EA - CEA's work in 2022 by MaxDalton

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: CEA's work in 2022, published by MaxDalton on December 21, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.CEA and the EA community have both grown and changed a lot in the year since our last org-wide update. We (the CEA Executive Office team) have written this post to update the community on the work CEA has done in 2022.What is CEA?CEA (The Centre for Effective Altruism) is dedicated to nurturing a community of people who are thinking carefully about the world’s biggest problems and taking impactful action to solve them. We hope that this community can help to build a radically better world: so far it has helped to save over 150,000 lives, reduced the suffering of millions of farmed animals, and begun to address some of the biggest risks to humanity’s future.We do this by helping people to consider their ideas, values and options for and about helping, connecting them to advisors and experts in relevant domains, and facilitating high-quality discussion spaces. Our hope is that this helps people find an effective way to contribute that is a good fit for their skills and inclinations.We do this by...Running EA Global conferences and supporting community-organized EAGx conferences.Funding and advising hundreds of local effective altruism groups.Building and moderating the EA Forum, an online hub for discussing the ideas of effective altruism.Supporting community members through our community health team.We also produce the Effective Altruism Newsletter, which goes out to more than 50,000 subscribers, and run EffectiveAltruism.org, which hosts a collection of recommended resources.Attendees at EAG London in AprilOur priority is helping people who have heard about EA to deeply understand the ideas, and to find opportunities for making an impact in important fields. We think that top-of-funnel growth is likely already at or above healthy levels, so rather than aiming to increase the rate any further, we want to make that growth go well. (This is a shift from our thinking in 2021. The main reason for this shift is that we think that the growth rate of EA increased sharply in 2022.)You can read more about our strategy here, including how we make some of the key decisions we are responsible for, and a list of things we are not focusing on. One thing to note: we do not think of ourselves as having or wanting control over the EA community. We believe that a wide range of ideas and approaches are consistent with the core principles underpinning EA, and encourage others to identify and experiment with filling gaps left by our work.Our legal structureCEA is, like Giving What We Can, 80,000 Hours and a bunch of other projects, a project of the Effective Ventures group — the umbrella term for EVF (a UK registered charity) and CEA USA Inc. (a US registered charity), which are separate legal entities which work together.(We know the US charity name is confusing! To make matters even more complicated, until recently EVF was also known as CEA — that confusion is why EVF changed its name.)2022 in summary2022 was a year of continued growth for CEA and our programs.What went well?Growth of our key public-facing programsMany of our programs scaled up very rapidly, while maintaining (in our opinion) roughly constant quality.Some examples of this (with more examples and details below):Events: The number of connections made at our events grew by around 5x this year, which should help many more people find a way to contribute to important problems.Online: Engagement on the EA Forum grew by around 2.9x, helping the spread of important new ideas and richness of discussion.Groups: 208 organizers went through our University Groups Accelerator Program (10x growth for a new program starting from a low base), receiving 8 weeks of mentorship designed to accelerate EA journeys for organ...