From late 2020 to last month, I worked at grassroots-level non-profits in operational roles. Over that time, I’ve seen surprisingly effective deployments of strategies that were counter-intuitive to my EA and rationalist sensibilities.

I spent 6 months being the on-shift operations manager at one of the five largest food banks in Toronto (~50 staff/volunteers), and 2 years doing logistics work at Samaritans (fake name), a long-lived charity that was so multi-armed that it was basically operating as a supplementary social services department for the city it was in(~200 staff and 200 volunteers). Both orgs were well-run, though both dealt with the traditional non-profit double whammy of being underfunded and understaffed.