Some advice for starting up an EA Uni Group - Bureaucracy, Funding and Succession

By Jian Xin Lim 🔸 @ 2024-12-21T17:50 (+29)

Rigor: Quite confident but haven't run these thoughts past many people.

Starting an Effective Altruism (EA) group can feel daunting, but it’s also incredibly rewarding. In September 2024, I founded the EA Bath University Group in the UK. It's now been 3 months and I have some advice from challenges I encountered.

In this post, I’ll share:

1. How to address doubts about the Intro Fellowship without overwhelming yourself
2. Tips for navigating university bureaucracy
3. When to apply for Uni Groups Funding
4. Advice on planning for succession, including using resources like the Organiser Support Program (OSP) and when to consider letting a group hibernate.

Whether you’re considering starting a group or improving an existing one, I hope this post provides practical advice and inspires you to take action. Use this as an awareness raiser. Feel free to skip parts irrelevant to your specific situation, or that you feel comfortable tackling. E.g. US universities sometimes need an academic sponsor, UK universities usually don't, and the separation between societies/clubs and lecturers is strong here.
 For context, here is how I spent my ~15 hours a week as a (mostly) sole organiser:

• 2 hours a week marketing and reaching out to other societies (half of this was tabling for 12 hours in freshers week)
• 3 hours a week in sessions (1.5 sessions a week)
• 3 hours a week preparing sessions and catching up on todos that came out of these sessions
• 3 hours a week in 1-1 text and in-person conversations
• 1 hour a week with my OSP mentor
• 3 hours a week with miscellaneous e.g. organising the one-off consultation session, applying for funding, organising EAGx Virtual session.

If you're reading and deciding whether to start a group, I strongly encourage you to read this first. 

How to address doubts about the Intro Fellowship without overwhelming yourself

• Of the 15 hours I organised each week, 3 hours were dedicated to creating slides for sessions, which began as summaries of the intro fellowship readings. While these slides were helpful—eliminating the need for homework in our version of the intro fellowship—they took far longer to prepare than they should have. The process became much easier once I found slides created by EA Florida and various slides shared here.
• I’d like to write a separate post on the pros and cons of the presentation-based intro fellowship that I ran, but for now, my main advice is: keep it simple. You might notice issues with the intro fellowship format and feel inspired to create something entirely new. That’s great—but before diving in, check whether others have raised the same concerns on this forum and whether resources like this already exist that try to address them.

Navigating University Bureaucracy

• Getting a society/club setup through the Student Union/University bureaucracy might be annoying. As always the amazing EA Groups Resources page has advice for founding EA Groups and AI Groups.
• Specifically, you might
  • Need to make a case for being sufficiently different from other societies. Luke Muelhauser's blog on EA might help
  • Deal with slower than usual response times if there's little urgency/accountability (I'd recommend arranging calls/ going to the office of the person you're emailing)
  • Various health and safety trainings. I wouldn't ignore these. However, much of the training I had to do was common sense, so I skimmed and made a note of surprising details 

If you can choose between being a volunteering group or a society, there are some functional differences but they're not huge. The main one for EA Bath is that being a volunteering group causes people to not find us as easily on the main societies page.

Applying for CEA Groups Funding

Applying for funding for the group requires some initial setup time. Before the group officially started, I was hesitant to apply for funding because it was unclear how much money we'd need (most expenditure, e.g. for snacks, are dependent on the number of people). 

I think there are 3 options here:

• Apply for funding before term starts
• Don't apply for funding until your term/semester ends and you're relatively free
• Apply for funding part-way through your first term/semester

I took the 3rd option. I chose to fund the initial costs—like banners and snacks—myself. Later, once the group was established, I applied for and received funding from CEA Groups Funding, which reimbursed me for those expenses. I was fortunate to be in a position to take this financial risk, as it wasn't guaranteed the funding would be approved. In hindsight I think this was a fine decision. Applying for funding during the busyness of term-time isn't ideal, but I think I significantly improved my justification for the amount I was asking for, by having already established the group.

