Re: Effective Altruism Network [working title]

[Mike P. Sinn]

I'm not in college,  but thank you for your hard work!

Cordially,  
Mike P. Sinn

  

On Fri, Jun 22, 2012 at 7:06 AM, Holly Morgan <hollyrebe...@gmail.com> wrote:

Fellow worldchangers,

Making the world a better place has been a persistent idea throughout human history, but surprisingly

few groups have attempted this strategically and effectively.

We're launching such groups.

The Effective Altruism (EA) Network is building a nationwide movement around creating the best world

possible by the most effective means. Similar groups exist around more targeted domains, such as

Giving What We Can (.org) for effective philanthropy, and 80,000 Hours (.org) for ethical career choice.

We will bring these ideas and more to colleges across the US.

We have a core team of 20 people working on finding chapter leaders at top colleges, developing EA

content, and building infrastructure for the network. But we can always do more, and better, so come

join the team!

Here are some of the nuts and bolts of the project. We want to launch EA chapters at as many colleges

as we can, starting THIS FALL. We’re pre-packaging content and exercises – on effective philanthropy,

ethical career choice, high impact research, personal effectiveness and self-improvement, and

discussion of the best causes – in a form that any bright person can deliver without prior knowledge of

the ideas. These ‘modules’ will form an open library that chapter leaders are free to select whatever

they’d like from, to supplement what they present to their groups. We’ll also be streamlining the

launching and running of chapters in other ways – it’ll still take some work to run a chapter, but the path

will be well-lit.

For the EA network to be successful, we need chapters. We get chapters by: 1) finding contacts at top

colleges to spread the word for us; 2) calling up all the people who respond with interest; 3) working

with them to set up shop. The first step involves finding well-connected students (student body

presidents, newspaper editors) and like-minded students (leaders of related student groups), and having

them forward a message from us to their friends and listservs. We’ve found around 800 such students

so far.

An education reform organization used roughly this method to get 80 chapters in one year, with

the effort of 2 people. We have 20 people (some full-time) and rising, and are well-connected in the

EA community. Just through word of mouth we’ve gotten interest in starting chapters at Harvard,

Stanford, Brown, NYU, Berkeley, and a handful of other great colleges (and we haven’t started the mass

contacting yet!). We have subteams for all parts of the process, but having more people means we can

scale up even more and grow quicker. The benefits of the network scale at least linearly with additional

chapters and infrastructure, so your marginal impact will be large.

If you’d like to get involved, let us know (effectiv...@gmail.com ), and we’d be happy to Skype

with you. Meanwhile, feel free to share this message with others.

All the best,

The EA Network Team

[Holly Morgan]

*Just to clarify, this network is a project of Leverage Research, and not the Centre for Effective Altruism (as might be assumed from the name, or the fact that I'm sending it!)