EA - Inside the Mind of an Aspiring Charity Entrepreneur [Follow Along] #1 - From Layoff to Co-founding in a Breathtaking Two Months by Harry Luk

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: Inside the Mind of an Aspiring Charity Entrepreneur [Follow Along] #1 - From Layoff to Co-founding in a Breathtaking Two Months, published by Harry Luk on September 27, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.TL;DRI want to extend a MASSIVE, heartfelt thank you to the abundant resources put together by the EA community and the wonderful EAs who are so generous with their knowledge and time (even when talking to a complete newbie like me).Because of you, I went from being laid off in June and knowing nothing about EA in July, to being offered a nonprofit co-founder position in early September, to finishing some initial groundwork of setting up a charity (productivity system, Founder's agreement, funding proposal draft, etc) in late September.The initial groundwork implemented thus far were all influenced by the action steps found in How to Launch a High-Impact Nonprofit. Thus, this aims to be a post sequence dedicated to putting the book's concepts to work and showing some actual work examples.Hopefully with more of your support and feedback, the StakeOut.AI charity startup can keep a good steady pace and accomplish more crucial milestones in Oct and onwards.As this post is the intro of the sequence, it details more specifically my journey (learning and doing applications) - including important tips for other applicants (apply early, handling rejections) and some feedback for EA organizations taking applications (setup to process many applications, send responders a copy of their responses, informing those who didn't make the cut).I hope this brings value to the EA community as this is perspective from someone very green in EA, eager to take action quickly even though I came from a totally different world before.AcknowledgmentI would like to give a special thank you to Dr. Peter S. Park for editing this post and for all our future collaborations! There is also a I'm so grateful for everyone who has been a part of the journey thus far section later in this post.IntroductionHi, my name is Harry, it's nice to meet all of you. This post, my first ever post on the EA forum, is inspired by Three lessons I've learnt from starting a small EA org and Why and how to start a pilot project in EA - so thank you Ben Williamson.The purpose of this post is to [1] document my journey publicly (hopefully to inspire others who are thinking they want to start a side project, or apply to CE, or go down the path of charity entrepreneurship), [2] maximize feedback as per Ben's post (both directly through the post (in the comments) and indirectly (people who reach out privately with additional suggestions/ advice)), and [3] share key lessons & milestones to hopefully contribute to the forum via actual work examples.The hope is that it is going to be a follow along post sequence, as my co-founder Dr. Peter S. Park and I get our nonprofit startup up and running.Though the journey with EA has only been 2 months, I already have so many people to thank who have answered questions, provided feedback and pointed me in the right direction. I am forever grateful for you :)The Catalyst: The Layoff that Sparked My JourneyI first found out about Effective Altruism from my Google search about impactful tithing. As a Christian, I have been tithing 10% of my income for many years, but because I was laid off from shortage of work in my previous marketing role, I was interested in finding more impactful ways to give due to our now lowered family income.This is when I stumbled upon GivingMultiplier.org and was introduced to the idea of super-effective charities. I was intrigued by their approach where you can still give from the heart (your favorite charity), but at the same time incentivizes you to give more to super-effective charities by matching your donations (the higher % you give to super...