Effective Altruism in
Aotearoa New Zealand

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.

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.

We think that 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.