JK

Jeffrey Kursonis

310 karmaJoined Jun 2022Working (15+ years)

Bio

Participation
2

Jeffrey Kursonis built and co-built quite a number of non-profits in New York City, including The Haven, an arts and altruism collective with 300 people gathering weekly for ten years in Manhattan. A multicultural and altruistic faith community in Harlem, still going today. The New York City New Sanctuary Movement, one of two main hubs of the national network of faith communities giving sanctuary protection to undocumented families being pursued by Federal Immigration Law Enforcement. It’s a long list. 

After my work in NYC, a nascent national organization, Emergent Village, tapped me to lead their early growing network of local cohorts seeking to organize progressive religious leaders. I formed a team and we built it up to over 100 US cities, as well as many regional gatherings and other movement training and organizing (extremely similar to CEA). This “emerging church” movement changed the face of American religion by directly moving thousands of religious leaders and their congregations to the left, spawned a whole publishing genre, helped elect Obama, helped influence our Federal same sex marriage legal structure and sadly became a focal point of the conservative backlash unleashed by Trumpism. As a side note, Jeffrey is no longer religious but still deeply appreciates the proven training ground religion provides. Here is a video we produced about the national cohort network, note my name as producer in the end credits: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-oaU29Z4dg

Jeffrey has been an active EA’er for over a year now, doing the Intro and Advanced Fellowships and working as a Meta-Moderator for Virtual Program trainings for new facilitators and actively posting on the forum. I recently applied to be on the CEA Virtual Programs new Advisory Board.  

How others can help me

I have a long career in the religious world, and now I'm no longer religious so I'm rebuilding in the regular world, it's a challenge. Religion is very good at movement building and at persuading people to change their views two things EA is trying to do...in the internet boom of the 90's the term "evangelist" became popular for basically marketing pro's communicating their vision. Many EA's might be surprised to learn that the word charity simply means love...in older English versions of the bible, like the King James, verses that we now use the word love for would then use the word charity. To give with no expectation of return benefit, the very core of EA, is essentially the act of charity which equals an act of love.  These less scientific and more artful human kind of expressions are more my style. Because I agree with the core EA notion of bringing scientific method into charity work, I want to see that happen, but implementing it can still be a very human and social and creative thing. I need help evangelizing this message. :) 

How I can help others

If you are a young EA and have any anxiety in your work and life, I am a lifelong coach and mentor to young activists, and from the culture of my long experience it has a pastoral quality...definitely not for everyone, but very good for some. 

Comments
73

Oh and for the poster, there is a group called "All in Awe" that helps place graphic artists with EA org's...maybe they could place you in some jobs.

Yes they are mostly in EA Anywhere under #role-artists and #role-film-and-tv. There is also an in real life gathering of marketers and creatives in EA NYC. Artists of Impact is an early stage org drawing professional artists toward effective giving similar to how others have done that with athletes.

This is fantastic, a perfect example of how the arts amplify EA ideas making them more palatable and available to non experts. That’s why we have EA Artists & Creatives group, as well as EA Creatives & Communicators and Artists of Impact and more.

I think this is a great perspective on the future of EA and as SBF’s trial is about to explode across world media and bring a new wave of negative mentions of EA, people I know who are building effective giving org’s while considering themselves within EA are also choosing to use the term Effective Giving more broadly in their communications because the term EA is facing an extended bad press cycle. I deeply regret this reality but it’s the nature of how things work these days.

The other thing this presentation touches on and I will discuss it with my own twist is that we’ve somewhat abandoned our fundraising core…and I think many EA’s have failed to grasp how big fundraising is to our core essence and place in the world. Early EA full of STEM people did the remarkable job of pushing evidence based impact to the fore of the whole philanthropic world. If you read outside of EA in other philanthropic circles all you hear about is effective impact. It’s a classic success story of a small movement changing the bigger narrative in its field. And one of the proofs of this is how so many people decided to rely upon EA charity evaluators for their donations and we built up a massive amount of funds spread over 50+ fundraising organizations.

One of the things that always amazes me about EA is how many take this massive success for granted. It is almost without precedent that a small group of philosophy and STEM activists build up billions of dollars of funds. That just doesn’t happen. Most movements struggle for years. Having 25-50 million dollars is considered a hugely successful movement. Many EA’ers making 100K plus as altruists have no clue that is not how altruists in the past got paid…a career in altruism meant you made very little money, it was like you were choosing to donate the huge portion you weren’t getting paid as your sacrifice for doing good.

