EA - EA NYC’s Community Health Infrastructure by Rockwell

Link to original articleWelcome 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: EA NYC’s Community Health Infrastructure, published by Rockwell on February 3, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Written by Alex Rahl-Kaplan (EA NYC Community Coordinator), Megan Nelson (EA NYC Community Health Coordinator), and Rockwell Schwartz (EA NYC Director).The mission of EA NYC is to support the growth and success of the effective altruism community in New York City and beyond by fostering a welcoming, inspiring, and productive hub that serves those aiming to do the most good. In support of this mission, over the course of 2022, the team at EA NYC worked to scale our community health infrastructure. The EA NYC team believes that strong community health is a priority and a crucial component of achieving our collective aims. We also believe our investment in community health to date has been fruitful and we intend to continue to prioritize and expand our community health infrastructure, as there are ever-evolving community needs and always room for improvement.In this post, we outline what the EA NYC team has been doing over the past year to support the health of our local EA community. We encourage other EA communities to consider creating similar infrastructure and we are happy to serve as a resource and partner in such efforts. We also welcome feedback and would love to learn from others as we continuously strive to make EA a safer and more inclusive community.Paid, Part-Time Community Health Coordinator HiredIn April 2022, EA NYC hired Megan Nelson as a paid, part-time Community Health Coordinator through the CEA Community Building Grants program.Megan’s Background: Megan is a licensed master social worker in New York State with a decade of experience serving individuals, families, and groups. She became involved in EA before it was EA, after reading The Life You Can Save upon its publication in 2009.Megan’s Role: Megan advises the EA NYC team on sustainable community growth, and is available as a point-person for those who have concerns related to the NYC EA community. Megan serves as a confidential, supportive resource. You can email her here, or contact her anonymously here.Megan also helps coordinate NYC Community Builders monthly dinners (discussed below), gave presentations at EAG DC and EAGxBerkeley on self-care and burnout, organized group accommodations for EAGxBoston 2022, spoke at a university groups retreat, was a volunteer facilitator for EA NYU’s Spring 2022 Intro Fellowship, and co-leads EA NYC's new Women and Non-Binary subgroup (discussed below). Megan played a central role in the creation of guidelines for the potential future NY EA coworking space and a fair and balanced system for vetting potential users.Publicizing Megan’s Existence: EA NYC publicizes the existence of the Community Health Coordinator through our website, monthly newsletter, and all community surveys. We also explain the role during our events (at which Megan is often present) and encourage the community to utilize Megan as a resource.EA NYC CH vs. CEA CH: The EA NYC team continues to utilize and work with CEA’s Community Health Team and the EA NYC Community Health Coordinator role should be viewed as an additional resource to, rather than a replacement for, CEA’s CH work. By having multiple point-people available, we hope to offer our community members more options for reporting their concerns as well as a consistent, local resource.Weekly Community Health All-Team CallsOnce a week, the EA NYC team has a 45-to-60-minute Community Health call. We created this dedicated weekly meeting in order to keep community health front-and-center in our decision-making and programming. During these calls, the Community Health Coordinator, Community Coordinator, and Director discuss a range of topics that are largely proactive, rather than reactive to existing issues. C...