The Network for EA Support & Training

Theory of change

We help talented young people become great altruistic thinkers and doers by training and supporting EA university group organizers. We believe great organizers make great groups and great groups make great EAs. To make great organizers, we will help them master the breadth of EA content and build their own world models while training them to communicate those models to others.

We want organizers and group members to feel personally responsible for developing their own views on the big questions of Effective Altruism: What is most important, why is it important, and what can I do about it? Appreciation for reasonable disagreements across these questions and earnest exploration of competing perspectives on them is central to ensuring the independent thinking we want to foster.

Our conception of EA

We conceive of EA as a set of intellectual tools for cultivating your moral sensibilities and directing them towards action. You should be clear with yourself about who matters, what matters to them, and how your actions will actually affect them. You should then take the actions you think will do the most good subject to common-sense side constraints. The test is how seriously you take the exercise, not the particular conclusions you draw.¹

Values

• Ideas and substance first

  • The bedrock of all EA communication is deep understanding of the conceptual tools, values, perspectives, and facts that bear on doing good—no metric or planning system can substitute for this.

• Questions and processes over conclusions

  • We have a liberal conception of EA. These are big, often personal questions about how to live. We expect disagreements; we don't expect to resolve all of them. EA culture should celebrate taking the questions seriously, not reaching consensus and certainly not deferring to consensus.
  • Taking the questions seriously, however, is a serious challenge. We should have strong, explicit reasons for our beliefs and hold each other accountable for articulating and developing our reasoning.

• Treating people as ends

  • Our communities develop people's personal moral reasoning. That is something that individuals ultimately own themselves and we deeply respect that.
  • We are here to present the ideas and challenges of Effective Altruism, not to convert people or recruit them on behalf of specific organizations.
  • We think some of our participants will independently choose to act on these ideas by taking up traditional EA careers, but that is not our goal. We optimize for quality processes, not specific outcomes.

• Quality over quantity

  • We hope to deeply understand the communities and individuals we work with and craft excellent conversations for them specifically.
  • If this means we support many fewer groups than we might otherwise, we will make that tradeoff.
  • We will scale only when it comes at low cost to quality elsewhere.

• Care in action

  • EA ideas and community should improve the lives of people who engage with them on their own terms, not impose external obligations.
  • We emphasize ideas and discussion because people should feel confident and comfortable in what they believe before acting in the world.
  • This includes people's own wellbeing. Self-sacrifice is not a proxy for seriousness. Personal happiness is a legitimate input into decisions, not something to be overridden by concerns for impact.

• Transparency, honesty, and humility

  • Ultimately, community building is a project of perspective sharing. That requires community builders, including us, to disclose complete pictures of our history, desires, uncertainties, and motivations—both flattering and unflattering—so others can make up their own minds about our ideas.
  • We embody these values in communications big and small: setting goals, choosing content, making decisions, and building systems.

Core activities

• University Group Support

  • Tier 1: intensively mentor student community builders at 5–10 universities from our long list²
    • Funding covers food for events, budgets for donations in educational giving exercises, signage, space rentals, and other costs.
    • Mentorship includes regular calls on substantive EA topics, strategy, and event design; and campus visits to give talks, advise group members, and execute events.
  • Tier 2: lighter touch support for an additional 10–15 universities from our long list

• Employing Professional Community Builders

  • We will hire full-time community builders to live near key universities and directly mentor and support groups there.
  • They will do everything the group needs, from logistical work, to giving talks and 1-1 advice, to hosting events, allowing student leaders to focus on ideas, content, relationships, and their personal development.
  • These community builders will uphold our core values and theory of change. The bar for hiring will be high and we're willing to leave these positions unfilled.

• Workshops for Community Builders

  • Three multi-day workshops in the Bay, DC, and London.
  • The aim is to share our theory of change, build relationships with and between a broad range of community builders, and help them absorb perspectives from the best EA thinkers we can find.
  • Workshop participants will be drawn from ~60 strong universities and recent graduates of EA groups.

• Content Curation

  • We curate and organize the best and most EA-relevant books, papers, blogs, podcasts, videos, films, and art so that community builders can efficiently absorb them and develop their own views, curricula, and recommended readings. One working list here.
  • We also create educational resources like these lists of abstract and empirical concepts important to EA thinking.

Determining success

• Our Community Builders

  • Our staff and student organizers should have broad EA knowledge, strong judgement, and reasoning transparency well above replacement level for community builders in 2025.

• Our Events

  • Our workshop talks should present clear and compelling ways of distilling the Effective Altruist mindset and effectively conveying it to others.
  • Attendees should seem curious, engaged, and potentially great at communicating EA ideas.
  • Our contributors should be the most impressive EAs there are.
  • University-based events should balance welcomingness and challengingness, feel fun, and be imbued with personality. They should have a critical mass of highly engaged students who feel license to push back and ask critical questions.

• Our Groups

  • Our groups should have a healthy critical mass of engaged members with a strong interest in and command over the ideas by the end of an academic year.
  • Groups should also be regarded as an intellectual force on campus by many students in the group and outside of it.