Kevin Xia 🔸
Bio
Participation5
Generalist at Hive, currently working on Community Management, Resource Pages, MEL, and Fundraising. Effective Altruism and Animal Advocacy Community Builder, experience in national, local and cause-area specific community building. Amateur Philosopher, particularly keen on moral philosophy.
How others can help me
I'm super happy to chat with anyone and learn from you, so don't hesitate to reach out if you don't have any expertise on the following - however, some specific areas I am hoping to learn more about are:
- I work at Hive, a global community-building organization for farmed animal advocates. I would love to hear your thoughts, (project) ideas and feedback!
- Philanthropic Grantmaking (specifically, how feasible is it to change larger foundations' program areas)?
- Unusually high-earning career paths for earning to give (I'm thinking 400k+?)
- Farmed animal advocacy careers outside of NGOs and Alt-protein (e.g., food industry/adjacent sector jobs and policy in governmental institutions)
How I can help others
I have a fairly good overview of the farmed animal advocacy space, so happy to chat about all things there. I find that I am most helpful in brainstorming, red-teaming, effective giving and career advice. And, of course, happy to talk about Hive or meta-level work in animal advocacy more generally! I have some experience in community building on a city, national and cause-area specific level, so happy to nerd about that. I also have a background in philosophy, focusing on moral philosophy - so happy to bounce ideas or chat cause prioritization.
I believe that I, like many visitors on the Forum, would usually be very careful to vote on either end of an extreme. The reason I opted to move all in into animal welfare is that, while I acknowledge and put some credence on views around ripple effects and moral uncertainty (in the sense of placing some weight on societal consensus views), these views primarily have an influence on my view of how global philanthropic spending should be allocated.
However, when it comes to an additional $100m, the (difference of) neglectedness completely wipes out these considerations for me. It appears, that there are $290 Million going into FAW[1] vs. $70 Billion into GHD; pouring another $100m into FAW would effectively grow FAW from 0.41% of global philanthropic (neartermist) funding to 0.55%. I am not sure if this is the ideal way to frame the debate question (I use it really more as a proxy), but I have close to 0 credence that less than 0.55% of global philanthropic (neartermist) spending should be spent on farmed animal welfare.
I focus on farmed animal welfare as opposed to including wild animals, because it seems that that's what many debate readers have in mind and are discussing here.