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This is: EA Philippines' Strong Progress and Learnings in 2019, published by BrianTan on the AI Alignment Forum.
Hi, EAs! I’m Brian Tan, co-founder of Effective Altruism Philippines. I’m writing this post to share the great progress we’ve made in starting and growing the EA Philippines community in our first full year in 2019. We’ve learned a lot of things along the way, and we’d like to share what worked and what hasn’t for us here.
How EA Philippines Started
EA Philippines was first started by Kate Lupango in September 2018. Through help from LEAN and Wanyi Zeng (of EA Singapore), she was able to connect with other EA community builders in other countries and get resources on how to start a local community.
She created a Facebook page for EA Philippines, and she posted on a Facebook volunteer group looking for volunteers to join the EA Philippines community. Jeffrey Escobal reached out to her to express interest after seeing that post.
Kate also posted looking for mentors in the EA Group Organizers Facebook group. David Nash (of EA London) connected Kate with Tanya Quijano, a Filipina who had previously attended an EA London event. Finally, I found the page on Facebook a few weeks after Kate made it, and decided to reach out. The four of us met for the first time in November 2018, and decided to co-found the group and start growing the community.
From left to right: Kate, Tanya, Jeffrey, and I (Brian)
When we started, we had three main goals:
1. To increase awareness about EA in Manila
2. To build a friendly community for people interested in EA
3. To get Filipinos to increase their involvement in or donations to EA’s top cause areas
We’ve mostly been successful at the first two goals, but we aren’t satisfied with our progress on the third. We'll talk more about that towards the end of the post.
Key Outcomes in 2019 (our 1st year)
1. We’ve now identified 11 contributors and 7 participants in our local community (including us four core team members). We classified them based on CEA's Concentric Circles Model and our evaluation of where they fit in the funnel.
2. Around May 2019, we successfully applied for a general group funding grant from CEA, which allowed us to fund our operations from May to December 2019. Later, we successfully applied for a grant that covers January to December 2020.
3. In 2019, we held a total of 14 events - usually doing one per month. We now average 20 attendees per event, and we get an average of four “repeat” attendees per event (not including us co-founders).
4. We've been able to partner with the local offices of EA-recommended organizations such as Oxfam, Innovations for Poverty Action, and IDInsight, and have representatives from their orgs speak and attend our events.
5. We've also met or had calls with members from various EA communities, such as EA Singapore, Toronto, Montreal, Norway, and London, and with members of EA organizations, such as GiveWell, LEAN, CEA, Rethink Charity, and The Life You Can Save.
6. 5 student members of EA PH started a chapter named EA Blue at the Ateneo De Manila University in August, and they recruited 60 students to join their chapter.
On Organizing Events
Photos from some of our events in 2019
When we started, we didn't know anyone else in Manila who was interested in EA. We were all fairly new to the movement. As such, we decided to focus on holding monthly events in order to spread awareness about EA and its various facets and cause areas.
We worked on EA PH part-time, on top of our day jobs. At first, we were paying for expenses out of our own pockets. Thankfully, we got funding from CEA to fund our events from May to December 2019.
This table includes information on all the events we’ve held so far:
To explain some things about the table above:
The March 26 talk was given by Yuna Liang, a Senior Research ...
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