My Experience as a Full-Time EA Community Builder in NYC

By Alex Rahl-Kaplan 🔸 @ 2024-07-25T19:46 (+73)

Some rewards and challenges of working as an EA NYC community builder over the past two years

Motivations

I wanted to share these thoughts for a few reasons:

1. I hope this serves as a reference point for people considering careers in EA community building (though this is only one reference point, of course).
2. EA NYC is hiring an Executive Director! If you're interested, apply here by the end of July 28th (Eastern Time).
3. I think there's often value in people discussing their jobs.^[1]

By the way, I have a few relevant disclaimers/caveats that I encourage you to check out at the bottom of this post. For now, I'd just like to say that I'm writing this in a personal capacity and do not claim to represent the views of any of my employers, past, present, or future.

Otherwise, I may occasionally update this post to correct any misleading/inaccurate points. Please let me know if you catch anything that seems off!

Lastly, many thanks to those who encouraged me to share this post and especially to Elliot Teperman for sharing some helpful thoughts on an earlier draft. Of course, all mistakes are my own.

Summary

From July 2022 to July 2024 (ongoing at the time of writing), I will have supported Effective Altruism NYC (EA NYC). In this position, I worked closely with the Centre for Effective Altruism's (CEA) Community Building Grants (CBG) program, which provided funding and support for my position.

This work has been pretty great for me! Like anything, there have been some bumps in the road, but I think it has been broadly good. I imagine many cases where I would recommend EA community building and/or CBG program participation for specific individuals. However, I would also like to give some disclaimers about things I wish I had known beforehand. 

Given my uncertainty at various points throughout the past two years, I've questioned whether taking the role was the right move… However, if I had known two years ago what I know now, I would have felt a lot more confident in my decision!^[2]

Here's an outline of my considerations:

Some good things

• I built a lot of skills
• I made a lot of connections
• (Perhaps aided by the other benefits) I got access to more opportunities
• (Definitely aided by the other benefits) I built up my confidence quite a bit

Some mixed things

• I felt my compensation was fair, but that might be specific to me
• Personal career planning was complicated, but that helped me design a new path for myself
• Working at a small (EA) organization has had some pretty straightforward pros and cons
• Diving deep into EA has been stressful at times, but I now feel better because of it

I also left a lot out! Feel free to reach out and/or add (anonymous) comments if you have any thoughts and/or questions (though I imagine I may only sometimes be able to answer/help with some things).

Context

CBG program participation

According to CEA's website, the Community Building Grants (CBG) program aims to build flourishing communities of individuals who work to maximize their impact using critical reasoning and evidence. 

I've benefited from the following kinds of support from the program: 

• Personal grant funding (which constituted my salary)
• Network with fellow CBG community builders
  • Including in-person retreats and online community
• 1-on-1 support from the program's manager
  • I did not leverage this support much, but I received significant support from the first two points mentioned.^[3]

One point to clarify: the Community Building Grants program is one way to fund EA community-building work. One could also do EA community building through various other models.

EA NYC context

EA NYC started as a small meetup group in 2013. Since then, it has grown into a community of hundreds of people.

Effective Altruism NYC has received support from the CBG program for staff salaries since 2020. I was the fourth full-time NYC community builder to receive funding through the program. Before that, the organization was volunteer-run.

I took on EA NYC's Community Coordinator role in July of 2022. At the time, EA NYC had 2.2 Full-Time Equivalent (FTE) employees (including myself), and the organization was planning on hiring more full-time staff to expand its programs and manage a potential coworking office. 

Following some changes in funding flows, EA NYC's plans to hire additional staff and open an office became less feasible than initially imagined. Since then, EA NYC has not hired additional staff or opened an office.

That said, EA NYC has also seen a lot of positive activity recently, including the very first EAGxNYC conference in 2023! I encourage you to get involved and/or plan a trip if you'd like to connect with caring and thoughtful people in NYC.

My reflections

The good

Transferable skills

I learned a lot as I helped run a small organization. Part of this came from simply doing the job, and part of my learning came from intentionally using flexible time to invest in professional development.

