Thank you Jessica 💚 I guess the next challenge will be can we maintain the good outputs over time and if our team grows!

It’s nice to know other people are also excited about our work.

I would love more people to share progress updates on what their orgs are up to too.

Thank you Vaidehi, this means a lot, it’s always such a trade-off between the amount of time it takes to write a post that is understandable to other vs. using our time on something else, so this was really nice to hear.

Would be curious to hear what intuitions you have that resonated the most with this post? And any that you have that weren’t mentioned 👀

Thank you 💚 it was a team effort and I appreciate all the advice and feedback you have given. It would be hard to do this in a silo.

The world is burning 🔥 happy to contribute where we can to putting a little of it out

Thanks for everything you do! We wouldn't be here without you.
 

What do you think is the most neglected, potentially high-impact career opportunity that could make significant progress for farmed animals.

Thanks for sharing! 
I really agree with this too, i think there is a lot of pressure in the EA community to get a job in EA to feel part of the community and this often leads to people just trying to get jobs immediately, when often you can do the most good by gaining some experience first. I will caveat that i still think there is a spectrum of certain jobs where you can learn more or less and it is still important to try to find those ones or have some idea of what you want to try your fit for first. In addition its not the case for all roles, e.g. i think campaigners in the animal space would be better going into this role straight out of university-ish because a lot of it is learning on the job/ from others and there aren't many campaign type jobs in for-profits :) 

For me personally, even though I think I had the steepest learning curve in my current role as a founder, I learnt a lot in my previous years of work that was transferable. More importantly, I built up financial stability that helped me take bigger risks, like starting my own organisation (I am PRETTY certain i would not have done this if i didn't have the buffer i had and a fall back job) 

I wonder how as a community we can help people to feel okay about this and less pressure to get an EA job straight away? More case studies? 

Also just want to add that lobbying is a very sought after skill in some EA cause areas (like animals) where there is a skill gap so you could also consider getting a role in an animal advocacy non profit after to help them make progress and not have to pay extortionate PA prices. 

+1 to direct impact being underrated. But i do think that its not just any role that can be useful and that most of working in government is what you make out of it (networking, finding the highest leverage opportunities and connections etc.) not just getting a role. 

I have also heard this but i have also heard the complete opposite, that gov taught them to be able to do things quickly and not perfectly under pressure which is very valuable. I also think in general it has a high variability depending on personal fit and which department and manager you have. I will add that particularly in the animal space most organisations don't know how to lobby due to a lack of people getting this insider experience. So i think civil service is great for SOME people and maybe more valuable for certain cause areas than others. But i tend to agree that we should lean into more people testing their fit to figure out where they land on working there or at least exploring this as a great career option and talk to some people before hand to work out whether they are likely to be a good fit 

Jumping in here just to say @Probably Good I think its great to have extra exposure to the animal welfare roles! Thanks for doing this. 

In regards to having the same roles as 80k i think this is unrealistic as we have different parameters on what roles and organisations we are monitoring so that seems unlikely to happen, even though I agree it would be good.

Firstly, I want to acknowledge that this comment has probably been pretty valuable in terms of sharing feedback for the CE team about perceptions that maybe a lot of people were unaware of, so thanks for raising some concerns that you and others might be having. I'll also just say as a co-founder of a CE-incubated charity, I am far from impartial, but I think sharing some inside information could be helpful here.

My main response is to the first 2 comments because I have no real knowledge of the last point.

CE is setting a norm for using research or evidence (however limited) as a basis for starting a charity. 

CE actually uses research & evidence to inform starting charities in the animal welfare space. This is not the norm! I think even establishing this as what you should be looking at is relatively new to the animal welfare space and should be acknowledged and praised. Currently the majority of charities that are started in the animal welfare space are not backed by research or significant evidence, from what I have observed usually founders think something is a good idea are relatively charismatic and subsequently get funding. So even though I agree that the research can be improved and I think it's helpful to flag this to Karolina and Joey, I think that the starting point of CE charities is a lot more than that of other charities in this space. So, really, I think we should commend CE for trying to establish any kind of research as the norm and basis for starting a charity. (I think the animal rights movement could be much better if this was a standard all new charities adopted).

CE was never extremely confident with their own research internally to incubated charities, it was merely a foundation. They also established failure mode thinking into our impact assessments which is another great norm.

I can only talk about cohort 1 which was FWI and AAC. In this cohort, CE presented the research that they believed there was the potential for something really impactful to happen in something generally in this space. It was then up to the co-founding team to go out and do deeper research including getting more external feedback to validate the research, whether the charity was really worth starting and how to execute it best. CE also embedded into our thinking that we shouldn't necessarily expect that our charities would succeed and that we should have clear failure points to assess whether it's worth it to continue it, taking into consideration the counterfactuals of the movement's money. Again i think this is a great norm to establish, many charities in the animal welfare space and in other sectors do not do this. They merely carry on without these assessments. Healthier Hens declared shutting down because of this and i think this should be celebrated not used as a signal of poor research. So basically, I think actually if you are mad about new charities not collaborating enough, I think that's on us, not CE. 

I think your main point (Which is a valid concern) is whether CE charities are net a good use of movement resources.  To date just speaking about AAC we estimate adding over $2,000,000 of counterfactual value to other animal welfare organisations with a spend of just over 750,000 in under 5 years.

I agree with Haven's point that the animal movement needs to do better and be better. But as you and others have said, I still think CE charities are some of the best in the movement. If we don't try to create new good organisations addressing gaps in the movement, I don't think we are going to realistically accelerate towards ending factory farming. The question is, do you know a better incubator programme to start new organisations than CE, or do you just want them to improve a bit? 

SWP, Animal Ask, Healthier Hens, FWI and AAC have all been supported by either EA animal welfare fund or Open Phil or both (in the case of most of us) so I would be really surprised if there were that much difference between the alternative funding perspective you are suggesting here.

From AAC's point of view, I would be interested to know your concerns on scalability because I think there are infinite ways we can scale; it's more about us selecting the right one. I'd love feedback on this so feel free to DM me from your anonymous account. We have supported over 150 organisations in increasing talent into critical positions they were struggling to hire for with 90 landing positions and have also brought in $408,000 of counterfactual funding to other organisations. Currently, we estimate (conservatively from most donors feedback) for every 1$ we spend a $2.5 of value is added to the movement. Which suggests we are net positive to the movement. We have plans to double this ratio by the end of this year. 

In conclusion, of course, CE has areas to improve, as we all do. Still, I think this is a pretty harsh analysis of an organisation adding a considerable amount of value and norms to the animal advocacy movement on founding charities. I think they would add a lot of value to bringing these values and norms into the donor landscape as there is a gap and CE has a pretty good track record in doing this in other donor circles like the Meta Funding Circle etc.

Lauren 

(transparently co-founder of AAC)  

Yes sorry I think we are actually saying the same thing here, I meant your former statement not the later. I’m not saying we shouldn’t investigate things but the 300 plus comments on the 3-4 nonlinear posts doesn’t seem an optimal use of time and could probably be dealt with more efficiently, plus the thousands of people who have probably read the posts and comments is a lot of time! Maybe these things shouldn’t be handled in forum posts but in a different format.

I fully agree that these things have to be dealt with better my main concern about your point is over the consensus idea which I think is unrealistic in a community that tries to avoid group think and on topics (ftx aside) where there doesn’t seem to be a clear right or wrong.