Three Organizers Walk Into a Liberal Arts College

By Unwobblypanda @ 2025-04-03T23:45 (+73)

Hey EA Forum,

We're the EA group at Middlebury College in Vermont—three organizers (freshman, sophomore, junior) trying to figure out how to make EA stick on a small but ambitious liberal arts campus. We've run into the classic "attendance starts high, then drops off to like, two people and a cricket" scenario with our traditional reading groups and fellowships. Still, we know that Middlebury students have a whole lot of wealth and/or talent, and it’s really important to expose them to EA ideas and organizations and balance out the consistent presence of consulting/finance/etc. pathways.

This year, we decided to shake things up. We invited organizations to campus instead, hoping people might get excited about concrete career paths and inspiring ideas without feeling like it's just another thing on their overflowing reading list. We brought the Good Food Institute (GFI) to campus and had an awesome time meeting a representative who was a lot of fun, engaging, and basically our new best friend. However, turnout was still disappointingly low despite our enthusiastic marketing attempts (and the promise of free snacks!).

We've also been tackling campus dining halls, advocating for a switch to meat-free dining in at least one of our three halls. We recently organized a meatless dinner event to promote the idea, and that went relatively well! Progress-wise, one dining hall has agreed to reduce meat offerings significantly once a week—still far from our goal of making an entire dining hall completely meat-free, but it's something.

On the bright side, our ongoing tabling for Giving What We Can pledges has actually been pretty great—we've got about 80 pledgers now, which feels like a big win considering it's just us and a table. Almost all of those pledgers have agreed to just a 1%  - 10% Trial Pledge, but the hope is that at least a few will now have an on-ramp to further EA exposure and a larger pledge.

Here's where we'd love your thoughts:

We're open to all ideas!

Thanks a ton—really appreciate your wisdom, empathy, or even just pity.

Cheers,

The Middlebury EA Crew

Kevin Kuruc @ 2025-04-04T17:39 (+26)

I have no immediate or useful feedback on this specific question, but just wanted to say that I'll be starting as an economics professor in the Fall at Middlebury. I'd be excited to meet and engage with y'all! If any of your identified bottlenecks are something a faculty member would be able to help with, keep me in mind :) 

Sam Anschell @ 2025-04-04T00:30 (+15)

Woah, huge congratulations on getting 80 pledges! That’s a really incredible achievement - I hope you all feel proud :)

I would guess that established uni groups at big schools don’t get 80 pledges per year; you might consider reaching out to GWWC (community@givingwhatwecan.org) to brainstorm how to make the most of this momentum.

I don’t have experience in student group organizing (not starting an EA group at my college is my biggest regret in life), but I’d recommend looking into whether your campus career center is open to co-hosting events and working with students on applying to high-impact roles.

At the liberal arts school I went to, events hosted by the career center tended to be pretty well-attended. Plus, you can lean on the job boards from 80k, Probably Good, and Animal Advocacy Careers to direct students to real world opportunities.

Another idea is to look into whether you can teach a student forum about EA for college credit! It really lowers the bar for students to commit to weekly meetings/readings if they can substitute it for another class.

And if students in your club are ever interested in talking to someone about entry-level operations or grantmaking work, I’m always excited to call!

NickLaing @ 2025-04-04T09:53 (+5)

This is super encouraging - I'm impressed how you leaned into the areas where liberal arts students might already have a felt need and interest, both empathetic and smart.

1) Finding a meaninful job (apparently a big deal for Gen Z)
2) Diverse food options including vegetarian meals

No suggestions here unfortunately, at 38 I'm not sure what the youth are into ;).

Aidan Alexander @ 2025-04-08T08:16 (+4)

One thing that we at FarmKind have been thinking about is partnering with student groups who are advocating for their schools to improve the animal welfare and climate cost of their dining halls. Student groups are making great headway convincing administrations to move closer to plant-based, but in almost all cases college administrations aren't willing to go all the way yet. In these cases, they could offset the remaining animal welfare and climate cost through donations to effective charities (see here for a write-up, and here for the tool itself). If you're interested in this, we could help you customize the calculations to your university. DM me if you're interested :)

Constance Li @ 2025-04-06T15:33 (+2)

There is a students channel on Hive, which is a community of farmed animal advocates. You could connect there to find various resources and connections. 

One that jumps to mind is the student led Food 4 Thought Innovations. They are having a festival in the Harvard for food transformation change next week. 

Short video explainer