EA - Brief Updates on EAIF by hbesceli

The Nonlinear Library

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: Brief Updates on EAIF, published by hbesceli on September 12, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.
I'm Harri, a Fund Manager at EAIF. This post includes some brief updates on EAIF, an overview of what I'm working on there, and some reflections.
Tl;dr
Main updates on EAIF:
Alejandro Ortega, Jamie Harris and I have joined the team
We're happy with our principles-first focus, and aren't currently planning on further clarifying this at the moment
Things that I'm working on:
My main focus is ensuring we're meeting deadlines for responding to applicants
We're conducting a retrospective evaluation of our past grants
I'm thinking about how we can get better at evaluating applications
I'm aiming to get a better understanding of what it is for EA to thrive
Alejandro Ortega, Jamie Harris and I have joined the team
In February 2024, the people working at EAIF were Caleb Parikh and Tom Barnes. Since then Alejandro Ortega, Jamie Harris and I have all joined the team.
Caleb is the EA Funds Project Lead, and the EAIF Chair. Alejandro, Jamie and Tom are all Fund Managers. They work at ~5h/w on EAIF and largely focus on assessing incoming applications. I'm also a Fund Manager and work at EAIF at ~20h/w, and am the main person with the capacity to focus on EAIF work beyond assessing applications, though I do a bunch of that too.
(Whilst Caleb is still currently the EAIF Chair, I've been taking on more of the Chair responsibilities over time. There's a good chance that I'll take on this role fully soon but we haven't decided on this yet)
We're happy with our principles-first focus, and aren't currently planning on further clarifying this at the moment
In December 2023 EAIF posted
EA Infrastructure Fund's Plan to Focus on Principles-First EA, which included a tentative plan for next steps such as 'Scope out vision more and define metrics more clearly'.
We don't have more updates on this vision at the moment, and aren't currently prioritising further work on it. I'm a bit conflicted about this. On the one hand, I think one of the main challenges for EAIF is knowing what kind of grantmaking to focus on, and I expect having a more developed vision to help with that. I also expect it to make it clearer for people whether it's something they want to donate to.
On the other hand, I think that the post does a good job of describing our current focus, and I'm more excited on us spending marginal capacity on a) getting a better concrete sense of what the EA community needs and what opportunities there are, and b) doing more active grantmaking related to this. I think that doing these things will both mean that we're making more valuable grants, and will help us more in terms of getting clarity on our focus.
*CEA recently published a
post on their "principles-first" approach to EA. I expect there's a lot of similarities between this and EAIF's focus, though we're not committed to this vision specifically.
My main focus is ensuring we're meeting deadlines for responding to applicants
My main aim at the moment is ensuring that we're meeting commitments to applicants in terms of responding to them with timely decisions. This is something EAIF has struggled with historically, and something we think it's important we're doing well. A big focus of my work so far with EAIF has been redesigning parts of the evaluation process so that we're meeting these commitments.
We're conducting a retrospective evaluation of EAIF's past grants
Alex Barry is working with EAIF to conduct a retrospective evaluation of EAIFs grants, and we're planning on making a version of this public. We expect this to focus on answering:
How valuable are the grants? What does the distribution of the value of the grants look like?
What are the concrete outcomes that have happened as a result of the grants?
What should EAIF be doing dif...