A Summary of Profession-Based Community Building

By Sean Lawrence, SarahPomeranz @ 2022-12-20T22:08 (+67)

TLDR: there are now a notable number of profession-based community building organisations in EA and below you will find the key activities, team structure, and ways to get involved for several of the most active organisations.

Summary

There has been a significant increase in the number of organisations catering to specific professions – profession-specific organisations (PSOs) – over the past 12-24 months and we want to update the community on who some of these organisations are and what they seek to provide for their members and the broader EA community.

Please note that this list is not fully comprehensive. It should be treated as a partial snapshot of some of the organisations that exist in this space and a window into some of the ways in which they are doing community building in a profession-specific context. If your profession isn’t listed on this post then you may find an organisation that does cater for it on High Impact Professional’s Professional Groups Directory, which is a more comprehensive resource for finding professional groups (see their EA forum post). If you run a PSO that isn’t on the High Impact Professionals’ Workplace and Professional Groups Directory, please email Devon or book a call with him. Additionally, High Impact Professionals can help nascent PSOs through strategic support, reviewing grant proposals, making introductions, and more so don’t hesitate to get in touch!

If you run a PSO and would like to be added to this post, please copy and fill out this template and send it to Sean.

The What and Why of Profession-Specific Organisations

PSOs focus their organisational mission and scope on supporting a specific profession, or group of related professions, with tailored content and programming to help members of that field learn more about EA and how they can contribute to the shared project of doing the most good in the world. Additionally, PSOs provide a community of like-minded professionals to help increase network effects amongst members, limit value-drift and make the EA space more welcoming to professionals overall.

Goals

We think this post could be valuable to:

  1. Increase the awareness of existing PSOs and their activities. Recent EAGs have given some of us the impression that members of the EA community are unaware that there are active community building efforts targeting professionals and what each group's target focus and mechanisms of engagement are.
  2. Summarise the methods for engagement with professionals. This post may help to motivate nascent professional-specific groups, highlight commonalities in PSO’s approaches so organisers can collaborate, and/or highlight gaps in approaches that could be filled.
  3. Help grow the membership of organisations. 
  4. Inspire people to start groups for neglected professions. By seeing that there are already a lot of professional groups around, we hope that others see this as a viable way to have an impact in their profession. 

List of Profession-Specific Organisations

(Please note that this list is not fully comprehensive)
Last updated: 21st December 2022

EA Architects and Planners

What do we do? 

We seek ways in which architects, urban designers, and planners can use their unique skills to get involved in EA causes and to have a greater positive impact. We are NOT focused on finding high-impact work within architecture and planning, but rather, explore a wide range of opportunities where architectural or design thinking may lead to more effective ways of doing good. 

As we research ways in which this might be achieved, we are updating the Career Options for EA Architects and Planners database to help others find inspiration. 

Our aim is to a) create an environment that supports ‘EA’ architects, planners, and people interested in the built environment and b) maintain a global network of contacts that EAs seeking relevant services, advice, and help can benefit from. 

Here and here are articles published on the topic on the EA Forum.

Methods of engagement with professionals.

After the launch, we are hoping to offer services such as:

About the team. 

We are hoping to launch and start actively recruiting and growing the community soon. 

Currently, the main point of contact is Tereza, who started exploring the topic of becoming an ‘EA Architect’ in early 2022. Tereza (LinkedIn) is an architecture master’s student at Oxford Brookes with an undergraduate degree from University of Cambridge who has worked in urban design for the past 3 years. Since early 2022, she has explored how to become an ‘EA Architect’ and worked on SHELTERs, EA hubs, and explored ways to get involved in charter cities.

Recently, Britney Budiman (LinkedIn) joined Tereza to help launch EA Architects and Planners. Britney graduated summa cum laude from San Diego State University with a B.A. in Urban Studies and has prior experience researching innovative housing solutions in California and Brazil.

We have a growing database of architects and planners eager to join our efforts after the launch.

Call to action.

Fill in this short form to express interest if you a) want to get involved in setting up and working on EA Architects and Planners, b) are a professional wanting to offer your services through the group, or c) you need help with anything related to the built environment. 

More links.

EA Software Engineers

What do we do? 

Networking and career building for EA-aligned software engineers.

Methods of engagement with professionals.  

About the team.  

Nicole Janeway Bills, Yonatan Cale, David Nash, and others.  Email:  easoftwareengineers@gmail.com

Call to action.  

Sign up for the mailing list for a monthly debrief of EA software engineering content.

Effective Altruism Consulting Network 

What do we do? 

The Effective Altruism Consulting Network (EACN) is a global community of over 500 prospective, current, and former consultants who use evidence and reason to maximise the social impact of their careers. We strive to achieve our mission through: 

Methods of engagement with professionals. 

About the team. 

Call to action. 

More links. 

Effective Altruism Tech Network (EATN)

What do we do? 

