Centre for Effective Altruism
Effective Altruism Field Building
The Centre for Effective Altruism's mission is to nurture a community of people who are thinking carefully about the world’s most pressing problems and taking impactful action to solve them.
What problem is the Centre for Effective Altruism working on?
Everyone wants to do good, but many ways of doing good are ineffective. The effective altruism community is focused on finding ways of doing good that actually work.
Effective altruism is both an intellectual project, using evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible, and a practical project — taking action based on this research, and building a radically better world.
What does the Centre for Effective Altruism do?
The Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) is dedicated to nurturing a community of people who are thinking carefully about the world’s biggest problems and taking impactful action to solve them. CEA believes that this community can help to build a radically better world: so far it has helped to save over 150,000 lives, reduced the suffering of millions of farmed animals, and begun to address some of the biggest risks to humanity’s future.
CEA does this by:
- Helping people consider their ideas, values, and options for and about helping.
- Connecting people to advisors and experts in relevant domains.
- Facilitating high-quality discussion spaces.
Based on survey data, CEA believes that this helps people find an effective way to contribute that is a good fit for their skills and inclinations.
Specifically, CEA:
Runs EA Global conferences and supporting community-organised EAGx conferences.
Funds and advises local effective altruism groups.
Builds and moderates the EA Forum, an online hub for discussing the ideas of effective altruism.
Supports community members through its community health team.
Produces the Effective Altruism Newsletter, which goes out to more than 50,000 subscribers.
Runs effectivealtruism.org, which hosts a collection of useful resources.
What information does Giving What We Can have about the cost-effectiveness of CEA?
The impact-focused evaluator Longview has made grants to CEA based on their assessment that CEA is highly cost-effective. CEA has also received significant grants from Open Philanthropy, which found that CEA’s work was one of the most important factors causing people to do useful work aimed at reducing existential risk and improving the long-term future.
Note that we, CEA, and Longview are all part of Effective Ventures — see our transparency page.
Please note that GWWC does not evaluate individual charities. Our recommendations are based on the research of third-party, impact-focused charity evaluators our research team has found to be particularly well-suited to help donors do the most good per dollar, according to their recent evaluator investigations. Our other supported programs are those that align with our charitable purpose — they are working on a high-impact problem and take a reasonably promising approach (based on publicly-available information).
At Giving What We Can, we focus on the effectiveness of an organisation's work -- what the organisation is actually doing and whether their programs are making a big difference. Some others in the charity recommendation space focus instead on the ratio of admin costs to program spending, part of what we’ve termed the “overhead myth.” See why overhead isn’t the full story and learn more about our approach to charity evaluation.