All of Joan's Comments + Replies

Thanks so much for writing this! 

I just went through the process of trying to hire an executive assistant in the US so I thought I'd contribute a bit. My sample size is relatively low (I only tried 1-2 executive assistants from ~3 services), but here are some things I found helpful: 

* In my experience additional cost --> additional quality. Boldly (the firm we will likely end up using - $50 / hour) seemed to have higher service quality than places like Time Etc. ($30 / hour)

* I tried a series of 'work tests'. Here are the two I found most pred... (read more)

Appendix: 

Jan 2022 survey of Oxford/Cambridge/Stanford organizers 

We surveyed some full-time group organizers on how valuable they’d found various aspects of CEA support, versus support from non-CEA people (GCP, Lightcone, Buck Shlegeris – EAIF, Claire Zabel – Open Phil, EAIF, Stanford residencies). We gave them the option to be anonymous.

We split this up into 13 types of CEA support (UK group leaders retreat, US retreat, calls, etc.), and 8 types of non-CEA support. They rated things on a 1-7 scale, based on how useful they found them. 

Igno... (read more)

2. yes
3. correct
4. yes
5. we think focusing will improve quality in the short term, which will enable more potential scale / impact in the long term

Thanks for your questions! As mentioned before, I’m excited for others to consider full time community building via the infrastructure fund, and hope that you and others would peruse this option if you feel well positioned.

I don’t think CEA is covered all the net positive opportunities in this space — just the ones we think are the best given our view of our core competencies, staff capacity, and theory of change.

Within the CEA Groups team, we have several different sub-teams. Two of the sub-teams are focused on experimenting and understanding what a model looks like with full-time community builders in a focused set of locations (one sub-team for university groups, another sub-team for city/national groups). This is because the type of centralized support CEA might provide and the type of skills/characteristics required of someone working full-time running a university group or a city/national professional network might look very different depending on the ultimat... (read more)

Thanks Michael, these are good points. We should have been more careful here, and plan to edit the post to be more nuanced.  

Thanks for the recommendations, Ryan. I'll pass this on to my team and we'll look into it the historical outcomes of undergraduates. 

Thanks for your comments Mathias, 
 

Just to echo your point about supporting university groups - beyond supporting a subset of university groups with full-time organizers via the CBG program, we just released a job posting for someone to help us develop a scalable university support program that I think is high impact. This will further support volunteer-led university groups. 

> I don't have any a priori reason to believe that Austin and Warsaw have much less 'ea-potential' than Stockholm and Prague. It seems to me that many places have po... (read more)

For the large EA Virtual Program round, at first we were worried about having enough facilitators. But then we actually had quite a number of volunteer facilitators (over 100!) so then we focused on getting more participants. In the end we ended up having participant demand that matched available facilitators. As we mentioned, we're working to build more operations capacity for the virtual programs version of our fellowship. Once we do this, we hope to be able to offer them on a more consistent basis so more people can sign up.

On #1 and #2: In our report in footnote 5 where we reported this data we said:  "As some students leave fellowships before finishing, and fellowships are run independently through groups, our estimates of the number of fellowships in Q4 and participants across Q1 / Q4 are somewhat uncertain."

I do think the benefits of reporting estimates are more valuable than only reporting precise information, but we do try to add additional detail about where the uncertainty comes from. I'll keep this comment in mind when we do our Q2 report as well. 

Hi Brian, 

Great to hear about your enthusiasm for fellowships! 

1. Q1 data - we count fellowships based on when they start
2. We collect data on this at the end of each fellowship, so the non-EAVP participant numbers in the report are guesses based on Marie’s conversations with group leaders. For groups Huw was not in touch with on a regular basis, Marie assumed an average of around 12 participants/group, so it’s possible that the number is higher based on EA Philippines numbers (although a number of fellowships are smaller than 12 participants).
3. Marie is

We'll be releasing a write up of our 2019 review and 2020 plans in the near future, and will include historic spending for EA Grants and CBGs in 2019, as well as our projected spending in 2020. We spent $688,875 on CBGs in 2018. Because we didn’t have a separate accounting line item for EA Grants in 2018 and did not have consolidated internal documentation, it would take some time to come up with a specific amount. From our quick estimates, it is unlikely our EA grants spending was more than $1M, which would indicate we spent significantly less... (read more)

CEA’s Community Building Grants Program is planning to continue. You can see our most recent update about it here.

I’m Joan Gass, the Managing Director at CEA.

First, thank you for such a detailed, thoughtful criticism of CEA’s projects. It’s really valuable to hear from people about how we can improve our programs. This is also timely: we've recently hired a permanent Executive Director and we’re thinking through our strategy for this upcoming year.

CEA’s work, and CEA’s staff, have historically been mostly based in and focused on community building work in the US and the UK. We think that it may sometimes be legitimate t... (read more)

You may be interested in this 80,000 Hours podcast: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/rachel-glennerster-best-buys-in-international-development/

Hi Michael,

Thanks for your comments.

Representatives actually are responsive to resident, not just citizens. If you don't live in the US, you're right that US representatives won't be responsive. However, if you do live in the US, even if you're not a US citizen, your voice does matter.

In terms of the counterfactual use of funds, our assessment is based on the belief that funding for vaccines, AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria (through GAVI and the Global Fund) is one of the most cost effective - if not the most cost effective - use of funds. It's the same ... (read more)