At first, I was reluctant to invest too much time in professional development. I narrowly focused on trying things like "running successful events" (even though I didn't have much experience doing so). Eventually, I realized I would do better to focus instead on "learning how to run successful events." Therefore, besides trying to do the job, I've also read books and enrolled in courses or fellowships to help me work more efficiently.

While this kind of learning is common in many roles, it felt significant for me because there was so much flexibility on how I could spend my time and so much uncertainty about how I should spend it. In hindsight, learning to work more productively and thoughtfully was probably best for myself, EA NYC, and my future career.

Connections

Since part of my job was essentially serving as a node within a network, I wound up wildly accelerating how many people I met / worked with.^[5]

I've been fortunate to build a robust network in this role. Through the CBG program itself, I've connected with fantastic community builders from all around the world. Through conferences, I've connected with experts across a wide range of domains (and I suspect being an EA community builder from a significant city has helped me network more quickly than other conference attendees). And through local organizing, I've worked with some incredible organizational/thought leaders, some of whom I've gotten to have more substantial conversations with.

Of course, there are many ways to expand one's network. But I suspect that being in this role was uniquely great for building my connections' quantity, relevance, and strength.

Access

Although this felt somewhat unfair to me initially, doing EA NYC community building through the CBG program did help me gain some access privileges.^[6]

This benefit primarily cashes out through conferences. For a dramatic example, I could share how I was rejected from the EAG London 2022 conference (before I started work) and later accepted to the EAG San Francisco 2022 conference (right after I started work). Both admissions decisions probably made sense, but I'm not confident I would have been accepted to EAG San Francisco if I hadn't worked as an EA NYC community builder.

Similarly, this work has given me more opportunities than I expected. While it's hard to identify opportunities I wouldn't have heard of otherwise, I suspect the following invitations were related to my having worked in this position (relative to what I would have been doing otherwise):

• Being invited to apply to jobs/programs/opportunities
  • Most didn't work out, but the application processes were surprisingly helpful.
• Being invited to host meetups / give introductory talks at EAG(x) conferences
  • I did end up doing this.
• Getting approved for events and other opportunities
  • E.g., EAG's, EAGxLatAm (<3), career coaching, etc.

Confidence

Altogether, working through the CBG program (and reaping the benefits mentioned above) helped me find a place in the EA community that I didn't feel previously. While I might be a bit unique on this front, I imagine others could feel similarly.

One specific thing I am immensely grateful for was my colleague's consistent support (especially despite my active efforts to convince her that I was, in fact, an imposter). I imagine community building for other groups would have provided some support (i.e., from kind-hearted board members or colleagues). Still, I was lucky to be paired with someone so compassionate in that respect.

Otherwise, I can't speak highly enough about the other city and national group organizers who received funding/support through the program. Although most lived in different countries (and often a different hemisphere), they were/are my respected colleagues. These are kind, caring, and thoughtful people, and I was fortunate to learn from their (often more senior) experiences. I had regular calls with some of them and benefited from their peer support/mentorship.

Lastly, I gained some confidence by engaging more seriously with effective altruism. While working at an organization with "Effective Altruism" in its name, I was even more motivated to think carefully about things like cost-effectiveness and "impact." By engaging critically with such ideas (not to mention an inspiring network of people), I started feeling better equipped to work on my interests.

The mixed

Compensation

I felt my Community Building Grant funding was fair. Of course, this is personal and subjective, and many factors could change how someone feels about their funding.

Subjectivity

For reference, I'm relatively early in my career, have little formal training, and don't have significant ongoing financial commitments (aside from trying to survive in NYC). I've also compared my job to similar nonprofit roles in my location and counted myself lucky on that front.^[7]

One downside I've felt is a sense of below-average job security. At my previous job, where I worked at a large corporation with quarterly check-ins, I felt relative stability as long as I kept getting decent performance reviews. For better or worse, I didn't quite have that luxury through my funding structure at EA NYC. 

