Announcing New Rethink Charity Board Members

As part of ongoing efforts to continually invest in governance and accountability infrastructure, Rethink Charity is proud to announce the expansion of our board of directors by five new members. We are welcoming Kalista Barter, Travis Cooper, Ozzie Gooen, Alexander Gordon-Brown and Colm Ó Riain to the board.

RC conducted a thorough process in searching for new independent directors, considering candidates with a wide range of skill sets from across the globe who also hold a strong personal belief in the Rethink Charity mission and vision. Each newly inducted board member possesses valuable skills and industry knowledge across crucial domains that we believe will greatly benefit RC and the broader EA community.

In addition to the board expansion, RC senior leadership commissioned the creation of specific oversight committees within the board (e.g. executive committee and budget committee), and the formation of internal Objective and Key Result (OKR) boards aimed at holding projects to stated goals and associated deadlines.

New Board Members

Kalista Barter

Kalista has dedicated the last 12 years of her career to fundraising for animal welfare causes, after having been persuaded to prioritize the plight of animals during her philosophy courses at the University of Southern California. Nearly four years ago she started the philanthropy department at Animal Charity Evaluators, and became increasingly involved in the Effective Altruism community, solidifying her commitment to effective advocacy for farmed animals. She currently serves as the Senior Director of Development for The Humane League.

Travis Cooper

Travis graduated from the University of Alberta in 2014 with a Bachelor’s of Commerce in Honors Accounting. He has worked in public practice in Edmonton Alberta for 5 years, specializing in US/Canada cross-border tax issues. He obtained his Chartered Accountant designation in 2016.

Ozzie Gooen

Ozzie is a Research Scholar at the Future of Humanity Institute, currently working in forecasting infrastructure research. He’s previously worked at 80,000 hours and has cofounded multiple tech companies, including Guesstimate.

Alexander Gordon-Brown

Alexander is a longstanding member of the EA community, having taken the Giving What We Can pledge in 2013. He has spent most of that time earning to give, and donated to a variety of organizations involved in movement-building, as well as to Givewell-recommended charities.

Colm Ó Riain (MIRI)

As Head of Growth at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, Colm coordinates MIRI’s philanthropic strategy and supports recruitment as MIRI grows. After 15 years working in the video game industry at companies including Electronic Arts and Activision, he moved into philanthropy work at Zynga.org and Harmony Project Bay Area before joining MIRI in July 2016. He has a master’s degree in AI from the University of Rochester and a joint honours bachelor’s in Mathematics and Computer Science. Colm is also a professional violinist and composer.  

All of the new and existing board members are committed to helping us make our work as impactful as possible. We look forward to working with them, and we hope you will join us in welcoming them to the team.

Donor Briefing 06/2019

Looking forward to seeing many of you at EA Global in San Francisco! We will have exactly 14 Rethink Charity employees heading to the conference. Hope you enjoy this briefing. 

Project Headlines – The Rethink Charity Board of Directors gets a makeover, Rethink Grants soon to reveal their first evaluation, LEAN publicly releases the new EA Hub, RC Forward releases a full cost-effectiveness analysis and 2018 in Review, Rethink Priorities delivers on several research publications, and SHIC suspends operations. 

Customize your briefing – Each of our projects are launching their own quarterly briefing. Please click on the relevant links if you would like to subscribe to receive donor briefings from Rethink Priorities, RC Forward, and LEAN. 

Financials Snapshot* – $USD

Full RC Briefing

Project Updates

Rethink Charity Overview

Rethink Charity projects continue to swap expertise and resources increasingly as separate collaborating entities, aligning with the trend outlined in our previous briefing of each project becoming appropriately autonomous while continuing to benefit from a consolidated administrative system. As opposed to conducting work on behalf of RC, projects are now operating under their own separate branding, often crediting one another in publication. For example, Neil Dullighan and Rethink Priorities were credited in the recent cost-effectiveness estimate of RC Forward. You can expect similar collaboration patterns for upcoming EA Survey posts and EA Hub feature developments. 

RC senior leadership have been taking more action on building out governance and accountability infrastructure. These efforts include the induction of five new Rethink Charity Foundation board members, the creation of specific oversight committees within the board (e.g. executive committee and budget committee), and the formation of internal Objective and Key Result (OKR) committees aimed at monitoring progress on stated goals and associated deadlines. 

Board Impact – See who joined the Rethink Charity Board of Directors here. 

Rethink Grants (RG)

• Rethink Grants will publish its first evaluation, which features a custom cost-effectiveness model and team assessment of the Donational project. 

• Public reception and a number of other factors will be crucial for a decision to run RG beyond the initial proof-of-concept. 

• The project could potentially manifest in several forms, including a handful of complete evaluations per year, or several shallow to medium-depth evaluations per year. 

RC Forward

• RC Forward jointly published a cost-effective analysis of RC Forward with Rethink Priorities that demonstrates the platform to be 3 to 55 times more cost-effective than donating directly to the charities that RC Forward supports. 

• The project released a year-in-review of 2018, which also outlines plans for the rest of 2019. 

• RC Forward distributed $180,101.22 CAD to high-impact charities from donations made in Quarter 1 of 2019

Rethink Priorities (RP)

• Peter Hurford will be delivering a talk about ballot initiatives at the EA Global SF conference.

• Rethink Priorities published many reports on the EA Forum: a massive review of sentience in invertebrates, EA growth metrics, wild animal life history, the life history of herbivorous insects. We also started our analysis of risks from nuclear war with more to come over the next week.

• The EA Survey 2018 series concluded with analysis of EA retention and GWWC pledge retention. RP has also put out a call for input on constructing the upcoming 2019 EA Survey. 

• Over the next month, RP will release reports on ballot initiatives as a pathway toward passing policy endorsed by effective altruism and the cost-effectiveness of corporate campaigns for broiler and cage-free reforms. 

The Local Effective Altruism Network (LEAN)

• Having successfully launched the Effective Altruism Hub, LEAN is now focused on building new features to serve the EA community, while also tightening up the technical foundations and security of the platform.

• Next in queue is the projects feature, allowing community members to publicly collaborate with others on independent initiatives 

• We welcomed Catherine Low (formerly of SHIC) to the LEAN team to work on the resources feature. 

• LEAN recently wrapped up administering the Local Groups Survey (LGS) in partnership with the Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA). Results to be released in the near future. 

Students for High-Impact Charity (SHIC)

• SHIC collaborated with other similar projects and initiatives to create a cumulative summary of high school outreach.

• The SHIC team reviewed their 2018 programs and explained why outreach operations were suspended.

From the winddown post –  “2018 saw strong uptake, but difficulty securing long-term engagement – Within a year of instructor-led workshops, we presented 106 workshops, reaching 2,580 participants at 40 (mostly high school) institutions. We experienced strong student engagement and encouraging feedback from both teachers and students. However, we struggled in getting students to opt into advanced programming, which was our behavioral proxy for further engagement.”

What’s Next

RC will soon be fundraising across all projects after the close of the EA Global conference. Please get in touch if you would like to invest in the growth of these projects! You can do this by replying to this briefing or emailing Tee at tee@rtcharity.org.