Contact people for the EA community

By Julia_Wise🔸, Catherine Low🔸, Charlotte Darnell @ 2024-09-06T17:15 (+61)

This post is an update of an older post originally from 2018. If you’re familiar with our older policies, we suggest looking at our new confidentiality policy before bringing us sensitive information. This post reflects one part of the team's broader work.

We (Julia Wise, Catherine Low, and Charlotte Darnell) are the community liaisons at the Community Health and Special Projects team at the Centre for Effective Altruism. If you've encountered a problem in the community, we'd like to help! 

Ways to contact us

• The best way to reach all of us is the community health contact form (can be anonymous)
• Julia: julia.wise@centreforeffectivealtruism.org or anonymous form
• Catherine: catherine@centreforeffectivealtruism.org or anonymous form
• Charlotte: charlotte.darnell@effectivealtruism.org or anonymous form 

How we might be able to help

Here are some circumstances in which you might contact us:

• To discuss something you experienced in the EA community that made you uncomfortable
• To get advice about a difficult community or interpersonal problem you (or your project/group/organization) is facing
• To let us know if you believe a person or organization in EA has engaged in harmful behavior (harassment, mean behavior, dishonesty, etc)

Examples of work we’ve done since the team started in 2015:

• Advising organizers of EA groups and online spaces on handling problems or conflicts
• Supporting community members trying to get help for another community member who’s having a mental health crisis
• Talking to people about problems their behavior has caused and what we think they should do differently
• Working with the CEA events team to restrict people from events based on past serious problem behavior

Please have a low bar for getting in touch! Even if we don't have time for an in-depth discussion with you, any information you can give us is useful data that could help us to spot patterns of problems in the community.

If you contact us, here’s what might happen next

These are common responses, rather than a complete list or what will definitely happen.

• If you have questions about confidentiality or what kinds of steps we might take, we’ll aim to answer those first.
• If you send us information but don’t have any requests, we might just acknowledge your message, or we might follow up with questions.
• We’ll listen to the concern you want to share. It’s ok if your thoughts are unstructured or if you’re not sure what should happen next!
• We might help you brainstorm ways you or your group can manage the problem.
• We might share considerations that might be important for your decision-making, like
  • Different perspectives on the concern
  • Possible positive and negative consequences of different actions
  • How similar concerns have played out in the past in our experience
• We’ll talk through possible steps, like
  • Us talking to the person who caused the problem about changes we think they should make
  • You or us informing others, like a local group organizer, about the problem
  • Steps CEA might take in its own programs, like not admitting someone to our conferences
  • Referring you to other institutions that could provide help, like HR departments, legal resources, or law enforcement
• Sometimes after discussing the situation, people decide they don’t want any steps taken now, but might want steps if more problems arise.
• We’ll discuss any other steps we need to take (e.g. if we think someone is at serious risk, as discussed below in the confidentiality section).

Confidentiality

We know people who bring us sensitive situations care a lot about what happens with the information. If you get in touch, please tell us what level of confidentiality you want. We might ask your permission to share information so that we or others can take steps to address or prevent a problem, but we’ll respect your wishes if you don’t want that (unless we’re required to share something, as below). 

There are some cases where we’d need to share some information about a situation, like if we learn about some kinds of crimes, or misconduct by staff at our parent organization. We encourage you to ask us any questions you have about our limits to confidentiality before you share sensitive information with us. Our full confidentiality policy is here.

If you want your message not to reach a particular member of the community health team, please send it to a different team member and we can handle it without including that person. (For example, if you prefer not to involve one of our staff because they’re friends with someone involved.) You can see more about our conflict of interest policy here.

What kinds of situations can we help with?

Please feel free to send us small data points, even if you’re not sure they’re worth taking action on. We’re happy to gather information and prioritize situations based on our capacity. Some fictionalized examples based on real situations:

A situation that we acted on

Marc had a meeting with Christopher at an EA conference. He felt Christopher’s criticism of his career choice was needlessly harsh, and Marc came away from the meeting feeling pretty upset. Afterwards, Marc contacted us about this. Marc didn’t want to talk directly with Christopher about the conversation, but was ok with us passing on feedback to Christopher. One of our team members emailed Christopher asking him to use more care in giving criticism. Christopher said he hadn’t meant to be so discouraging, and asked us to pass on an apology to Marc.

