Firstly, I want to acknowledge that this comment has probably been pretty valuable in terms of sharing feedback for the CE team about perceptions that maybe a lot of people were unaware of, so thanks for raising some concerns that you and others might be having. I'll also just say as a co-founder of a CE-incubated charity, I am far from impartial, but I think sharing some inside information could be helpful here.

My main response is to the first 2 comments because I have no real knowledge of the last point.

CE is setting a norm for using research or evidence (however limited) as a basis for starting a charity. 

CE actually uses research & evidence to inform starting charities in the animal welfare space. This is not the norm! I think even establishing this as what you should be looking at is relatively new to the animal welfare space and should be acknowledged and praised. Currently the majority of charities that are started in the animal welfare space are not backed by research or significant evidence, from what I have observed usually founders think something is a good idea are relatively charismatic and subsequently get funding. So even though I agree that the research can be improved and I think it's helpful to flag this to Karolina and Joey, I think that the starting point of CE charities is a lot more than that of other charities in this space. So, really, I think we should commend CE for trying to establish any kind of research as the norm and basis for starting a charity. (I think the animal rights movement could be much better if this was a standard all new charities adopted).

CE was never extremely confident with their own research internally to incubated charities, it was merely a foundation. They also established failure mode thinking into our impact assessments which is another great norm.

I can only talk about cohort 1 which was FWI and AAC. In this cohort, CE presented the research that they believed there was the potential for something really impactful to happen in something generally in this space. It was then up to the co-founding team to go out and do deeper research including getting more external feedback to validate the research, whether the charity was really worth starting and how to execute it best. CE also embedded into our thinking that we shouldn't necessarily expect that our charities would succeed and that we should have clear failure points to assess whether it's worth it to continue it, taking into consideration the counterfactuals of the movement's money. Again i think this is a great norm to establish, many charities in the animal welfare space and in other sectors do not do this. They merely carry on without these assessments. Healthier Hens declared shutting down because of this and i think this should be celebrated not used as a signal of poor research. So basically, I think actually if you are mad about new charities not collaborating enough, I think that's on us, not CE. 

I think your main point (Which is a valid concern) is whether CE charities are net a good use of movement resources.  To date just speaking about AAC we estimate adding over $2,000,000 of counterfactual value to other animal welfare organisations with a spend of just over 750,000 in under 5 years.

I agree with Haven's point that the animal movement needs to do better and be better. But as you and others have said, I still think CE charities are some of the best in the movement. If we don't try to create new good organisations addressing gaps in the movement, I don't think we are going to realistically accelerate towards ending factory farming. The question is, do you know a better incubator programme to start new organisations than CE, or do you just want them to improve a bit? 

SWP, Animal Ask, Healthier Hens, FWI and AAC have all been supported by either EA animal welfare fund or Open Phil or both (in the case of most of us) so I would be really surprised if there were that much difference between the alternative funding perspective you are suggesting here.

From AAC's point of view, I would be interested to know your concerns on scalability because I think there are infinite ways we can scale; it's more about us selecting the right one. I'd love feedback on this so feel free to DM me from your anonymous account. We have supported over 150 organisations in increasing talent into critical positions they were struggling to hire for with 90 landing positions and have also brought in $408,000 of counterfactual funding to other organisations. Currently, we estimate (conservatively from most donors feedback) for every 1$ we spend a $2.5 of value is added to the movement. Which suggests we are net positive to the movement. We have plans to double this ratio by the end of this year. 

In conclusion, of course, CE has areas to improve, as we all do. Still, I think this is a pretty harsh analysis of an organisation adding a considerable amount of value and norms to the animal advocacy movement on founding charities. I think they would add a lot of value to bringing these values and norms into the donor landscape as there is a gap and CE has a pretty good track record in doing this in other donor circles like the Meta Funding Circle etc.

Lauren 

(transparently co-founder of AAC)  

Yes sorry I think we are actually saying the same thing here, I meant your former statement not the later. I’m not saying we shouldn’t investigate things but the 300 plus comments on the 3-4 nonlinear posts doesn’t seem an optimal use of time and could probably be dealt with more efficiently, plus the thousands of people who have probably read the posts and comments is a lot of time! Maybe these things shouldn’t be handled in forum posts but in a different format.

I fully agree that these things have to be dealt with better my main concern about your point is over the consensus idea which I think is unrealistic in a community that tries to avoid group think and on topics (ftx aside) where there doesn’t seem to be a clear right or wrong.

I have also recently been thinking alot about "how should we want to deal with a scandal" but mostly in terms of how much time is being devoted to each of these scandals by a community who really advocates for using our minimal resources to do the most good. It makes me really disappointed. 

<<i'm not sure the community even agrees internally on Bostrom, the Time article or Nonlinear>>

Forming a consensus additionally seems against the values of the EA community, particularly on quite complicated topics where there is alot of information asymmetry and people often update (as they should) based on new evidence, which is again an important part of the EA community to me at least. So I think I disagree and think it's unrealistic to have a community as large as EA "to find agreement on these," and I'm not sure how this would help. 