Due to the limited funding landscape in EA (and, more specifically, that for EA NYC), my salary depended on a narrow funding supply. Following the FTX collapse, I was a bit more worried than I was previously; I saved my donations for a bit, "just in case," until I realized the risk was less significant than I feared. In hindsight, considering this risk beforehand would have helped me greatly. (Otherwise, I could have also more proactively reduced my concerns.)

Location considerations

Probably because the rent is too damn high in New York City, I pay much more in rent than many of my colleagues in major cities around the world (even though I have below-median living costs in NYC). Fortunately, the CBG program systematically adjusts salary grants based on location. Overall, I've been glad I could pay my bills and live at comfortable standards.

Unfortunately, another location consideration could be one's country. Healthcare in the US is a bit ridiculous compared to many other CBG-funded countries, so not having employer healthcare has been an added pain.^[8] It is still possible for organizations (such as EA NYC) to set up benefits with their organizational budget. However, this would trade off against other ways those organizations could spend their funding. In the end, paying for my own benefits has basically just added a line item to my personal budget; (as I just mentioned) the bottom line has been fine for me despite this.

Organization structure

Some community-building organizations formally employ the CBG recipient. In the US, this could help the employees with taxes so that the individuals have some of their compensation withheld and can file a "normal" employee tax return at the end of the year. Since EA NYC didn't do this, I had to file an independent contractor tax return and pay my entire tax burden on tax day. This was only very mildly annoying for me. Still, others might find this more annoying (especially for people with more complicated tax statuses in the US). 

On the other hand, I was also relatively happy with the situation because A. it didn't cost anything extra (i.e., we didn't pay any service fees to get a Professional Employer Organization) and B. I got to make interest on my total income as soon as I received it! Since I usually wind up owing taxes to the government either way, it was actually kind of nice to only pay taxes in April (as opposed to losing taxes on every paycheck and then also paying taxes in April).^[9]

Career paths

Downsides

This was a fairly weird position without a clear next step. 

I left my previous job partially because I felt like I had reached the top of my promotion hierarchy; the next jump (to management) was challenging (though I had tried). 

In some ways, this might have been both better and worse at EA NYC. On the one hand, there were many "roles" to explore because it was a small nonprofit with lots of flexibility. On the other hand, there were only two full-time employees, so meaningful career growth felt a bit capped for me.

Alternatively, roles occasionally open up at the Centre for Effective Altruism. Some of these roles seemed (to me) like logical next steps for community builders (especially if I imagine a "normal workplace structure"). This jump from CBG funding to a CEA position is possible (in fact, this is what I am now doing); I just think the odds of this kind of "promotion" are less in people's favor than they would be at a typical workplace.^[10]

Overall, career opportunities can be circumstantial through the program. Prospects for more responsibility do open up, but whether that will happen in three months or three years may be hard to say. Fortunately, this doesn't need to be a big deal if one can plan for it. I think the program can be a great career step for those who are intentional about making exit strategies.

Upsides

This was a fairly weird position without a clear next step. 

Because this is a weird position, I felt particularly strongly incentivized to figure out my next career steps. I'm grateful for this in hindsight; I've made progress on making a career plan and strengthened this life-planning skill that will help me throughout my career (and hopefully help others insofar as I ever help people think about their careers). I'm grateful for all the peers, mentors, organizations, and programs that helped me deep dive into my career planning over the past year. I also appreciate EA NYC for being so supportive of my career development!

Also, small organizations offer a lot of flexibility, and community builders can likely shift their responsibilities relatively quickly—often for mutual benefit! I used this flexibility to think about things like project management, leadership, and strategy, though those weren't necessarily core parts of my job. Moreover, since EA community-building organizations often deal with career planning, some of my work and relevant professional development sometimes helped me in a personal capacity!

Lastly, I think community builders' next career steps after receiving funding from the CBG program are often pretty good (though I am biased toward remembering extraordinary outcomes). Off the top of my head, I've known/heard of people who go on to found effective nonprofits, found for-profits (aimed at benefiting society and/or raising money to donate), found policy organizations, continue to work at CEA, go on to work in US government, go on to work at think tanks, and more.