EATN connects EA’s at large tech companies. Primarily, we help support other group organizers do their job better at their respective tech companies (e.g. firm up their theories of change, make newsletters more cost effective, share ideas).

Methods of engagement with professionals.

Mainly through the other EA group organisers to the EA’s at specific companies (e.g. through Noah Starbuck to Amazon).

A couple tech-specific things

About the team.

Call to action.

Email John Yan (jyan115@gmail.com) if you’d like a link. Or message Yanjo on the EA Forum.

High Impact Engineers 

What do we do? 

We aim to increase the quantity of impactful work done by physical engineers across the globe.

Methods of engagement with professionals.

 We’re still in the planning and evaluation phase for our larger projects. We have a website with resources tailored to engineers, run a Slack group for engineers, and are attending most EAG(x)s to connect with engineers in the EA community and run meetups.

About the team. 

Our team is internationally dispersed:

Call to action. 

You should contact us or request a 1-1 with us if:

More links.

High Impact Medicine 

What do we do?

High Impact Medicine (Hi-Med) is a non-profit organisation that builds a global community of impact-driven medical students and doctors empowering each other to maximise the good done with their careers.

Methods of engagement with professionals. 

About the team. 

We’re an international team of ambitious medical students and doctors: Akhil Bansal and Abe Tolley co-founded Hi-Med in autumn 2021, they’re now joined on the advisory board by Hunter Lau (who founded EA medicine that joined Hi-Med) and Lucia Coulter (Co-founder of LEEP). Marie Firgau is our executive director, part of the core team are also Erik Jentzen, Holly Kristensen, and others. 

Call to action.

Fill in our get involved form to receive our monthly newsletter, have a look at our current opportunities, and apply for an in-depth conversation.

More links.

High-Impact Psychology (HIPsy)

What do we do? 

HIPsy aims to help people engaged with psychology or mental health to maximise their impact. Our goal is to increase the likelihood of high-impact decisions, make collaboration and information processes more effective, and reduce the risk of value drift for people engaged in psychology or mental health. We will provide access to up-to-date high-quality information, advice, and networking opportunities to foster effective action, i.e., knowledge transfer, exchange, and collaboration, enabling high-speed and high-impact work in psychology-related areas. 

Methods of engagement with professionals.

We will provide relevant resources that are easy to access and use, such as:

We will facilitate the sharing of psychological know-how to support work in EA. This may include resources for:

About the team.

Dr. Inga Grossmann was appointed as the youngest professor to date at the HMKW in Berlin, a university of applied science. Having worked in academia and business for 10 years, she has broad and up-to-date knowledge of research, the industry, and the practice related to all sorts of psychological interventions. She managed a variety of research and development projects, small teams in companies and larger groups of students, and built networks of experts for companies. Currently, Inga assists and consults existing EA mental health and meta projects, e.g., Overcome, the Mental Health Navigator, and the Wellbeing Program. 

Supporters:

Call to action.

Please contact us here if you'd like to collaborate, share ideas, provide funding, or contribute your skills, such as: online content creation, running mentorship programs, hosting events, web-dev, design, community-building, operations, running surveys, research, and cost-effectiveness analyses.

You can also pre-sign-up to tell us which resources would be most valuable to you. We aim to provide the most wanted and promising ones—very likely for free. Please forward these links to anyone who might be interested in benefiting from our initiative:

More links.

Impactful Government Careers

What do we do? 

Impactful Government Careers (IGC) is a network of civil servants helping each other have the biggest social impact they can. We offer coaching, workshops and meetups for UK civil servants who want to plan an impactful career. This is supported by our research into how and where to have impact in government (which we publish).

Methods of engagement with professionals.

About the team. 

Toby is currently on a career break (sabbatical) from the Cabinet Office to coordinate IGC full time. He is supported by a team of volunteer civil servants from across government and board of advisors.

Call to action. 

If you would like to hear more about what we are doing contact Toby (toby@impactfulgovcareers.org) - we are particularly keen to talk to current or ex civil servants.

Anyone can join our mailing list, to get updates on impactful jobs, relevant articles and new ideas about how to have impact in government. 

More links. 

Closing

Starting a PSO has been hard work at times but a lot of fun. It has afforded me (Sean) the opportunity to meet amazing like-minded professionals, have fantastic conversations and do rewarding and engaging work, all the while making a meaningful difference to the EA community. 

If you, or someone you know, are interested in starting a PSO, I would strongly encourage you to reach out to Devon from High Impact Professionals, or anyone else listed on this post, even if you are unsure. The PSO community is incredibly supportive and an absolute joy to be a part of, so don’t hesitate to get in touch.

Finally, if you run a PSO and would like to be added to this post, please copy and fill out this template and send it to Sean.

 

Thank you to everyone who contributed to this post and Devon Fritz for proofreading and feedback.