EA San Francisco Needs a New Lead Organizer — EA Forum
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EA San Francisco Organizers
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This post is primarily a community organizing call-to-action rather than a technical or policy analysis resource; relevant mainly to those interested in EA community building in AI-heavy regions.
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Summary
A call for a new lead organizer for EA San Francisco, emphasizing the group's unique position in the AI development hub of SF and its potential for high-impact work on neglected topics like AI welfare and space governance. The outgoing organizer argues the role requires minimal time commitment but offers significant counterfactual impact, as the group would likely become dormant without a replacement.
Key Points
- •EA SF is uniquely positioned due to San Francisco's status as an AI development hub with a concentrated population of EA-adjacent individuals.
- •The lead organizer role requires less than 5 hours per week for a basic version, making it accessible to those with other commitments.
- •The group's theory of change focuses on neglected topics like AI welfare and space governance, and cross-disciplinary collaboration.
- •Without a new organizer, the group would likely cease operations, giving the role significant counterfactual impact.
- •The outgoing organizer is departing to work on AI policy in Washington DC.
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# EA San Francisco Needs a New Lead Organizer
By EA San Francisco Organizers
Published: 2026-01-05
TLDR: I'm leaving San Francisco to do policy in DC within a few months. As the lead organizer of EA SF, it's likely the group will go dormant if no one takes on this role. However, EA SF is uniquely situated to be a potentially very high impact city group, due to its location in an AI development hub with a high concentration of EA-adjacent people. Thus, becoming lead organizer would be extremely counterfactually impactful - no one else would do it if not you. Furthermore, this role doesn't require much work (a minimal version can be done with less than 5h/wk). If you're located in San Francisco, Berkeley, or the Peninsula, and you're interested in helping out, please reach out.
EA SF's Theory of Change
------------------------
Attention from within the EA community itself has shifted away from EA qua EA and towards pure AI safety. So why run an EA group in 2026?
There are a few reasons (which I partially borrow from [https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/R8AAG4QBZi5puvogR/effective-altruism-in-the-age-of-agi](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/R8AAG4QBZi5puvogR/effective-altruism-in-the-age-of-agi)):
1. **You can incentivize work on neglected topics.** There are several that would be ignored by pure AI safety groups trying to be legible and respectable to the broader public, and don't really have a home elsewhere. I'm talking about things like AI welfare, space governance, and utilitarian philosophy.
2. **You can incentivize cross-disciplinary work. **Because EA lies at the intersection of several other groups like rationality, animal welfare, AI safety, and global health and development, there is a lot of room to engage people from all of those spheres and promote cross-disciplinary collaborations which otherwise wouldn't have happened.
3. **You can cultivate EA virtues** (truth seeking, scope sensitivity, and altruism) in people who will be impactful in the future. People are naturally incentivized to follow their peers. By bringing together people who are high in these traits, you incentivize virtuous behavior through the example of others, in a way that wouldn't happen in a pure AI safety group.
The question now becomes: is it tractable to achieve this through a city group? I think so. Some of our pathways to impact are shared with other EA city groups, but we also have pathways largely unavailable to other groups.
The two standard pathways to impact that I think EA SF executes on are:
1. We aim to engage and eventually recruit promising people to work on the world's most pressing problems. We have a publicly accessible website and post our events on public forums like EA Forum and Lesswrong to engage people who might be interested in attending events. We do 1:1s with people who are interested.
2. We connect people trying to work on important problems to people and opportunities that might be able to help them, and thus
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