Over the next few weeks, the Centre for Effective Altruism will be reaching out to the community to raise funds to support our next year of work.
So far, more than 300 effective altruists have contributed to CEA. If it were not for your help, we would not have been able to create a community of effective givers who have pledged more than half a billion dollars to charity, guide hundreds of graduates into careers that make a difference, advise policy-makers around the world on effective policy, or support the effective altruist movement through events like EA Global. Now we need your continued support to help us build on that work. You can find much more detail in the 2015 CEA Winter Prospectus.
As a whole, CEA is committed to making sure that effective altruist ideas reach their potential to shape the world's future for the better. Each of the parts of CEA addresses a different component of that challenge.
- Giving What We Can supports effective donation to charity
- 80,000 Hours helps people lead effective altruist careers
- EA Outreach enables the effective altruist community to grow healthily
- Global Priorities Project helps policy-makers apply EA ideas in their work
Supporting all of this is our operations team which delivers shared services that let each project focus on delivering their core objectives.
Each part of CEA will be raising more this winter to help us hire great people, cover our costs for the year ahead, and make our existing work better and bigger.
- Giving What We Can aims to raise £475,000 and still needs £282,000 to reach that goal.
- 80,000 Hours aims to raise £220,000 and still needs £48,000 to reach that goal.
- EA Outreach aims to raise £474,000 and still needs £274,000 to reach that goal.
- Global Priorities Project aims to raise £300,000 and still needs £160,000 to reach that goal.
- CEA shared services aim to raise £200,000 and still need £150,000 to reach that goal.
Each organisation will be communicating more about their plans and funding needs. You can find an overview of all of our work in the 2015 CEA Winter Prospectus.
I'm happy to answer any of your questions here. You can find details on how to donate here. You can also contact us to discuss donations. You can contact any of the project leaders directly using the details available in our prospectus.
Ping. I also have ongoing confusion here because in some places this is referred to as 'shared services' and in some places as 'CEA unrestricted'. These sound like very different things! Is this something that existed in previous years (and wasn't fundraising for what reason exactly?), and if not what's changed?
You're quite right, they are different. At the moment, we are planning to use marginal unrestricted funds to invest in shared services. Partly this aims to increase the autonomy of the shared services function and reduce the extent they feel they need to ask for permission to all the orgs to do useful things.
Past that level though, unrestricted funding would help us build a small reserve of unrestricted money that would provide us with financial stability. Right now, each organisation needs to keep a pretty significant independent runway because virtually all our reserves are restricted. If we had a bigger pool of funds that could go to any org, we could get the same level of financial security with smaller total reserves.