FAQs

Pātai Auau

General

  • If you’re on the fence about reporting a bad experience we strongly encourage you to report.

    Confidentiality is extremely important to us and we will respect any requests to remain anonymous or any other safeguards that you need. There are a few ways you can report a bad experience to us:

    • Email us directly at info@effectivealtruism.nz

    • For anonymous reporting you can use our anonymous feedback form.

    • Please note that while we look into and act on information received via the anonymous feedback form, we are not able to follow up with you specifically or send updates to you on specific actions we’ve taken unless you’re willing to share who you are.

    The community health team at the Centre for Effective Altruism manages any EA movement community health issues. If for any reason you have not been satisfied with our handling of a situation or would feel more comfortable talking about an issue to the community health team you should feel free to reach out to them.

  • Kiwis have been interested in effective altruism since the movement began. A semi-organised group started to form around 2015, and the charitable trust was incorporated in 2016.

  • That depends on how you count! We have over 1000 newsletter subscribers, hundreds of donors, and usually have around 30-60 people attend our annual retreats.

    We also have local meetup groups in most of the major cities.

  • Anyone who’s interested in effective altruism can benefit! Our community has a broad range of career, educational, and personal backgrounds and we strive to make it an inclusive and welcoming space for everyone. As long as you’re interested in engaging with EA ideas we’re excited to have you!

  • Not usually. We don’t claim to have the final answer to questions like which cause areas are most important or how to have the most impact within those areas. There are some general decisions we make following EA ideas, such as making sure the food we serve is vegan, or not spending too much money on unnecessary luxuries for events.

  • Not really. We don’t expect agreement about any specific ideas within effective altruism, or about the role effective altruism plays in your life.

    EA is a broad debate about where we can use money, time, and career capital to do the most good. There are no agreed-upon answers. A lot of EAs do tend to agree with some specific ideas, like “factory farming is a big ethical problem” or “advanced AI may pose an existential risk to humanity,” but we don’t want you to feel any social obligation to believe these. We agree with Helen Toner’s forum post about EA being a question, not an ideology, and do not want our members to feel any social pressure to take on specific beliefs about how to do the most good.

    We ask that our community be open to debate about where we can do the most good. Our members have varying perspectives and answers to these questions and strongly value debating them to reach deeper levels of understanding. We value and support any and all critical perspectives on mainstream EA ideas as long as they are expressed and debated in good faith and respectfully by all sides.

  • Our activities are funded in various different ways. Many are run completely voluntarily. Our operations manager and some of our local group leaders have received funding from Effective Ventures for their work.

    The operating costs for our donation programmes (e.g. accounting costs, software, transfer fees etc.) are covered by private donors.

Donations

  • You can claim your tax rebate on the IRD website— all you’ll need is a myIRD logon and your donation receipts. We have a step-by-step guide to the process here.

  • Private donors cover all transaction fees, so 100% of your donation reaches the organisation you support.

    We also take steps to minimise transaction fees in the first place. For example, we collect donations via direct bank transfer to avoid credit card fees. Then, when we distribute the money to our charity partners, we pool donations together to minimise international transfer costs.

  • Unfortunately, we don’t currently have the resources to assess the effectiveness of NZ-based charities. We rely on the work of external charity evaluators like GiveWell in choosing our partners, and they generally haven’t assessed any NZ organisations either.

    Philosophically, we tend to think that it’s more effective to give internationally, at least when it comes to helping human beings.

    If you wanted to do your own research on which NZ charities to support, we’d recommend using the scale, neglectedness and solvability framework. (And we’d love to hear your conclusions!)

  • We rely primarily on research from external charity evaluators like GiveWell. However, we also also draw on expert advice and the broader principles of the effective altruism movement in our selection process.

    You can see our full selection criteria here.

  • Instructions for updating or cancelling your donation are available here.

    Please feel free to manage your donation however is best for you. We never want our donors to feel pressured to give, especially if it would cause them any hardship.

Other

  • Probably not, sorry. We facilitate tax-deductible donations to selected partner organisations, but we don’t make grants or provide funding outside of this.

    If you think your organisation meets our partner criteria, you can nominate yourself here, and we’ll consider you in our next review. However, the bar is high, and it’s fairly rare for us to add a new organisation.

    If you’re a NZ-based charity looking for funding, we recommend you consult the givUS database, which collates more than 1,200 funding opportunities. Most council libraries subscribe to givUS on behalf of ratepayers, so you should be able to access the database for free via your local library.

  • If you have questions (or just want to chat about effective altruism) feel free to reach out to us at info@effectivealtruism.nz, or book a 1-on-1 video call with our team.