Community building for effective altruism involves developing a strong community of engaged people who are committed to doing as much good as they can.
Effective altruism community building can be an "impact multiplier," allowing you to have a large impact across a variety of different causes. To illustrate this, consider these two scenarios:
The second option multiplies your impact, as creating a strong effective altruism (EA) community could lead to several people working on highly effective projects, rather than just one. This is one of the main advantages of EA community building: leveraging your own resources to encourage others to do good.
These communities can take different forms, such as those defined by university membership, geographic location, or cause area interest. They all share the same goal: encouraging greater connections and collaboration between interested individuals, which allows the EA movement to increase its impact.
There are endless ways to create EA communities. A few examples are listed below.
Local groups are centred around a location or educational establishment. They generally focus on in-person meetups, discussions, events, and other activities to learn more about EA and get more involved.
Example: Effective Altruism Cambridge
Cause area groups focus on a certain cause area, with no geographical limits.
Example: Effective Environmentalism
Networks of individuals promoting effective altruism who are involved in the same business or industry.
Example: Effective Altruism Consulting Network
Fellowships are generally reading and discussion groups spanning multiple months. These may focus on understanding the general principles of EA, or dive deeper into certain cause areas.
Examples: EA Virtual Programs and Harvard Fellowship on Long-term AI Risks
Events, such as conferences or student summits, encourage participants to build new connections, improve coordination within and across cause areas, provide access to funders and employers, and become more socially integrated in the EA community.
Examples: EA Global and Giving What We Can's community events
Community building is one of the key activities that strengthens and grows the EA movement. Local groups and in-person connections are two of the main pathways for individuals to get involved with the EA movement.
Building a community of people interested in EA could multiply your impact, as you can find and encourage others to maximise their altruistic endeavours, rather than pursuing them alone. Moreover, a healthier and more engaged EA community will mean we're able to make faster progress on existing causes, and identify promising new causes. If you're not certain which are the most important causes to support, EA community building can be highly impactful on a range of pressing global issues.
Currently, there are very few people working on EA community building relative to the large potential to do good. However, as we discuss below, lack of funding is not the current barrier to growth in community building.
The EA community has the potential to be extremely influential in improving the course of the future and reducing suffering globally.
Some notable achievements driven largely by those within the EA community include:
There have been many other positive achievements that the EA community was a large part of advocating for, funding, and supporting:
These past accomplishments indicate that the EA community has the potential for a very large positive impact going forward. 80,000 Hours estimates (extremely roughly) that the EA movement could cause $10–100 billion USD per year to be spent on effective projects, or reduce the risk of human extinction by 1–10%.
A strong EA community isn’t the sole reason for these successes, but it’s likely that a larger and more engaged EA community will be able to achieve greater positive impact than one that is smaller and less engaged.
As of 2019, 7,400 people identified as part of the EA community, with 2,315 of them considering themselves "highly engaged." Both of these numbers are much smaller than the populations of many universities and indicate significant room for future growth.
However, lack of funding is not what is preventing this growth. Large donors — Open Philanthropy in particular — are interested in funding this area. Given that in principle they could fill any funding gaps that remain, the current constraint on growth is the capacity for funding to be effectively used, rather than the amount of funding available. Donations in this area often take the effect of reducing the funding that Open Philanthropy provides at present (as your donation substitutes for the funding it otherwise would have given) and thereby increases the amount it can grant to community building — and Open Philanthropy's other focus areas — later on.
Therefore, we think that though EA community building is neglected in the sense that far too few people are working on the area than would be optimal, it is not neglected in the sense that there is much room for more funding right now.
In the Centre for Effective Altruism's 2020 annual review, they reported that Community Building Grants (CBGs) "have contributed to notable improvements in some groups (though CBGs weren't the only factor)." Some examples include:
Events and fellowships have also been shown to improve engagement and connections within the EA community:
In summary, achievements with CBGs, fellowships, and events to date indicate that community building is highly tractable. Organisers make a strong counterfactual impact on improving the engagement and size of EA groups, as well as providing networking opportunities.
Community building is generally an intervention that benefits a variety of cause areas, rather than focusing on any particular issue. If you have a strong belief that a particular cause area is much more pressing and cost effective than others, it might make sense to prioritise funding it directly instead of wider EA community building.
However, there are some exceptions, such as fellowships and events in certain cause areas. For example, the Stanford Existential Risks Initiative Summer Research Fellowship or the Improving Institutional Decision-Making working group.
Community building so far has generally targeted at university groups and younger professionals. If you believe it's more impactful to attract late-career professionals that can fill certain talent bottlenecks, you might want to focus on a different approach. This seems reasonable, as people with more career capital, influence, and knowledge can often achieve more impact with their careers.
Two relevant considerations here are that the EA movement is quite young, with 82% of individuals under 35, and that most people first get involved in EA at a median age of 24. This might be because university students and younger audiences are more open to new ideas and joining new groups than older people, so attracting an older audience is potentially less tractable.
CEA is the organisation that has the clearest strategic focus on engaging younger professionals and university students, so if you don't agree with this strategy, it might make sense to donate to other EA community-building opportunities, or pursue them yourself.
You can donate to several promising programs working in this area via our donation platform. For our charity and fund recommendations, see our best charities page.
This page was written by James Ozden. You can read our research notes to learn more about the work that went into this page.
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