But i fully agree it would be great if we had a better process or strategy of how to deal with scandals

I'm just commenting here, but it's in reference to the evaluating the evaluator's posts and comments below. There is some confusion as to where GWWC's recommendation for THL's corporate campaign work is coming from? Is there some strong evidence for this that was not published? Why is THL considered but no other direct charities? 

If we were going off the conclusion of the evaluating the evaluators shouldn't GWWC just be recommending EAWF? 

Thanks for all your hard work on this :) 

Thank you for writing this beautiful piece! It really touched me. I am sad to admit I wasn’t even aware, there seems to be so many atrocities that consistently happen to animals it’s hard to keep up. Thank you for taking the time to write, acknowledge and inspire others!

On point 9-this is something we really are aware of at AAC and would love your take on it. As far as I know I think with career advising both AAC and 80k will discuss a number of opportunities with individuals some of which are more competitive and some of which are less competitive. The biggest issue is with job board that attract a lot of traffic here we are trying to direct people very strongly towards the highest impact opportunities, however the trade off here is these opportunities are few, highly competitive and low absorbency. We are considering to expand the job board to include more opportunities that can absorb more people and still have some impact but there is a strong concern we may therefore direct talented people away from higher impact opportunities due to them being on our website. I think it’s a valid point but I do think that 1:1 tailored career advising or mentorship should minimise this risk, with a strong focus on the needs of the individual and their chances to realistically get the jobs discussed.

so 9 placements each on 3 months FTE but most are part time for 6 months

3 months FTE, thanks for spotting 

Hi James,

Thanks for your questions and engagement with our post.

<<Besides the predictions you had for various amounts of people attending the online course, reading the skills profiles, etc., did you have any more high-level targets such as "we want to support X number of people in choosing a better career for animals"?>>

Yes, ultimately we will want to measure some variant of impact adjusted career trajectory changes for individuals. We haven't tried to really measure this for the skills profiles as these were largely for helping us to get a better knowledge internally on different types of roles in the movement. The online course and the 1-2-1 career advising will be assessed at least in part by our randomised control trials which will look to measure both career changes and also some behavioural changes of individuals who participated in the intervention vs. those who didn't. 

<<Looking at Appendix A, I saw you were disappointed with the amount of people who said they were likely to change their likely career trajectory, which is definitely understandable. Have you got plans to research into and/or improve this figure or do you not consider it a pressing issue at this stage?>>

Correct, although this is very immediate responses and its likely there could be more positive results in a few months or even years. At this stage digging deeper isnt the priority right now until we become more optimistic about continuing this service, but this might change when we receive the results from our RCT's on both the 1-2-1 advising and online course.

<< Would you be willing to share your cost-effectiveness calculations you reference in Appendix C? I'm considering starting a start-up later this year and would love to see how other people have modelled it, especially for an intervention that is seemingly quite hard to model rigorously.>> 

Absolutely,  although we must caveat that these are very rough CEA's and you might get some better advice on this from Karolina from Charity Entrepreneruship. If you email Jamie@animaladvocacycareers.org, he'll be happy to share this with you. Also if you want to chat more broadly about your start-up ideas and have a chat about this feel free to reach out to me. 

Lauren 

Great post and thanks for sharing, 

<<Paying for courses. Instead, perhaps someone could take on doing the leg work to work out which courses in some important arena is best, and then secure funding for EAs to do those. >> 

I guess we (AAC) did try this with our Management and Leadership training for EAA organisations this year, although potentially we didn't do deep research into the available courses. We did spend some time prioritising based partially on academic research which ones we thought could be the most beneficial. 

I think for us a major failure point was more due to what you pointed out here:

"A problem that's even worse for mission driven organisations than others is that object-level work always seems more urgent and important than self-development." Some feedback we had from the management and leadership training we provided this year was that even though initially participants were bought in and excited to participate some failed to complete the course due to a lack of prioritization on their part (i think its great that our participants were so transparent about this)  not due to the suggested course content not being valuable.  It's possible however this was also due to our implementation, if we do this again we will try to approach the training differently by working with a smaller number of organisations and try to get more buy-in from leadership for example get them to allocate a certain number of hours to this training for the individual. 

I think a challenge is that the value of taking the course might not be quantifiable to the individual or the organisation. So even if you find a course that could be helpful to develop a key skill, how can you measure the benefit to both the individual and the organisation of the person taking the training vs. them spending time on an object-level project. Would be grateful if you had any insight on this.   

<<I’m therefore keen for EAs to do more brief write ups of specific things they’ve learned and how - say, what they found most useful in learning how to write well. Of course, sharing them publicly (like on this forum!) is especially useful. But even writing suggestions up quickly and sharing them with colleagues can be really helpful - my colleague Brenton is particularly great at noticing things he’s learned and quickly writing them up for others to benefit from>>

Would also be really keen on this, it could be a great way for people to self-improve on certain topics. 

<<Systematising mentorship>> 

I think Kathryn from WANBAM has done an excellent job in facilitating this and matching individuals well but i imagine to do it well it's also very time-consuming for the person facilitating. 

Anyway, loved reading this post so thanks for writing it up.

Lauren