This isn’t just a case of an older generation perspective being jealous of a younger generations success…this lack of awareness of the actual core accomplishment of EA in the world leads to mistakes because when you are not operating in reality you are guaranteed to make choices that won’t work.

When you have billions of dollars under your management in todays world it gives you a weight in public forums that is not based in your philosophical work, but based in your clout. This allowed the philosophers who did great things in building EA to go back to their roots and spin out new esoteric concepts totally shifting EA in its second wave toward Longtermism and X-risk and away from charity and fundraising. This was a mistake because it was built on clout and not a long career building the philosophical foundations. Which lead to problems.

I believe the third wave of EA should be to now build upon its true foundation of fundraising leadership and to take it out to a bigger and broader audience. The new EA cannot continue as a mostly STEM elite group. That doesn’t fit the mission. A broader more mature effective giving movement reaching all the millions of wealthy donors has to have a culture that is more welcoming to those donors.

I have been in movements that have had to change from their early core culture to a broader more mature culture as they’ve grown and it’s a painful thing for many who bemoan the loss of the little tight knit community they loved. And I’m sympathetic, but it’s the same sympathy you feel for a sad teenager having to leave their friends and school because their parents got an important new job far away. It’s a painful loss but it’s just life.

As a non STEM person I will tell you this forum is not a welcoming place. This is not new information, I’ve read here and spoken to people who all know it. It’s time to open EA up to more arts and humanities people, to more mid and later career people and as I’ve argued elsewhere to probably guffaws from EA readers, to more average people that are not elite. This is the kind of balance that will change the culture and make EA more welcoming to all the people it needs to draw in to go where it needs to go.

We will surely always need a STEM core to do charity evaluations and to continue a healthy subsection of philosophical thinking about X-risk and Longtermism or whatever it evolves into. I love and value that work, but it’s not what EA actually is in the world.

What EA actually is, is the network of local groups CEA supports, the charity evaluation work and the many funds relying on their work, the various think tank research org’s, the efforts to help people work in effective impact jobs and both the charities EA supports and the new ones it starts. That’s what EA is and we now need to get a whole bunch of new people involved in and supporting all that…and to get those people we have to do some new things like more creative marketing, make documentary films and other creative media to spread the vision and inspire imaginations, and change the culture to make it more welcoming to non-STEM people. To do all that we need more artists and creatives and more average people and more mid and senior career people.

Wow, you guys are doing so great. I'm curious how you do the creative content? How do you find the people and manage the process using local writers and actors? I would also love to see any information on why you do radio instead of say TikTok?

This post is why EA is so great. The broader take home is that human life and social systems are infinitely complex and all of EA needs to continue to trend humble regarding our ability to figure things out in the specific window/perspective we have. And since our funding advice goes to the wealthiest and most willing to give humans on earth, we hold a significant sway on which interventions get funded, so if we are off or wrong, we do harm. Thanks for continuing to iterate humbly. 

This is fantastic. Those of us who believe EA needs more art come from virtually an identical motivation - it communicates and amplifies all the great stuff that EA has spent so much time and sweat and money creating...why leave so much impact on the table when you can amplify it to a waiting world?  There's more of course with art, but that's a big part of it. 

As another commenter said, this should stand as an EA Marketing reference for all of us...and with so much data, James proves he knows how to speak to his audience! Now we also have to speak to those other audiences that don't want data but want emotion and intellectual inspiration, people just waiting to send in a donation or join a local EA group or move overseas with one of our charities. 

And speaking of inspiration, wait until you see what we've got in store for the "ea-X-hibition" art exhibit at EAGx Berlin in September...the piece we are putting up will blow everyone away and other conferences are already asking for it. Tell your friends in Europe. 

Based on based evidence of our excitement, of course!

I love this and I and my friends are going to run over to Manifund and put our money where our beliefs get excited!

I have many years of being in multiple kinds of religious communities and I can say I've seen this kind of dynamic...this is great thinking. 

I remember reading about a group of people early in Alameda, before FTX started and that had a good number of EA's among them, who stood up against SBF and demanded a better contract and he dismissed them and they all left...one can't help but think that helped create an evaporative concentration of people willing to go along with his crazy.

As an aside, for pondering, the evaporative cooling dynamic is something I experience in cooking almost daily where you reduce the liquid in order to make it a sauce with more concentrated flavors...they always refer to this as reduction, or a reduction sauce. In this case it's a good thing...but knowing this dynamic in cooking helped me understand your argument. 

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