Retreats and summits
▪️

Retreats and summits

Last updated: 23 September, 2024

1. What are retreats?

Retreats bring community members together for two or more days, typically outside  the city, to engage in EA activities together. The minimum viable product for a retreat is gathering EAs in the same location and ensuring that they have food - a lot of the value lies in this; providing a space for EAs to connect, share ideas and inspire each other. These events are organized by university, city, and national EA groups.

  • University EA Group Retreats (Uni Retreats): Smaller (15-25 attendees), generally open for everyone in the uni group, but sometimes with selective applications.
  • City & National EA Group Retreats (National Retreats): Larger (25-50+ attendees), with formal applications and often more experienced participants.

The retreat formats vary:

  • Unconferences: Informal, flexible, participant-driven event where attendees suggest and lead sessions based on their interests, giving them opportunity to develop skills like public speaking. These typically require less time for organizers to run.
  • Objective-focused Retreats: These retreats’ follows a common thread to achieve a goal. One example is a retreat for recent EA intro-fellowship graduates to help them make progress on their career plan.
  • Casual Retreats: Designed for attendees to have fun and deepen connections with fellow group members, outside the normal context of the group.

Some retreats invite external speakers which can have a significant impact, especially if they are in high impact positions, local role models or former members with successful EA-aligned careers.

2. Heuristics to keep in mind

Here are some heuristics for best practices we have come across from talking with retreat organizers and attendees. This is not an exclusive list:

  1. Venue and food: Below are some things to keep in mind when deciding venue and between catered and home-cooked food.
    • Optimize for coziness: The venue’s cost matters less than the atmosphere. Prioritize coziness over top-quality: consider simple touches to make a cheaper venue feel homely (e.g. light some candles).
    • Cooking together: Attendees usually enjoy the atmosphere that comes from cooking together, but ensure everyone contributes to prevent feelings of “free-riding”.
    • Optics of luxury in EA: If the only available venue is expensive or seems luxurious, consider informing the attendees of your choice. A common concern among attendees is whether the funding of the retreat could be used to create more impact.
  2. Content: These are some content-heuristics we would be excited to see more organizers focus on.
    • Intention-setting: Set clear, meaningful intentions for the retreat and share with the attendees, to create a space aligned to your goals. For example, if the retreat's purpose is to foster community, an intention might be to build deeper relationships by being open, welcoming new members, to get the attendees to reflect on how the community can be improved.
    • Deeper connections: Prioritize activities that encourage authentic connections. Include a mix of scheduled and unscheduled social events with activities that promote meaningful conversations or shared experiences (e.g. ice-breakers, physical activities or collaborative games).
    • Actionable outputs: Having content like workshops with clear, tangible outcomes can motivate attendees and can prompt them to reflect on the role of EA in their life. One example is a career-planning workshop with defined ‘next steps’ to follow up on after the retreat.
  3. During retreat: Below are some aspects to keep in mind for being an organizer during the retreat.
    • “Good enough”: It is generally more important to enjoy the event as an organizer than to stress over every logistical detail.
    • Inclusion and good vibes:

Focus on creating a good atmosphere in the group and focus your energy towards ensuring that no one feels alone during the retreat.

3. How to run a retreat

For a simple overview of suggested tasks to be done, see this template. Under follows the most essential points with some further descriptions and advice.

3.1 Initial preparation

Decide the scope

How much you choose to do depends on how ambitious the retreat is, a simple divide might be to look at the tasks that are must do, should do and could do:

3.1.1 Must do

The minimum viable product for a retreat is gathering EAs in the same location, ensuring that they have food. A lot of the value of retreats lies in solely providing a space for EAs to connect, share ideas and inspire each other.

3.1.2 Should do

A retreat can go beyond the minimum viable product.  Start by defining the purpose and objectives: Why are you organizing it? Clear goals allow for focused content: i.e during this retreat the attendees will make progress on their career plan by having x workshop and y tangible outcome.

Good retreats focus on getting an atmosphere where everyone feels included and socially comfortable, and that reflects the EA group e.g. by spurring interesting discussions. Another key element is attendee participation which can be achieved through having engaging content, attendee-led sessions, flexible programming, and shared responsibilities like cooking and volunteering..

3.1.3 Could do

Some of the most successful retreats have invited in external speakers to optimize for the objective(s) of the retreat: E.g. inviting a career advisor from your national EA Group or 80,000 hours to increase the chance that the attendees make meaningful progress on their career. These retreats often require significantly more time to plan, and generally more funding. You can reach out to unigroups@centreforeffectivealtruism.org if you have questions regarding planning such a retreat.

