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: EA Germany's 2023 Report, 2024 Plans & Funding Gap, published by Patrick Gruban on December 8, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

In this post, we'll report on our activities in 2023, outline our plans for 2024, and show our room for funding.

Summary

EA Germany (EAD) acts as an umbrella organisation for the German EA community, the third largest national community and biggest in continental Europe, according to the

2022 EA survey.

The non-profit transitioned from volunteer-run to having a five-person team (4 FTEs) that focused in the first full year on talent development, community building support, and general community support. EAD ran successful programs like the EAGxBerlin, an intro program, and community builder retreats while also offering an employer of record service and fiscal sponsorship. In total, more than 1,000 people joined events and programs, while 4,000 received the monthly newsletter. We tried out five new programs in a hits-based approach and will continue with two of these.

For 2024, we refined our Theory of Change and plan to target people interested in global catastrophic risks (GCR) and professionals who could make direct career changes in addition to EA-interested people and community builders. We aim to expand into AI safety field building, running targeted programs for those with specialised skills with programs such as professional AI safety outreach or creating an AI safety website. We plan to test additional new programs, including establishing a virtual Germany-focused EA group, proactively recommending job opportunities, running new volunteer programs, a policy program, and starting media outreach to engage different target groups.

We currently face a

funding gap of 37,000 and seek donations to fill this gap.

About EA Germany (EAD)

We are a registered non-profit organisation with a

team of five people (4 FTE), and are currently funded by grants from CEA (Community Builder Grants program) and Open Philanthropy Effective Altruism Community Growth (Global Health and Wellbeing) via a regranting from

Effektiv Spenden. A six-member board provides oversight and advice.

We have >100 members but act as an umbrella organisation for the whole German EA community, including people in and from Germany interested in the ideas of EA.

There are 27 active local groups with 5-50 active members each (the biggest

according to the last EA Survey being Berlin, Munich and Aachen). In total, >300 people are regularly active in local groups.

Based on the

2022 EA survey, Germany was the 3rd largest national EA community and the biggest in continental Europe and had as many respondents as the next four countries by size (Netherlands, Switzerland, France, and Norway) combined.

Impact Report 2023

In 2023, we spent most of our time on

talent development, community building support, general community support, and the setup of EAD. In addition, we

explored some new programs.

Core Activities: Finding and Retaining Members

To develop talents, we guided people through a

funnel from

Communications (600 monthly users on the website, 3,900 subscribers of the monthly newsletter, >450 EAD Slack users),

the intro program (100 applications each for two iterations, 60 successful participants in summer, winter program only starting now) and a following

weekend-retreat ("EAD retreat", four retreats, 200 participants in total),

the EAGxBerlin (550 participants)

to more impactful actions.

To guide people indirectly to impactful action, we supported community builders in Germany via

two retreats (60 participants in total),

monthly calls for all organisers (~15 participants each),

1-1s (at least 2/year, we talked with >50 organisers/teams of 29 groups), and

resources like presentations, templates (used by ~50 % of groups).

We also support the community overall with

an employer of r...