Upcoming changes to the EV US and EV UK leadership teams

By Rob Gledhill @ 2024-02-07T18:33 (+48)

I wanted to provide an update about the leadership teams of Effective Ventures Foundation USA, Inc. and Effective Ventures Foundation (UK). 

On EV UK’s board, Tasha McCauley and Claire Zabel will be stepping down from their trustee roles within the coming weeks. Tasha has served on the EV UK board since 2021 and Claire since 2019, and both originally wanted to step down from these roles approximately a year ago. They decided to stay on to guide EV through a trying time, determine future plans for the organization, and finalize our trustee recruitment efforts. EV UK is extraordinarily grateful for the service that both of them have provided over their tenures, and especially in the months since FTX’s collapse.

To fill their vacancies, Eli Rose from the EV US board will be moving over to the EV UK board, and he will be joined by Johnstuart Winchell before the end of February. Johnstuart is the Founder and Lead of Good Impressions, an organization providing free advertising marketing to effective nonprofits[1]. Before starting Good Impressions, he worked at Google and Boston Consulting Group. To see an overview of all EV UK leadership, please visit this page on our website. 

On the EV US board, Nicole Ross will also be stepping down from her trustee role in the near future. She has served on the EV US board since 2022, and as with Tasha and Claire, originally wanted to step down earlier but has stayed on to help with the organization’s governance until we could find new trustees, pass through some legal challenges, and set a course for EV’s future. EV US is immensely thankful for everything that Nicole has given to the organization and the larger EA community during her term. She will remain at EV US in her capacity as the Head of Community Health at CEA. 

Anna Weldon joined the EV US board on February 1st. Anna is the Director of Internal Operations at Open Philanthropy, and she previously worked as Director of Human Resources at Buffalo Exchange, a US-based recycled clothing retailer. She’s guided workplaces in the areas of manager development, change management, and organizational restructuring. An additional trustee will be joining the EV US board shortly, and we will make an announcement once their appointment has been confirmed. 

Finally, while Zach will be assuming the role of CEO of CEA, he will continue to serve as CEO of EV US. In this capacity, Zach will focus on leading CEA but retain his oversight responsibilities of EV US. I will continue to serve as EV UK CEO, and Zach and I will consult on what is in the best interests of both EV US and EV UK, and I will also be primarily responsible for the EV Ops team. To see an overview of all of EV US leadership, please visit this page on our website.

  1. ^

     Some of Good Impressions’ current clients include projects at EV US and EV UK. While the marketing services that Good Impressions provides are free of charge and therefore this relationship does not meet the bar of a legal Conflict of Interest, Johnstuart will be recused from any decisions that could conflict with his role as a service provider to EV’s projects (e.g. during yearly budget approvals). 

bern @ 2024-02-08T03:24 (+26)

Thank you for keeping us updated, Rob, even before the final trustee has been finalized, and thank you to all of you for your service.

Please feel under no obligation to respond to this, but if you are able to share: From the outside, it looks as if the EVs have really struggled to find new board members and I'm curious what the bottleneck is. Did very few applications meet your criteria? Did you actively reach out to lots of people but they said no? Etc.

I suppose I am not surprised by an apparent lack of interest from suitable candidates—the opportunity costs for such people will be high and frankly it mostly looks like stressful and thankless work. But I'm curious if there's anything the wider community could do to make the search easier next time.

Ulrik Horn @ 2024-02-08T05:26 (+15)

Thanks for everyone's hard work on board assignments - I know they often go by uncompensated.

I could not help but notice that 3 women are stepping down, being replaced by 2 men and one woman. I know it is impossible to draw statistical conclusions from this in terms of gender trends, but still, my precursory understanding is that diversity in leadership, including board seats, help drive diversity "further down". I am thus concerned that the shifting gender balances here might make other DEI work more of an uphill battle. I am also sure you have reflected on this but would be curious if you could share any of your thinking on the topic? I also realize that since board seats are uncompensated, it places undue burdens on women in such positions who might also bear disproportionate caretaking responsibilities at home (one solution could be for board members' employers to see their work on the boards of other orgs ar part of their job - or maybe this is something EA orgs already do).

I do not mean to come across as too critical in this comment but have to make the comment in a bit of a haste so please forgive any lack of nuance I have not included. And I know EA orgs in general are super good at best practices in hiring - I love the way for example RP really tries to prevent biases from affecting their hiring decisions.

lincolnq @ 2024-02-09T15:27 (+27)

(My personal opinion, not EV's:)

EV is winding down and being on this board is quite a lot of work. This makes it very hard to recruit for! The positive flip side though of the fact of the wind-down means that the cultural leadership we are doing is a bit less impactful than it was say a year or two ago.

When we faced the decision of whether to keep searching or accept the candidates in front of us, I considered many factors but eventually agreed that it was ok to prioritize allowing the existing board members to leave (which they couldn't do until we found replacements), even if the new folks were not ideal in every conceivable way. I wished we had a better gender balance too, but ultimately since projects are spinning out, it's going to be much more on those individual projects and less on EV central to figure that out!

(I'm very excited about our new trustees despite this!)

Ulrik Horn @ 2024-02-09T16:47 (+5)

Thanks Lincoln that's a good point - I had not considered that. I'm so used to thinking EV super big deal. Let's hope there is good diversity in the leadership in the various spun out organisations.

AI Law @ 2024-02-08T15:41 (+7)

I'm not entirely sure why you're being karma-bombed for this. I've done what I can to bring your score up towards 0. 

Agree or disagree, I don't think your comment breaks any rules or norms, and was well written with reasoning provided. Don't take the weird scoring to heart.

Ulrik Horn @ 2024-02-09T06:03 (+2)

Thanks! I am quite concerned about DEI in EA and comment frequently about it (these comments, like here, often get ~30 votes and end up +/- 0). My guess is that some people perceive me to be on some sort of culture war mission. And I do think the dialogue I am inspiring with my comments can at times be uncomfortable and "detract" people from our super important work on animal welfare, global health, existential risk, etc. I think there is some truth to this but I think other factors are at play too, especially for me personally.

I also think many people reading posts like this have similar thoughts as I do (there was 2 disagree votes on the post before I commented - maybe they had the same concern?). But I think many people with these thoughts are concerned about commenting as it might put them at a disadvantage when applying for grants or jobs. If that is true, I feel even more compelled to use my privilege to make comments so that people can anonymously and easily just hit the upvote or agree button. Maybe we could have AI write different takes on posts in the future, in the same way you can have GPT pretend to be certain political characters - we already have the summary bot!

I am thinking about maybe writing a post about why I care about DEI so much, although I would not expect a lot of people to change their voting patterns.