Work dynamics and balance

As a local EA community builder, I worked for a small startup-like organization with ~2.2 FTE employees. This had many unique dynamics that I hadn't fully considered about the job. I'll go through some pros and cons quickly:

• There's a ton of flexibility for what I could be doing. 
  • Sometimes, this was great and fun. 
  • Other times, it was a bit overwhelming, and I had to prioritize aggressively.
• There's unlimited PTO! 
  • There's also unlimited time I could be working…^[11]
• There aren't many cooks in the kitchen. 
  • Sometimes, it was nice to work independently. 
  • Other times, I wish I had more than six local colleagues.^[12]
• There are no rules! ^[13]
  • Sometimes, it was nice not to have red tape and to feel like I got to build systems from scratch.
  • Other times, I would have appreciated more straightforward guidance or systems already in place.
• "Community" became part of my job.
  • This was great - very fun in many ways.
  • This also (rightfully) gave me a greater sense of responsibility to be a "professional community builder" in various social contexts.

Well-being

In general, many of the points I've mentioned in this post are related intuitively to my well-being, as one might expect (i.e., being unsure about my career path was a little stressful, but making lots of connections was great). 

Otherwise, being at the center of EA has been a bit of a mixed bag for me. EA has been intense. There are some real benefits to being a connector within this space but also some downsides.

Downsides

Being a professional EA community builder has been especially stressful for me during a few times when there were more public EA concerns. For example, within a few months of my start date, FTX collapsed, news broke about sexual harassment in EA, people raised concerns about racist associations in EA, and anti-EA articles followed in the media. To top that off, occasionally, people would come to events and joke about how my job was helping to run a cult. These were not fun times.

To be fair, I think this is just one of the more challenging parts of community builders' jobs; they are de facto representatives of Effective Altruism. People may ask them some tough questions. But at the end of the day, I think I could have realized sooner that I can only do so much and that some things won't improve overnight. 

Also, there was some general degree to which thinking about effective altruism stressed me, and being at the center of everything made me feel more stressed. In particular, I took a closer look at the most significant cause areas and felt disheartened about how far (or not) we have come on some issues. Of course, this doesn't necessarily relate to being a community builder, and feeling discouraged is common. However, working as a community builder inspired me to learn more about global issues, and this didn't always feel immediately beneficial.

Ultimately, this was fine, if not better, in the long run. After re-reading Nate Soares' Replacing Guilt (a few times), I eventually got more used to accepting limitations on progress and realizing that the world is awful, the world is much better, and the world can be much better. While I've sometimes felt like "there's always more impact potential,"^[15] I've gotten better at acknowledging that I can only do what I can.

Upsides

After working here, I feel more resilient. It's hard to draw a causal connection, but the challenges mentioned above seem related!^[16]

I've felt better about keeping my head down so I can work on problems (including awful global issues). I can more clearly separate my emotional reaction to terrible problems from my intellectual pursuit of working on those problems. Of course, I can only separate these things so much, and this might not be as easy for others, but I think this has helped me to be more productive in impacting the stuff I care about (which was the point of caring in the first place as far as I'm concerned).

I believe I can also think about positive impact in a bit more nuance now. Whereas before, I probably grouped a lot of things together as "good," I think recent challenges have made me realize that EA is just an abstract collection of things; a lot of good stuff can come out of the Effective Altruism movement, but so can a lot of bad stuff. Ideally, we aim for more favorable outcomes. Still, I've become more okay with accepting that issues are relatively inevitable and that we can only try our best to prevent/mitigate them.^[17]

Lastly, I've gained some general confidence about how I want to live my life around/outside of effective altruism. After much consideration, I recently made my life's most thorough career plan (primarily aided by much of the support I've mentioned above). While I know things won't go as planned, I feel better having chosen a clearer vision for my future. I'm grateful that my experience at EA NYC inspired me to reflect!

Conclusion

I think the CBG program is pretty cool, and working at EA NYC has been a great life experience for me.

