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: CEA update: Q1 2021, published by MaxDalton on the Effective Altruism Forum. This is a linkpost for This update covers CEA's work in the first quarter of 2021. Background Our mission is to build a community of students and professionals acting on EA principles, by creating and sustaining high-quality discussion spaces. In 2019, we focused on stabilizing the organization and improving execution. In 2020, we clarified and narrowed our scope (by setting strategy and spinning off Funds and GWWC). In 2021, we are focused on working towards our annual goals, as well as growing our team. Program progress These are brief summaries; you can find more details for each program further down in this post. Groups Support We had around 100 calls and 120 in-depth email / Slack exchanges with group leaders. We received positive feedback on the calls (average likelihood to recommend >9/10). We increased 1:1 support for highly-ranked university groups, and helped to seed a group at Georgetown University. Fellowships We worked with Emma Abele (a contractor and CBG recipient) and EA groups at Oxford and Stanford to set up virtual fellowships. We also hired a contractor to provide 1:1 support for groups running fellowships. The number of people attending a fellowship grew 3x quarter-on-quarter (according to our records - there may have been some underreporting last quarter. We expect there was substantial growth in any case.) We’re working with Max Daniel to develop a new curriculum for the In-Depth Fellowship. Enhanced support We’re trying out enhanced support for law students, Black and Hispanic/Latinx community members, and group organizers in areas where the movement is just beginning to grow. Community building grants: We made several renewal grants and several new grants. We are looking to expand our capacity in this area. Forum The number of hours people spent engaging with the Forum grew by 19% quarter-on-quarter, and we’re on track to exceed our target of doubling engagement time from 2020 to 2021. We published all content from the Introductory Fellowship[1] as a series of sequences on the Forum, which will make the Forum a better place to learn about EA. We’re hiring for a full-stack engineer to help us to develop features more quickly. We cross-posted a lot of old content (so that more high-quality content is searchable via the Forum), and began to build a wiki, in collaboration with Pablo Stafforini. Events (EA Global: Reconnect) EA Global: Reconnect was focused on building connections between existing highly-engaged community members. 850 people attended, and they booked about 7 meetings on average. We recorded more meetings than we did in all of 2020, though that’s partly due to a different system of measurement. Community health The team made good progress on a variety of small proactive projects, and continued to do reactive work on areas like media, interpersonal situations in the community, and reducing risk in spaces and locations where EA is newly developing. Expanding capacity My (Max’s) main focus in 2021 is on hiring. Reasons for this: Stable base: We now have funding, strategy, and management capacity to build on. Important areas: We think that EA survey data + program data suggests that we are operating in some extremely important areas (e.g. university groups, events). Room for growth: We’re still taking only a small fraction of the opportunities available in those areas. In Q1 we opened two rounds, for a finance lead and a full-stack engineer. We also began to redraft our careers page and made some improvements to our hiring process. We’re on track to open more rounds in Q2. Other progress We have secured enough funding to cover our next two years of operation and expansion. We have moved into our new Oxford office, improved our cybersecurity, and streamlined a ...