Divide responsibilities: A good first step is to divide the responsibilities between the different people organizing the retreat. If you are organizing yourself, get a sense of what needs to be done and plan roughly when you should do the various tasks to ensure that you don’t have to do everything in the final week before the retreat.
Plan your time: The time spent on organizing the retreat varies widely, but most organizers report spending between 15 and 60 hours.Organisers report that they generally spend less than 50% of the time on their second retreat compared to the first one. The same is true for groups where there hasn’t been a retreat before vs. where there has.
Decide the target audience & length of retreat: The first few things you should decide is who and roughly how many people the retreat is targeting, and for how many days
  • We recommend a 2-night retreat as default.
  • We recommend attendees having at least knowledge equivalent to having done an intro-fellowship (especially for fully funded retreats).
Apply for funding: Knowing the target audience and length of event can be used to apply for funding
Decide the date & book the venue: Determine a date where most of the potential attendees will be available, and find a suitable venue. For the venue, opt for something that isn’t costly unless you have a specific reason to choose something more luxurious. All things being equal, consider finding a venue out of the city.

3.2 Before retreat

Get applications & sign-ups: Send out an application form (optional) and a sign-up form to confirm attendance at the retreat.
Decide transportation: are all the attendees taking the bus together to the venue, are you ride-sharing or can the attendees get there on their own?
Plan the content: read the heuristics about content and feel free to take inspiration from the content templates.
Plan food for the retreat: remember to be aware of allergies. Plan the recipes you are going to use and how you will get the groceries to the venue.
Community health: will you have community health volunteers? Read more here.

3.3 Just before retreat

Assign volunteer shifts: Make a list of shifts for the different responsibilities like cooking and cleaning during the retreat. Ensure everyone contributes to prevent feelings of “free-riding” and that there isn’t one gender doing all the work.
Logistical reminder: Send a reminder to attendees about where and when to meet for transportation and/or the most important things they need to pack.

3.4 During retreat

Feedback form: Make sure attendees fill out the feedback form before they leave

3.5 After retreat

Follow-up: Follow-up on actions or plans from retreat.

4. Where to get funding

EA groups can apply for funding to organize a retreat via CEA's group support funding. You can review our common group expenses guidelines to see the per-person funding limit for retreats, which is adjusted downwards for groups in lower-income or lower cost-of-living countries.

Other places to go for funding:

  • In EA ecosystem: Open Philantropy’s University Group Fellowship can be applied to for events such as retreats. There are currently not many other places in the EA ecosystem where groups can go for group retreats funding, but you can find always find the updated list via the options for group expenses listed here.
  • External funding: There is also the possibility for groups to seek funding outside EA. This is often more specific to the local context (e.g. cross-country European groups being able to apply to Erasmus+ funding).
  • Participant fee: Several groups host either fully or partially self-funded retreats by having a retreat fee for the attendees. Even if you apply for CEA's group support funding, you might be expected to have attendees cover part of the cost.

When seeking funding, consider:

  • Funding outside EA: Consider which opportunities are relevant for your group when it comes to funding: Is it possible to seek funding outside EA for your group?
  • Context of your EA Group: Is it normal to fully or partially self-fund retreats/trips in other similar organizations? Is there ways to ensure that no-one is financially hindered from coming to the retreat whilst still being partially funded by attendees?

5. Community health

Retreats can be quite intense experiences for some attendees. We recommend having community health volunteers at the retreat which attendees can reach out to if they need someone to talk to. Consider having a specific code of conduct for the retreat or refer to your group’s regular code of conduct.

It is not common to have alcohol at retreats, if you do plan on having it, consider which proactive steps to take to reduce any potential problems from alcohol at the event.

The CEA Community Health Team has further advice for community health at retreats that we recommend you read. If you have further questions, you can contact the Community Health Team.

6. Templates

6.1 Planning

6.2 Content

Competitions & Activities

Career-planning

Taking action!

Applied rationality & Decision making

Cause-area specific

Given that a lot of object-level knowledge (especially if it includes statistics or within fast evolving fields like AI safety, alternative proteins etc.)  becomes outdated faster, like an Alternative Protein presentation or a talk about AI Safety, we choose to link to resources for finding more up-to-date material instead of linking specific ones:

7. Further reading

(EA Forum) "Midwest EA Next Steps Retreat Post Mortem 2022

(Blog) "Better Formats For Group Interaction" by Spencer Greenberg

(EA Forum) "Questions That Lead To Impactful Conversations"

◾[Outdated] Retreat and Summits