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Stewardship: CEA’s 2025-26 strategy to reach and raise EA’s ceiling
webAuthors
Zachary Robinson🔸·Oscar Howie
Credibility Rating
3/5
Good(3)Good quality. Reputable source with community review or editorial standards, but less rigorous than peer-reviewed venues.
Rating inherited from publication venue: EA Forum
Relevant to AI safety insofar as CEA's strategy shapes the EA ecosystem that funds and supports much of the AI safety research community; useful background for understanding EA organizational priorities and community health.
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227
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35
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eaforum
Forum Tags
Building effective altruismCommunityAnnouncements and updatesCentre for Effective AltruismEffective altruism fundingOrganization strategy
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Importance: 38/100blog postprimary source
Summary
The Centre for Effective Altruism outlines its 2025-26 'stewardship' strategy, committing to a principles-first approach to EA rather than cause-specific alignment. CEA aims to grow the EA community, improve its public reputation, diversify funding, and strengthen organizational independence to ensure long-term resilience.
Key Points
- •CEA adopts a 'stewardship' framing, taking greater responsibility for steering the EA community as a unified organization rather than fragmenting by cause area.
- •Key priorities include community growth, improving EA's brand reputation, and diversifying funding sources beyond a small number of major donors.
- •The strategy marks a shift from 2024's internal foundation-building phase toward active external community expansion.
- •Strengthening CEA's independence and operational capacity is identified as critical to EA's long-term resilience.
- •A principles-first approach is emphasized to keep EA broadly applicable across cause areas rather than becoming narrowly identified with specific issues.
Cited by 1 page
| Page | Type | Quality |
|---|---|---|
| EA and Longtermist Wins and Losses | -- | 53.0 |
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Stewardship: CEA’s 2025-26 strategy to reach and raise EA’s ceiling — EA Forum
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by Zachary Robinson🔸 , Oscar Howie 28th Mar 2025 15 min read 35 227
Building effective altruism Community Announcements and updates Centre for Effective Altruism Effective altruism funding Organization strategy Frontpage Stewardship: CEA’s 2025-26 strategy to reach and raise EA’s ceiling Exec summary What does stewardship mean for CEA? What does CEA’s stewardship mean in practice? Growing the EA community Improving the EA brand Diversifying EA funding Strengthening CEA Why bother? 35 comments “I” refers to Zach, the Centre for Effective Altruism 's CEO. Oscar is CEA’s Chief of Staff. We are grateful to all the CEA staff and community members who have contributed insightful input and feedback (directly and indirectly) during the development of our strategy and over many years. Mistakes are of course our own.
Exec summary
As one CEA , we are taking a principles-first approach to stewardship of the EA community.
During the search for a new CEO, the board and search committee were open to alternative strategic directions, but from the beginning of my tenure, we’ve committed to a strategy under which we will:
Operate as one CEA , rather than winding down, breaking up or renaming the organization. Instead of optimizing for each of our team’s programs, we’ll be optimizing for EA as a whole.
Take a principles-first approach to EA, rather than becoming an AI org or otherwise re-orienting ourselves to specific causes.
Take greater responsibility for stewardship of the EA community, rather than restricting ourselves to passively providing infrastructure and support. This post explores stewardship in greater detail.
Stewardship is about actors taking more responsibility for reaching and raising EA’s ceiling, and we believe CEA should play a leading role in steering, supporting and coordinating the community. Importantly, however, stewardship of EA is not ownership of EA: we don’t want to be the only leaders, and we do want a close collaboration with the community.
During 2024 we focussed on building strong foundations that CEA will require to succeed at stewarding the community, including making over 20 hires (having started the year with 34 staff) while cutting a quarter of our costs, and developing our strategy for 2025 and 2026, including by listening to and learning from members of the EA community during visits I made to over half a dozen countries and in more than 200 one-on-one meetings. I feel good about the foundations we built and having prioritized building them, but that came with a notable trade-off: during 2024, we explicitly deprioritized trying to grow the EA community.
That’s changing: our stewardship strategy for
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