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This is: EA Funds has appointed new fund managers , published by Jonas Vollmer, SamDeere on the AI Alignment Forum.
Summary
Effective Altruism Funds has appointed new fund management teams, composed of both existing and new fund managers, to the following funds (new roles bold):
Animal Welfare Fund (AWF): Kieran Greig (chairperson), Lewis Bollard, Alexandria Beck, Karolina Sarek, Marcus Davis, Mikaela Saccoccio
EA Infrastructure Fund (EAIF): Max Daniel, Buck Shlegeris, Michelle Hutchinson, with Jonas Vollmer as the acting interim chairperson until we appoint a chairperson later this year
Long-Term Future Fund (LTFF): Asya Bergal (chairperson), Oliver Habryka, Adam Gleave
To expand our grantmaking capacity, we ran a private appointment process from December 2020 to February 2021. Existing fund managers were given the opportunity to re-apply if they wished, and new candidates were sourced through our networks. We received 66 applications from new candidates. Fund managers were appointed on the basis of their performance on work tests, their past experience in grantmaking or other relevant areas, and formal and informal references.
These fund managers have been appointed for a two-year term, after which we will run a similar process again.
We still have a larger application load than our regular fund manager team can support, so we plan to appoint further fund managers over the coming months. We are also considering setting up one or several additional funds (primarily a legible longtermist fund). As a result, we still expect significant changes to fund management over the coming months.
We’re also experimenting with a new system of guest fund managers, allowing people who might be a good fit to provide input to the fund for a single grant round. We hope that this will give more people in the community an opportunity to improve their judgment, reasoning, and grantmaking skills, add additional viewpoint diversity to the grant evaluation process, and build a bank of strong candidates to potentially appoint as regular fund managers when we need more capacity.
We hope that these changes will substantially increase each fund’s capacity to evaluate grants. In addition, we expect the following improvements:
The Animal Welfare Fund plans to communicate more proactively about its priorities.
The Long-Term Future Fund has increased its leadership capacity and will increasingly focus on proactively creating new grant opportunities (active grantmaking).
The EA Infrastructure Fund aims to do more active grantmaking, build long-term funding relationships, fund more small or medium-sized projects rather than established organizations, and more clearly define its priorities.
We would also like to extend our thanks to the previous fund managers, for their work in evaluating grants and improving our grantmaking processes, done entirely on a volunteer basis.
Rationale for appointing new fund managers
EA Funds has historically appointed fund managers in a somewhat ad hoc way, and we’ve never had a defined length of time that they’ll serve for. In 2020, we began consultations with existing fund managers to make the process of appointment more clearly defined.
We decided that fund managers should serve for a defined period of time (currently two years), after which they can reapply for another term. New fund managers start with a trial period, so that we can assess their skills and collaboration with their colleagues.
Considerations that we took into account included:
Increasing overall capacity: Our November 2020 grant round received a record number of applications, and all three funds were limited by the time the fund managers had available to consider applications. (We again broke that record with an even higher number of applications in March 2021.) Also, a number of the existing fund managers ha...
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