All of Naomi N's Comments + Replies

I’m one of the people interviewed by Joel and I’d like to share a bit about my experience, as it could serve as an additional datapoint for how this report was constructed. 

For some context, I’m on the Groups Team at CEA, where I manage the Community Building Grants program. I reached out to Joel to see how I could support his research, as I was in favour of somebody looking into this question. 

The key points I’d like to bring up are: 

1. Before going into the call, I was under the impression that it would be a chat, which bears for me the

Hi, I’m the CBG manager at CEA and happy to explain how we came to this amount. 

This $110,000 does indeed include a block grant of $20,000 that is intended to cover all non-salary costs, such as event costs and general operating expenses. Some non-salary costs in the past have included: venue rent, retreat costs, travel compensation for volunteers, and small regrants to local (student) groups. 

The remaining $90,000 is intended to cover the personal grant and should fund all employment related costs, such as taxes, social security contributio... (read more)

Hi, 

Naomi from CHERI here. First, thank you for picking up this idea and running the survey!

You write in the post: "The CHERI fellows seem to be both less committed to x-risk careers overall (just about one standard deviation below CERI/SERI fellows), and to see larger changes over the course of the program." And later you discuss a potential reason why (smaller number of applicants). 

I think this could be a potential explanation but we also selected a part of our applicants on the basis of being less familiar with x-risks/EA. We believed these m... (read more)

EA Switzerland is sending the whole team - we are short so fit the description of "relatively small group of people" very well. 

As people sometimes still refer to this post and use it as input for their fellowship program, I wanted to share three major updates:

1. Impact Seminar: originally, the fellowship was intended to be for everybody, from people new to Effective Altruism to advanced members. Last year we changed this, as having in-depth discussions with varying levels of familiarity was sometimes challenging. We made the fellowship only for advanced members and added a five-week introduction program, the Impact Seminar. 

2. Restricted in time: originally, the fellowship wa... (read more)

Hi Brian,

Thank you for the feedback, I hadn't included examples indeed because of the potential personal details, but I like the suggestion to make them anonymous. 

Anecdotally, I encountered the following example the most often*:

"Alice started to organize the global priorities reading club two months ago. The idea for the reading club started during a  conversation at the monthly (online) social, where she chatted about an EA forum posts that argued in favor of more global priorities research. Bob mentioned that EA FictitiousExample should do som... (read more)

What are the most common reasons for rejection for applications of the Long-Term Future Fund?

Thank you for your comment, great to hear that these suggestions seem to be helpful.

And great questions. I don't have a definitive answer (I might miss some things and the situation can differ a lot between organisations) but I can share some thoughts. Your second question is easier to answer, so I will start with that one.

I think that it's a bad idea to work with volunteers if:

• The organisation does not realise that volunteers aren't free. They cost time, for coordination, recruitment, training, answering questions, etc. And sometimes the

The post above comes from the personal experiences of Justus and myself, but for the people who prefer a more academic approach, I recommend this literature review on volunteer management.