CEA’s Community Events Programme: Update and Call for Applications

By OllieBase @ 2022-07-13T15:31 (+54)

TL;DR: CEA’s Events team funds and supports community members who want to run events. Apply to run an event here!

The Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) Events team now has 3 programmes:

• EA Global — organising large conferences for those significantly involved in EA.
• Retreats — organising retreats for community leaders and other select retreats.
• Community Events — funding and supporting events run by community members, such as EAGx conferences.

CEA has supported EAGx conferences since 2016. EAGx events primarily aim to engage and connect community members – both highly-engaged and those just starting to explore EA – in a certain region. EA Global conferences are usually larger^[1] and aim to help highly-engaged EAs from around the world network and share ideas.

At the start of this year, we expanded the type of events we support beyond EAGx conferences to include other events community members wanted to run. This post is an update on that programme, which is now called Community Events. I, Ollie, run the Community Events Programme^[2] (henceforth, CEP^[3]). 

Goals

The goal of the CEP is to help significantly scale up the number of high-quality, EA-aligned events. Secondarily, by supporting different types of events run by community members around the world, we hope to learn more about how events can help people have more impact and feed these lessons into our own work on EA Global and retreats. We’re currently early on in our testing phase, but expect to learn more over the course of the year. 

To support events at scale, we provide community members with flexible funding, high-level advice and, where appropriate, free access to the resources we use for our own events (e.g. Zoho, which supports our application systems, and Swapcard, our event networking app). We also pay organisers for their time working on the event. The amount of advice we offer varies depending on the size of the event and the experience of the organisers - in many cases (e.g. small retreats), we act more like a grantmaker than an advisor.

Community Events in 2022 so far

10 community events supported by CEA have taken place in 7 different countries so far this year:

• EAGxOxford (Oxford, UK)
• EAGxBoston (Boston, MA, US)
• EAGxPrague (Prague, Czech Republic)
• EAGxAustralia (Canberra, Australia)
• EA South Germany Retreat (Tubingen, Germany)
• EA Midwest "Next Steps" Retreat (Lake Geneva, WI, US)
• Strategic Philanthropy and Altruism Conference (Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates)
• Open Workshop on Global Priorities Research (Oxford, UK)
• EAecon retreat (Oxford, UK)
• Australia and New Zealand Group Leaders Retreat (Goulburn, Australia)

The likelihood to recommend scores for these events were consistently high (all over 8/10). We also have some evidence that high-impact connections were made at these events. For example:

• One EAGxOxford attendee reported that they made connections which helped them shape their next steps in upskilling in AI Safety. They applied for the SERI Fellowship and the ML Safety Scholars program, and were accepted into both. They think it’s 10% likely they would’ve applied to SERI and 60% likely they would’ve applied for the ML program if they didn’t attend EAGxOxford and EAG London.
• One EAGxBoston attendee reported that the contacts they made at the conference (who they probably would not have met otherwise) were worth ~$5 million in donations to the organisation they worked for (and we think that this claim is credible, based on this person’s position).
• One EAGxPrague attendee was offered and accepted a job with unexpectedly high fit at the conference.

These examples are illustrative of the kind of impact EA events can have on community members, though please note that they represent some of the best case stories we found so aren’t representative of a typical conference experience.

Upcoming Community Events 

The following community events are scheduled for the second half of the year and beyond:

EAGx

• EAGxSingapore (2 - 3 September)
• EAGxBerlin (16 - 18 September)
• EAGxVirtual (21 - 23 October)
• EAGxRotterdam (4 - 6 November)
• EAGxBerkeley (2 - 4 December, provisional)
• EAGxLatinAmerica (7 - 8 January 2023)
• EAGxIndia (13 - 15 January 2023, provisional)
• EAGxNordics (21 - 23 April 2023)

Other

• EA Workplace/Professional Group Organizers Retreat
• African movement builders summit
• An AI Governance Student Conference
• EA University of Queensland Retreat
• French X-Risk and Safe Technologies Summit (FERSTS)
• Longtermist Organisers Summit (Berkeley)
• EA Norway national conference
• NESCAC colleges group leaders retreat
• 3 Retreats for EA for Christians (West Coast, East Coast and London)
• Community Builders in Asia retreat

Apply to run a community event

If you’re interested in running a community event, including an EAGx conference, you can apply here. You can read more about what we offer and why you should apply in a previous post. We’re particularly excited to see applications for:

• Events for community members focused on a specific EA cause area.
• Events outside of existing EA hubs or which serve underrepresented communities.
• Events for sub-communities, such as EA for Christians.

Apply to join the team

We will be hiring staff to help run the CEP at the Centre for Effective Altruism later in the year. If you’re interested in working with me (Ollie) in running this programme, you can express interest here.
 

1. ^{^}

   Though not always - EAGxOxford 2022 and EAGxBoston 2022 were bigger than EAG London 2019.

2. ^{^}

   Not ‘Program’ because I’m British and it’s clearly a more attractive word with the ‘me’ at the end.

3. ^{^}

   CE is taken by Charity Entrepreneurship.