The Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) is an Oxford-based organisation that builds and supports the
effective altruism
Effective altruism (EA) is a 21st-century philosophical and social movement that advocates impartially calculating benefits and prioritizing causes to provide the greatest good. It is motivated by "using evidence and reason to figure out how to b ...
community. It was founded in 2012 by
William MacAskill and
Toby Ord, both philosophers at the
University of Oxford
The University of Oxford is a collegiate university, collegiate research university in Oxford, England. There is evidence of teaching as early as 1096, making it the oldest university in the English-speaking world and the List of oldest un ...
. CEA is part of Effective Ventures, a federation of projects working to have a large positive impact in the world.
History
CEA's founding was prompted by the need to set up an umbrella organization under which
Giving What We Can and
80,000 Hours could be incorporated. In late 2011, the members of those two organizations met to discuss how this new entity should be named, and the name "Centre for Effective Altruism" was adopted. At the time, the movement that would later be called "
effective altruism
Effective altruism (EA) is a 21st-century philosophical and social movement that advocates impartially calculating benefits and prioritizing causes to provide the greatest good. It is motivated by "using evidence and reason to figure out how to b ...
" did not yet have a standard name—terms common back then included "optimal philanthropy" and "rational altruism"—and this was the first time the term "effective altruism" was used in its current sense. CEA was registered as a charity the following year.
In 2015 and 2016, CEA incorporated several projects, including
Effective Altruism Global and Giving What We Can, and began to function as a centralized organization, rather than merely as an umbrella.
Sam Bankman-Fried joined CEA as director of development in late 2017, leaving shortly thereafter to fund Alameda Research. In 2018, CEA launched a new version of the Effective Altruism Forum, based on the
LessWrong codebase.
In 2022, the division of CEA providing operations support and fiscal sponsorship to several projects changed its name to "Effective Ventures". The rest of CEA now operates as one of Effective Ventures’ many projects, which besides Giving What We Can and 80,000 Hours, include EA Funds, the Forethought Foundation, the Centre for the Governance of AI, Longview Philanthropy, Asterisk, Atlas Fellowship, and Non-trivial. CEA continues to pursue its mission to build and nurture a global community of people who are thinking carefully about the world's biggest problems and taking impactful action to solve them.
In 2022, the Centre for Effective Altruism launched and fiscally sponsored Asterisk magazine as a quarterly magazine.
Activities
As of 2022, CEA's primary activities include organizing the
Effective Altruism Global conference series; building and maintaining the Effective Altruism Forum and the effective altruism landing page; funding and advising hundreds of effective altruism groups across the world; and preserving the effective altruism community's ability to grow and produce value in the future by building a healthy intellectual culture and an inclusive community.
CEA's offices are in Trajan House, a building that also accommodates many other organizations connected with the effective altruism movement, including the Forethought Foundation, the Centre for the Governance of AI, the Global Challenges Project, and the Global Priorities Institute; the latter is also part of the
University of Oxford
The University of Oxford is a collegiate university, collegiate research university in Oxford, England. There is evidence of teaching as early as 1096, making it the oldest university in the English-speaking world and the List of oldest un ...
.
CEA's budget for the year 2021 was $28 million.
See also
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Effective altruism
Effective altruism (EA) is a 21st-century philosophical and social movement that advocates impartially calculating benefits and prioritizing causes to provide the greatest good. It is motivated by "using evidence and reason to figure out how to b ...
*
80,000 Hours
*
Giving What We Can
*
Effective Altruism Global
*
Impact investing
References
External links
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{{Effective altruism
Charities based in Oxfordshire
2012 establishments in England
Organizations associated with effective altruism