 When I first encountered the concept of Effective Altruism, the whole thing was very abstract. We all want to do the most good, but to someone from the outside, the specifics of what exactly is being done within the movement can be a little opaque.
Now, a few months into working at Charity Entrepreneurship, I still wouldn’t claim to fully understand effective altruism as a movement -- but I’ve decided to write up some things I have seen, to help others get a glimpse of the particular people and the culture of the organization that I work with. Other effective altruist organizations have also written documents describing their work culture, contributing to transparency in the movement. I think that this perspective is especially helpful for people who are applying to work at effective altruist organizations. My hope is that readers of this article could get a sense of whether working at Charity Entrepreneurship could be a good fit for them.
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 Slatestarcodex had an interesting post regarding the equal application of rigor in philosophy. This principle can be applied in a practical sense to effective altruist interventions as well. Achieving Pareto Productivity. Simple Task Management and Productivity Rules that Go a Long Way4/14/2020 
The art of task management can seem elusive, with monk-like adherents following complex sets of belief systems to arrive at the holy grail of maximum productivity. While advanced users of task management and productivity techniques might indeed beat the average entrepreneur by far, the Pareto principle applies here as well: 20% of effort may give you 80% of the benefits. Pareto Productivity presents simple task management guidelines that go a long way. So feel free to cancel your 21-day productivity retreat and return the fancy sleep tracking ring. This will get you covered in much less than one Pomodoro slot.
 Charity entrepreneurship in many ways is a less stable career than a traditional job. Charities in their early days will have limited runways (often under six months). At any point, results could come in showing that an intervention is not worth continuing. On the other hand, value drift is an important consideration. Losing motivation to achieve altruistic impact happens more quickly than one would expect (see Empirical Data on Value Drift and Concrete Ways to Reduce Value Drift). Hence, it is better to donate more to effective causes now than to accumulate a large safety buffer that you might spend ineffectively in the case of value drift. So a question arises: how much personal runway or savings should someone have when becoming a charity entrepreneur? 
Charity Entrepreneurship is part of the Effective Altruism movement. If you’re going through our incubation program, it’s likely that your potential donors, employees, partner organizations, and other stakeholders come from the effective altruism community. While the basic premise of effective altruism seems simple, the set of ideas considered “common knowledge” among people heavily involved in effective altruism can be quite complicated. In some ways, we might conceptualize effective altruism as a field of study - it has a few frequently cited influential thinkers, a set of widely read canonical works, an internal jargon, and several diverging schools of thought. If you’re new to effective altruism, becoming well-versed in this contextual knowledge will help you communicate with other people in the movement more easily.  A “stakeholder” is anyone who has an interest in your non-profit. Some typical stakeholders you might encounter include:
How you interact with stakeholders depends on what type of role they play in your theory of change - in other words, how important they are in achieving your outcome.  We have written previously about the expected value of founding an impactful charity in direct terms, considering the largest and most direct impacts such as lives saved. However, these impacts are far from the only ones. Founding a new charity can impact your future ability to do good, your team's ability, and the charitable movement as a whole. We consider this collection of benefits the non-direct impact of charity entrepreneurship as a career. This post is about the impact of charity entrepreneurship on your team's ability to do good. The 2020 Incubation Program Will Be Held Online! Prioritizing Safety During COVID-19 PANdemic4/8/2020  For the safety of participants and to support the effort to contain COVID-19, Charity Entrepreneurship has decided to hold our 2020 Incubation Program remotely (as an online program) from June 29 to August 28. We’ve also extended the deadline for applications till April 21.  Founding a new organization has a wide range of effects on the charitable sector as a whole. If a charity is good, it can raise standards in a field, spread or stabilize key concepts, build the EA movement, or encourage the allocation of more resources to an area. There are hundreds of effects that a new charity can have on the sector as a whole, both positive and negative. This post covers a few of the most important positive ones.  Charity Entrepreneurship is a research and training program that incubates multiple high-impact charities annually. Founded in June 2018 by Joey Savoie and myself, Karolina Sarek, it builds on our experience in research and direct work on global health, animal advocacy, and other causes, including founding and incubating two GiveWell-incubated charities, Charity Science Health and Fortify Health. In this post, I summarize the results of the research we conducted in 2019 and our plans for 2020. |
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