• Note that CEA’s conferences and many other EA events have a community contact person on-site, who can also help with this kind of thing during an event.

A situation that we didn’t act on, but were glad to receive 

Aisha contacted us saying she’d been at an EA-related program with James, and found some of his comments came off as sexist. She thought this was likely “clueless” rather than deliberately offensive on his part. She did not want any steps taken unless there were further complaints. As we never heard more about James, we didn’t do anything in response.

A situation where we provided advice, but didn’t take any actions ourselves

The organizer of a cause-specific group told us that a new community member was planning on reaching out to politicians to advocate for policies. The organizer was worried that this person didn’t have the knowledge or skills to do this well yet. We discussed ideas on how to communicate with the community member about the risks, and ways to help them get involved in lower-stakes projects and upskilling opportunities. 

Situations that probably don’t make sense to bring us

Two coworkers had a disagreement that was able to be handled internally within their organization.

An attendee at an EA group regularly dominates the conversation in a way that bothers other attendees. The group organizer would be a good first point of contact here. But we’re happy to advise if the organizer wants help planning how to give feedback, if feedback doesn’t improve the situation, or if the attendee reacts very poorly to the feedback.  

Things that make us more interested to get information

• If the person or organization you’re concerned about is active in multiple spaces in EA or related fields.
• Repeated problems, especially if the problems continue after the person has been given feedback.
• If you think the problem is causing community members to be less active in EA.
• If you think the problem could make it harder for other people in the community to do their work in the future (actions that “poison the well” for future collaborations).
• We’re especially interested in advising people who might have to deal with similar situations in the future, like community builders or office managers.

Other people or services you could contact

There are a lot of different models, such as the legal system, restorative justice, ombudsperson offices, and informal whisper networks. They each have different strengths and weaknesses.

Sometimes we’ll be a good fit for what you need, but sometimes another institution or model will be a better fit.

• Your local EA group organizer if the problem you are having is with another member of the group
• Event organizers or event contact people, if the problem relates to an event you are attending
• A Human Resources staff member if the problem relates to a workplace
• If you need mental health care, we recommend you seek help from mental health experts. Mental Health Navigator provides some resources and guidance for accessing mental health care. We’re sometimes able to help advise when someone in the community is having a mental health crisis.
• If you’ve been a victim of a crime, consider whether it makes sense to report the crime to the relevant authorities in your region. You might find some of the services listed here useful:
  • UK
  • US

Respect and compassion

We know that people who raise problems in other settings have sometimes been treated disrespectfully and are worried about having their character discredited or not being taken seriously. It’s especially important to us to treat you with dignity, whatever reason you come to us for.

Even if we disagree with you about what steps make sense for us to take, we commit to treating you with respect and compassion.

About us

Julia Wise

Julia has been organizing EA events in Boston since 2011. Before joining CEA, Julia was a social worker focused on mental health, with experience in inpatient psychiatric care, mental health services for prisoners, and domestic violence services. (Note that she’s not functioning as a social worker in her EA work.) She served on the board of GiveWell from 2015-2024 and was president of Giving What We Can from 2017-2020. She studied social work and sociology.

Catherine Low

Alongside her work at CEA, Catherine is a board member of Magnify Mentoring and Effective Altruism New Zealand. Before joining CEA, Catherine managed the Students for High-Impact Charity program and taught science, physics, and ethics at the high school level. She has been heavily involved in EA community building in New Zealand and Australia since 2015. Catherine holds a PhD in physics from the University of Melbourne. 

Charlotte Darnell

Charlotte has worked on CEA’s events team and on community building projects such as EAGxOxford 2022, UK high school outreach, and organizing her university group. She studied history and modern languages at the University of Exeter.

Mistakes and concerns

You can read about some of our past mistakes on the CEA mistakes page.

The manager of the community health team is Nicole Ross; you can contact her if you have a concern about our work. If the concern involves Nicole, you could contact Zach Robinson as the head of CEA, or our parent organization, EV.