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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: Seven (more) learnings from LEEP, published by ClareDonaldson on June 17, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. LEEP (Lead Exposure Elimination Project) is an impact-driven nonprofit founded in 2020 through Charity Entrepreneurship’s incubation program. Our mission is to eliminate childhood lead poisoning and improve the health, wellbeing and potential of children worldwide. Our primary focus so far has been to work with policy-makers and industry to ban lead paints. (You can find out more in our launch post or our blog.) In this post we share some updates and lessons learnt during LEEP’s second year, following on from last year’s post. As background, by the end of LEEP’s first year, we had started programs in three countries and had received one government commitment to lead paint regulation. In LEEP’s second year (this year), we started working in six more countries, bringing the total to nine. We received another government commitment and paint manufacturers in two countries started switching to lead-free. You can see most of our current projects here. We hope the lessons in this post will be useful to potential nonprofit entrepreneurs and those working in policy change or advocacy. In other news, we are hiring! You can find out more later in this post. 1. By running programs in parallel, policy advocacy organisations can avoid time bottlenecks and expand their impact faster There are often waiting times in advocacy. We’ve found that governments or industry partners need time to independently move forward with the next steps in the process, such as organising a multi-stakeholder meeting, reviewing a new law, or when new paint ingredients are in transit. These waiting periods would slow down overall progress, but that can be avoided by running programs in multiple countries in parallel – when progress is bottlenecked by waiting times in one country, we can be moving activities ahead in others. We expect this could be a useful approach for other new policy organisations after their pilot stage, as it allows impact to be scaled to multiple countries without sacrificing speed in any individual country. 2. A hybrid approach of remote and in-person is another factor that allows a small team to increase their speed In our first year we found that it was possible to make progress with remote advocacy. We’ve found this is still the case, even after countries opened up and in-person meetings were possible again. Remote advocacy can reduce time spent travelling and arranging formal visits with government partners. This speeds up our work and makes it easier for one team member to manage government and partner relationships in multiple countires. WhatsApp or Zoom meetings, in combination with WhatsApp messages and emails, have led to more progress than we previously expected. We experimented with having Zoom calls with policy-makers using an interpreter (French-English in Niger and Portuguese-English in Angola), which were more successful than we expected and we will include in our standard toolbox if no LEEP team member is fluent. Overall we find remote engagement to be an efficient complement to in-person advocacy. 3. In-person conversations have outsized value It’s important to dig into a theory of change to gain better information about which levers matter most and why. We would like to start eight new projects by the end of 2023 and be working in at least 40 countries in a few years; this makes it important to gain information quickly in order to rapidly scale with an efficient playbook. When seeking this information, we have found that a number of very valuable lessons have come from in-person time in our focus-countries, which could be because: It’s easier to build trust and have warmer relationships, which makes it easier to ask (potentially more sensitive) questions ...