EA - Writing about my job: Co-founder of a new charity (early stage) by SofiaBalderson

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: Writing about my job: Co-founder of a new charity (early stage), published by SofiaBalderson on September 13, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Tl;dr: This is my very personal take on what it's like to start and run a self-started charity. This job can be very interesting, fun, and high impact, but it's also very challenging and it's not for everyone.Acknowledgments:Thanks to Allison Agnello, Christina Schmidt Ibanez and Constance Li for your valuable feedback and suggestions!What's my current job and how I got here:Co-founder of Impactful Animal Advocacy (IAA) - an ecosystem of community, knowledge, and tools that supports a more coordinated and strategic animal advocacy movement.I started this as a volunteer project in June 2022, first with a monthly newsletter then expanding to include a Slack community. Last month, I decided to work on IAA full-time after seeing significant community growth and a path for counterfactual impact.Who is this post foPeople who are interested in starting a charity or people who are curious about what it's like.As a relatively recent charity founder, I can make comparisons between what is a "normal job" and this job (while it's relatively fresh in my head).Because my charity does community building, I speak to many people about their work and plans, and some advocates are considering starting their own organization. I hope this will help you evaluate whether the job is for you, and should you decide to start a new organization, you'll be all the more prepared for it.What's the job aboutYou start, build, and run the charity. Because it's likely that it will just be you or your co-founder(s), you'll be doing a lot of different things (more about this below). This is a senior management position and it's a lot of responsibility. However, it's different from senior roles in more established organizations in a couple of ways. For example, the variety of tasks you have to do (both high-level and admin work) is higher, there is a lot more uncertainty and risk, and a lot more freedom in which interventions to run and how to run them. Starting a charity could be one of the most impactful things you can do with your career if you're the right fit for it.Past job experiences that may helpMy most recent role was Head of Programmes at Animal Advocacy Careers. Before that, I was a Project Manager and a Partnership Manager at Veganuary where I took on various roles in management and marketing. I've also worked in a couple of start-ups which added to my entrepreneurial experience. All these roles combined have helped me a lot. The skills that help me most from my past experiences are bootstrapping projects, project and people management.On the whole, I don't think there is any set of experiences that are essential for this job. Each charity idea will have its own requirements and even the best co-founder pair won't have all of them. For example, if you start a charity in policy, experience in policy change is likely to make your job much easier, but there are still many other skills that you need to have to succeed. Looking at our community-building project, both my co-founder and I are very good at networking and relationship-building, which are key skills that our project needs. However, we are still learning many other skills that we need, like fundraising.Some founders succeed without any experience, often coming right out of college (Charity Entrepreneurship has incubated several orgs like this!). If you think this kind of role is a great personal fit, but you don't have much working experience, it might be worthwhile to trial or test. I started the newsletter as a volunteer project and it gave me one year of feedback before deciding to take the project full-time.What helps to do this role wellThere are a couple of paths to s...