I started drafting this post partially because I wanted to share more about this career path and what I wish I had known before I started working here. I hope this might be relevant to others interested in this work. I'm especially eager to chat with those interested in EA NYC's Executive Director position, so feel free to message me about that.

Thanks for reading!

Disclaimers

I might have been unusually biased when writing this post. While part of my goal was to share some (ideally helpful) reflections on my time working at EA NYC and participating in the CBG program, I also had some conflicting motivations:

• As not-so-subtly mentioned, I'm currently helping EA NYC hire an Executive Director. I want candidates to be enthusiastic about applying!
  • I might be biased to sugarcoat my experience a little.
• I've just accepted a position at the Centre for Effective Altruism, where I will work on their Community Building Grants program team (the same one that previously funded my position). So, I want to be especially mindful of my words.
  • I want the program to succeed, so I'm probably biased to speak well rather than ill of it.^[18]

That said, I've tried to be honest about my experience when writing this post.^[19] I just thought you should know about the ways in which I might be biased.

1. ^{^}

   However, this post doesn't describe my day-to-day work. There are many different ways to do community-building work. This post is more like a review of a specific structure (e.g., a congressional staffer) than a review of a job itself (e.g., a Legislative Correspondent).

2. ^{^}

   Though, there's always room for uncertainty! I've been pretty fortunate lately, so you may not want to count my experience as a representative sample.

3. ^{^}

   I'm primarily listing personal benefits here. The program also offered operational support.

4. ^{^}

   People often attribute variations of this phrase to Mike Tyson.

5. ^{^}

   For reference, I had fewer than 100 LinkedIn connections before working at EA NYC. Now, I have over 600.

6. ^{^}

   In hindsight, the specific access I've gained has seemed reasonable on its own merits. I think being an EA NYC community builder sometimes gave me access to things I needed to do my job, and other times simply allowed me to build relevant experience and legitimacy.

7. ^{^}

   However, there are various ways to do community building, and I might have been working on the lighter end of the responsibility spectrum. Other community builders might do more complex work, so getting paid similar amounts could be frustrating.

8. ^{^}

   No pun intended(?)

9. ^{^}

   Then again, I realize this might just be a rationalization to make me feel better…

10. ^{^}

    Assuming most organizations have no more than ten direct reports to a manager, I think many roles do not face that much internal competition. However, through the CBG program, there are ~thirty other community builders funded through the same program who might consider applying to relevant roles. This is in addition to other EA community builders and employees at CEA itself (not to mention external applicants), so this direct vertical pathway seems pretty far from guaranteed by definition.

11. ^{^}

    I'm exaggerating to convey ideas concisely. Also, EA NYC has, in fact, tried to implement mandatory PTO.

12. ^{^}

    In reality, I only had one full-time colleague, but even including part-time employees and board members, it was a small crew! 

    As mentioned, I have considered the other CBG recipients to be my colleagues in many respects. Still, my working relationship with them differed from my working relationship with colleagues from EA NYC specifically.

13. ^{^}

    Also exaggerating/joking.

14. ^{^}

    I can't find the original source of that image, but this post said it was from Matthew Barnett and Jackson Wagner in the EA Dank Memes Facebook Group.

15. ^{^}

    This post illustrates part of what I mean in part D, but the post itself is not for the faint of heart!

16. ^{^}

    Well, I also considered my life over this two-year period, and I don't think things would have passively improved if it wasn't for multiple factors.

17. ^{^}

    To be clear, I'm not saying we should throw our hands up and give up. But at the end of the day, I need to rest sometimes, and I will need a full night's sleep even if (or perhaps especially if) things are imperfect.

18. ^{^}

    Though, I'm not sure if there's an obvious way a reader can support the program at the moment. Applications for new Community Building Grants are currently closed, and there are only limited CBG-supported organizations hiring at any given time.

19. ^{^}

    For what it's worth, I also wrote most of the first draft before I knew I would be hiring for EA NYC or that I would be leaving (let alone leaving to work on the CBG team).