Some information it'd be useful for CEA to provide are:

• The base rate of successful funding and successful "funding approved organiser" applications
• How that changes if it's a new group
• How that changes if the amount requested is low, on the basis that you're assuming the group will be small and require less than the default budget of $2,500-$4,000.

I'd expect to be able to get some of the above information by using the Office Hours for Group Support Funding.

If you are Founding a Group, Strongly Consider OSP

• It's worth considering whether you or your potential committee members could benefit from participating in an OSP (Organiser Support Program) before the academic year ends. I've found OSP incredibly useful, and I think this is partly because a small committee means the marginal influence of a mentor is greater. e.g. an extra 50% more thoughts if you have a committee of 2.
  • If you're unsure whether you, or others on your committee are 'knowledgeable enough about EA,' that might be a sign they would benefit more from OSP. I'd recommend Quick Access Chats if you're unsure.
  • Alternatively, if you sign up for OSP yourself
    • In the 2nd and 3rd meetings, it's recommended to bring in a co-organiser. One of your committee can come in at this stage.
    • You'll have a semester planning handbook to fill out, which can be a committee activity and also help get your members feeling agentic.

Succession Challenges Unique to New Groups

The advice draws on the Resource Centre succession page, Gukey's post on 10 mistakes during succession and What Uni Groups may be doing wrong with succession. Succession meaning the entire process of finding and then handing over to new commitee members. 

Doing succession for a group in its first year can be hard. Especially if:

• Your University requires a specific number of committee members to remain affiliated
• You have a small committee
• That committee is graduating soon
• Your existing committee is new to EA organising (and hasn't received handover from the previous year)

If the above is true, I think you should be mindful of succession from the founding of your group. I'm aware this sounds demanding and intimidating, and it doesn't help that the resources centre describes an ideal model of succession that is very thorough and suggests starting 1-1.5 years before graduating. However, it's possible to aspire for the ideal but settle for a good enough transition. 

Succession isn't a case of 20% of the effort garnering 80% of the results, but it's not far off. Some things to keep in mind are:

• Finding potential committee members can begin with simply 1-1ing with members in the first month of term. This is generally encouraged anyway, and in those discussions you can be internally tracking if they might be good committee. In later 1-1s, you can ask for small favours like making some dessert for a session (we did this, and the baker later seemed more agentic/comfortable taking on "proper" committee responsibilities)
• It's possible that committee members can come from prospective students. Advertise that you're looking for successors on the EA Groups Slack, at EAG Conferences and mention it when you meet other EAs. I met the incoming Bath chair as a participant at the Global Challenges Project, and she's worked at LEAF, facilitating EA-aligned courses for 15-19 year olds. This was lucky! But it helped to cast a wide net in EA circles.
• Your committee may be able to put in more time/week during your summer break (or equivalent long period between academic years)

What if your succession seems unsuccessful?

• By the midway point of your academic year, I think you should have reached 5. on the Resources page. That might mean you don't have the luxury of selecting your successor rigorously, and that might be okay for 2 reasons:
  • You could let your group hibernate for a year. Even if that happens, you still created a year's worth of impact, and have provided data on that specific university's challenges and opportunities that CEA can communicate to the next EA-aligned person who comes to your university! (see 4.) for what that process looks like.
  • As this post describes, getting less-involved people to organise for your group can have its advantages. I think this is a tricky topic, that there's no consensus on. Personally, if my successors emphasise EA's basic principles, I'd be okay with their main impact path being to help people go into areas that aren't strictly "highly engaged EAs". My main worry would be idea inoculation of the form "EA is AI safety" etc.

Starting EA Bath has been a deeply rewarding experience. I hope the problems I've described seem solvable, and that some of the links are helpful. In general, being a new organiser means benefitting more than usual from the helpfulness and support structures from the past. Don't be scared to use them!

Thanks to Mattias Endres and Toby Tremlett for giving feedback on drafts of this post!