EA - EA Philippines' Progress in 2022 by Elmerei Cuevas

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 Philippines' Progress in 2022 , published by Elmerei Cuevas on February 8, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.2022 has been a productive year for EA Philippines. In this report, we would like to present our accomplishments and points for improvement for the duration of our 2022 EA Infrastructure Fund grant. We hope that through this report, we are able to inform the wider EA community about the progress and potential of EA Community Building in the Philippines.Parts I-VI are approximately a ~12 minute read. The appendix is approximately a ~16 minute read.I. Funding Received and Financial SummaryIn February 2022, EA PH received a total grant of $89,350 from the EA Infrastructure Fund, for 1 year of 2.32 FTE salary split across 5 to do community building work for EA Philippines + our student chapters.This was how we intended the grant to be split:Person / Budget ItemElmer CuevasFull-Time Community BuilderRed BermejoPart-Time Community BuilderBrian TanPart-Time Community BuilderJanai BarilPart-Time Communications & Events AssociateTanya QuijanoPart-Time Health & Dev't Community BuilderEA Philippines General Grant FundingRoleAvg. EA PH FTE from Feb 2022 to Jan 20230.940.500.490.250.152 Months Buffer / Runway(i.e. if we have delays in our grant application or fundraising for the period after this grant)We generally followed this split, and the team worked roughly at the FTE hours allotted to them, except for Brian. He reduced his FTE gradually at EA PH since he transitioned to working full-time at CEA. He now works just 0.1 FTE as an adviser for EA Philippines, and averaged 0.21 FTE over the year for EA PH. His grant was reduced proportionally, and starting November 2022, Althy Cendaña started as a 0.5 FTE community builder for EA Philippines using the leftover money from Brian’s grant, with the approval of the EAIF.However, some months within the year required more work hours from the original FTE hours allotment. Hence, for the next grant application, we realized the need to increase FTE allotment for certain roles. Breakdown of the General Grant Funding of $6,500 can be found in the Appendix.II. Theory of Change used for Grant Period 2022-2023The document linked above was last updated in Sept 2021 but became the rough basis for the goals for this current EAIF grant. We have started to revisit this ToC for the 2023 cycle.We chose to focus on getting people into higher engagement categories. The Engagement Category Targets were as follows:Create at least 4 new highly engaged EAs (as defined by CEA here)Get at least an additional 6 people to reach category 4 of EA engagement, based on the community building grant EA engagement categories (linked here if you’re not familiar with them:)Get at least an additional 17 people to reach category 3 of EA engagement (100 hours learning about EA)Get at least an additional 29 people to reach category 2 of EA engagement (50 hrs learning about EA.Results of the Community Growth are in the next section.III. Growth in EA PH Community Membership as of December 2022As communicated in our approved grant application, below are our tentative high-level outcomes that we ended up using for the grant period, and our target completion as of January 18, 2023. .Rating the engagement category was done subjectively but informed by factoring in the fellowships, events, reading groups, 1:1s, conferences attended by members, personal EA content reading based on community surveys to contribute to hours of engagement, and volunteer, internships and career plans made. These numbers may be off by 5-10%, but currently is the best way we quantify these categories.Highly Engaged EA (Very good understanding of EA + taken significant action)4 (100+ hrs of EA content engagement + EA played major role in their choice of current job...