All of Joy Bittner's Comments + Replies

Thank you so much for the encouragement and support, Joey!

Thanks so much for this, Jeffrey. You’re absolutely right about the far-reaching spillover effects of depression on families, communities, and long-term health and productivity. And though they can be hard to measure, these impacts are still incredibly real. Anyone who has experienced depression personally, or through a loved one, knows just how deeply it affects the people around them in ways that often go unseen. Really appreciate you naming this broader reality.

HI Jason, 

Thank you so much for both the donation and for publicly sharing your reasoning. I really appreciate you taking the extra step to make this visible; that kind of transparency is genuinely valuable to the community and to us.

I share your core framing almost exactly. The long-run case here really does hinge on whether government and large institutional funding materializes, and that is a real bet with meaningful risk. Support from the Columbia team and the WHO is encouraging but far from a guarantee, and I want to be very open about that uncer... (read more)

Thank you Stephen, I feel really blessed to get to be part of this team, and grateful for all the people who trust us to help them.

:) 

so appreciate you and everyone there.

really great post, and as someone who lives in the global south, you're money probably when so much further than one would ever expect. thank you

Hi Mike, thanks so much for all your support and these thoughtful points. 

Yes, there are additional costs associated with geographic expansion, and we believe these costs are justified for several reasons:

Testing Demand and Adaptation: By expanding to more rural locations, we aim to assess the demand for and adaptability of our services. Urban life in Quito is fast-paced, and we've noticed various factors competing for people's attention, making it challenging for group attendance. Most other g-IPT programs operate in rural settings, where individuals... (read more)

Similarly, would like to know if it's possible to add Vida Plena? (I would imagine many orgs would like to know how they can also be considered for the donation election.)

Thank you so much, Philippe! Yes, we are excited about the possibilities of combining insights from different fields and seeing what the date shows us.

TLDR: Vida Plena, which provides WHO-endorsed group therapy for depression in Ecuador, seeks $200,000 for behavioral science research, $50,000 for expansion to new regions, $9,600 annually to hire an additional Group Facilitator or $120 to provide treatment to one person.

See our full marginal funding forum post here.

I'm the co-founder of Vida Plena, a nonprofit organization tackling Ecuador's mental health crisis through cost-effective, proven group therapy led by local leaders from vulnerable communities.  We do this through the direct implement... (read more)

same! the 5am start time is a bit rough. thank you so much!

Hi Jason, thank you so much for thoughtfully bringing up this important question. While we do concur that the likelihood of Vida Plena increasing suicidal risk is low, we firmly believe in the importance of considering all possibilities.

Firstly, we want to emphasize that we are following the suicidal risk protocols established by the expert team at the Global Mental Health Lab at Columbia University, and we have been fortunate to receive ongoing mentoring from them throughout the course of these cases.

Broadly speaking, research shows this is unlikely. For ... (read more)

HI Jemina, 

The program is made up of 9 sessions in total, once a week. So aprox. 9 weeks. 

Thank you so much for your support! Yes, its been a great journey! 

Muchas gracias, Simón, por llamar la atención este tema. A pesar de que no soy hablante nativo de español, estoy muy de acuerdo contigo sobre la importancia de no solamente traducir materiales al español, sino crear materiales desde el español para generar nuevas formas de pensar, mejor vinculado al contexto regional. Aunque entiendo la decisión de los organizadores del EAGx tener un gran parte de las presentaciones en ingles en esta primera edición, los anima que al futuro la mayoría sean en español. 

Cuando tuve la oportunidad de... (read more)

Hi Jason! Thank you so much for all your very thoughtful comments and ideas! (and also for your decision to support us in 2023!) Want to take a minute to respond to some of your points:

Funding from non-EA sources: absolutely! We are so grateful that the EA-community is willing to take some risks on new organizations before they have a track record. With the results that we are able to demonstrate early on, we are absolutely planning on applying for counterfactual funding. In fact, as an example of this we were just selected to be part of the South Park Com... (read more)

Thank you so much, Judith! I am so deeply grateful for all that CE has been for me personally and Vida Plena!

Hi Simon, thanks for your questions and you bring up good points!

For the facilitator training hours, it was a mix of in-person and virtual:
- 2 days of orientation in person 
- 4 days of interpersonal therapy training.  We had the group gather in-person, but the training was actually led virtually by a team from Columbia University. So potentially in the future, people who are unable to attend in person could attend virtually only
- the remainder of the training hours occurred during weekly supervision meetings which happens fully virtually&nbs... (read more)

HI Simon, thanks for the feedback - while I don't have access to the StrongMinds budget, based on their public tax returns, one difference I can point to is that we do not have any US-based staff (and subsequently, any US-rate salaries).  In general, I would also add that we only have one type of intervention,  whereas StrongMinds has added additional services/departments, which are likely critical and very beneficial, but harder to measure impact. 

I'm happy to share our 2023 budget with anyone who would be interested: joy@vidaplena.global    

I also worked with Markus during his pilot phase, and his work was extreamly helpful in helping us figure out some technical bits that he was able to do very quickly, but would have taken me hours (maybe would have just never been able to fix alone). I was exceptionally grateful for his help and it just gave me so much faith in the EA community that such a service would even exist.  Still feel really grateful for all his help.

:) It was thanks to thoughtful questions from people like you that made me thing this might be helpful to share! 

thanks so much for sharing these thoughts, Joey. Really clearly laid out and so important to be able to understand the nuances. 

these are great additional examples, Sara! thanks for adding. 
and yes, I completely agree its about 'removing obstacles before they happen'! good insight! 

really great to hear about your experiences as well! Very much agree, its a challenge to keep focused on the bucket of 'important priorities' and not just get caught up in 'fire-fighting' mode. What do you find works for you to keep that focus?

Thanks so much, Akash! Hopefully it can be helpful!
A lot of this is pretty specific to doing ops for smaller nonprofits - alot of big companies will also have ops staff as well, and they be doing things that are quite different! but the general concept of internal-focus and problem solving will be the same!

hahah love this analogy!

thanks for the kind feedback! It is really satisfying to know you are helping make sure that the org is a good place for people to work and also, hopefully grow and thrive! 

so, so agree with this comment, think its a huge oversight:

"-Spot regional differences within countries when answering different types of questions: Even if my country's GDP is higher than many countries where effective donations according to EA are allocated, there are many regions within my country where poverty is extremely high, even higher than in richer cities from poorer countries. Those differences are hard to spot if EA spots “poverty” as a whole without zooming in geographical zones."