EA - Community Health & Special Projects: Updates and Contacting Us by evemccormick

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Community Health & Special Projects: Updates and Contacting Us, published by evemccormick on May 10, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.SummaryWe’ve renamed our team to Community Health and Special Projects, in part to reflect our scope extending beyond what’s often considered to be “community health.”Since our last forum update, we’ve started working closely with Fynn Heide as an affiliate, along with Anu Oak and Łukasz Grabowski as contractors. Chana Messinger has been acting as interim team lead, while Nicole Ross has been focused on EV US board duties.In response to reports of sexual misconduct by Owen Cotton-Barratt, an external investigation into our team’s response is underway, as well as an internal review.Other key proactive projects we’ve been working on include the Gender Experiences project and the EA Organization Reform project.We are in the early stages of considering some significant strategic changes for our team. We’ve highlighted two examples of possible changes below, one being a potential spin-out of CEA and/or EV and another being a pivot to focus more on the AI safety space.As a reminder, if you’ve experienced anything you’re uncomfortable with in the community or if you would like to report a concern, you can reach our team’s contact people (currently Julia Wise and Catherine Low) via this form (anonymously if you choose).We can also be contacted individually (our individual forms are linked here), or you can contact the whole team at community.health.special.projects@centreforeffectivealtruism.org.We can provide anonymous, real-time conversations in place of calls when requested, e.g. through Google Chat with your anonymous email address.The Community Health team is now Community Health and Special ProjectsWe decided to rename our team to better reflect the scope of our work. We’ve found that when people think of our team, they mostly think of us as working on topics like mental health and interpersonal harm. While these areas are a central part of our work, we also work on a wide range of other things, such as advising on decisions with significant potential downside risk, improving community epistemics, advising programs working with minors, and reducing risks in areas with high geopolitical risk.We see these other areas of work as contributing to our goal: to strengthen the ability of EA and related communities to fulfil their potential for impact, and to address problems that could prevent that. However, those areas of work can be quite disparate, and so “Special Projects” seemed an appropriate name to gesture towards “other miscellaneous things that seem important and may not have a home somewhere else.”We hope that this might go some way to encouraging people to report a wider range of concerns to our team.Our scope of work is guided by pragmatism: we aim to go wherever there are important community-related gaps not covered by others and try to make sure the highest priority gaps are filled. Where it seems better than the counterfactual, we sometimes try to fill those gaps ourselves. That means that our scope is both very broad and not always clear, and also that there will be plenty of things we don’t have the capacity or the right expertise to have fully covered. If you’re thinking of working on something you think we might have some knowledge about, the meme we want to spread is “loop us in, but don’t assume it’s totally covered or uncovered.” If we can be helpful, we’ll give advice, recommend resources or connect you with others interested in similar work.Team changesHere’s our current team:Nicole Ross (Head of Community Health and Special Projects)Julia Wise (Community Liaison)Catherine Low (Community Health Associate)Chana Messinger (Interim Head and Community Health Analyst)Eve McCormick (Community Health Pr...