.

One data point: in the recent EA community retreat I organized for 65 people in France in 2025 (not a "premium" retreat), the cost per participant was 156€. This includes my time as well as financial support from participants.

I tend to see these types of events as complementary. I think we should not treat their various outcomes as fungible. You get results of different, non-tradeable kinds. In particular:

• Differents types of participants
• Different types of impact.

I love number 4! :D

Yes. Another question is the geographical direction of the (potential) giving. I suppose we should expect a strong focus on US-centric actions, which might very suboptimal. Surely relying on funds will help coordinate intelligently.

Therefore, one approach to preparing for the influx of many new donors could be to increase the EA Funds teams to facilitate grantmaking (afaik, they're quite overworked anyway).

Thanks for the kind words!

To answer your question:
- One person said it to me, and another wrote it in the feedback form: it can be hard to understand how an organization can amend their activities to be more effective, concretely. Another person found the event "too theorical".
- I personally think examples contribute a lot to making the ideas clearer and more convincing.

I'm really thrilled that you seized this opportunity to speak to many people (and become one of the relatively rare speakers to discuss a moral atrocity on that stage).
With the Dwarkesh Patel podcast episode you recently did, this is very, very encouraging. Thank you so much.

Thanks a lot for maintaining this space! It's been great coworking with you and others in GatherTown, I love how it creates a cozy, friendly atmosphere akin to that of a physical office.
Strong reco for others to come (especially remote workers) and experiment with this solution.

Thank you for the write-up. It's been quite impressive and very positive to see the development of Mieux Donner, kudos to the cofounders, the early hires, as well as Ambitious Impact who gave the push to most of the recently-launched effective giving initiatives!!

Great! I'm very interested in how this compares with the most beloved EA format: the "fellowship". If this works well, it will present a number of advantages: more dense; less need for planning; basically no dropping out.

Funny to notice that with my usual "funnel-based" thinking I'd have listed these workshops in the reverse order.

Hey @JoA🔸 , I was considering having a translation (maybe adapted to our cultural context) on EA France's website, if @Jeff Kaufman 🔸 is giving us his blessing :)