Last updated: 7th April, 2026
1. “Community Health”
Bringing people into the community is important, but EA’s discussion norms, culture, and reputation are also big determinants of our long-term success. How we discuss ideas is vitally important because it shapes our ability to learn more, uncover mistakes we’re making, and resolve uncertainties and disagreements. EA’s internal culture, reputation, and demographics affect who feels comfortable joining and staying engaged with our community. We think it’s important that we build a healthy intellectual culture, a positive reputation, and an inclusive community. If we fail to do so, a lot of the movement’s potential could be squandered.
We often talk about community health, which is the state of the EA community’s ability to achieve its potential for positive impact.
CEA's Community Health Team’s aim is to strengthen the health of the community and sub-communities, and to address problems that could prevent that. They are available to help group organisers deal with problems in their groups.
2. The importance of being considerate
For any community it is important to treat people of different worldviews, values, backgrounds, and identities kindly and respectfully — for the sake of the individuals themselves, and because it will lead to more people being interested in being a part of and promoting the community and their ideas.
But for the EA community we think there are additional reasons to be exceptionally considerate – perhaps more so than would typically be required by common-sense morality.
- One survey of social movement experts indicate that internal conflict or movement infighting is the most important internal factor leading to failure of a movement — indicating the importance of considerateness within the movement.
- EA ideas overlap with utilitarianism (the idea that the best action is the one that maximizes wellbeing and minimizes suffering), which can appear to be cold or disregard flow-on effects. Conveying warmth and caring can help counter this.
- People could be accused of being hypocritical if they appear to be claiming to be very moral or doing a lot of good, while being unpleasant or uncaring to others around them. And hypocrisy is often called out or looked down upon more so than many other perceived failings.
More about why EA should be exceptionally considerate is in this post: Considering considerateness.
3. Welcomingness and inclusivity
We ideally want the effective altruism community to be welcoming and inclusive to anyone who is curious about core EA principles (e.g. scope sensitivity, impartiality, scout mindset/truthseeking, and recognition of tradeoffs). While these shared principles are what bring us together, there is healthy disagreement within the community about how to do the most good, and we value this diversity of perspectives.
We aspire to be inclusive of people from all parts of the world and all walks of life, across different faiths, backgrounds, ages, ethnicities, identities, and experiences. In practice, the EA community currently has a larger proportion of certain groups such as young people, men, of white racial/ethnic identity, from wealthy Western countries, and who have had higher education in STEM fields. A non-diverse group can unintentionally make others feel less welcome. A tightly-knit local community can be great, but newcomers can feel left out.
It is sometimes necessary to proactively work to make your community more inclusive. More tips about diversity and inclusion in your group are here.
4. Your group won’t be for everyone
While we aim for the EA community overall to be broadly welcoming and inclusive, this does not mean that every EA space needs to be open to everyone. Our goal as an EA group is to foster a community of people who are genuinely interested in applying effective altruism principles to improve the world.
Effective altruism does not need to appeal to everyone, and it realistically will not. Ideally, people encounter EA ideas and if those ideas resonate they feel excited to learn more and get involved; if they do not, they can still leave with the sense that the EA community is made of well-intentioned people, even if it is not the right fit for them.
Having people come for the right reasons
Groups have sometimes run into challenges when events attract people who are not primarily interested in EA ideas, for example:
- Attendees who come mainly because the space is a convenient forum to debate topics unrelated to effective altruism
- People who attend primarily for the free food or a general social atmosphere, rather than interest in the ideas. For this reason we don’t recommend making any free food or other freebies a prominent part of advertising your events, even though it might increase the number of people coming.
- Individuals who are motivated mainly by access to opportunities such as jobs, grants, or funded conference attendance, without really valuing EA principles
Clear communication about the purpose of the community and the events, emphasizing EA ideas and/or discussions in event descriptions, can help preferentially attract those who are genuinely interested in applying effective altruism principles.
Inviting with purpose
Groups often can start by being open and welcoming to all who are interested in effective altruism ideas, but as groups grow, most groups choose to run events that are more selective.
“The Art of Gathering” contains excellent advice on choosing a purpose for events, and has tips on how this will affect your planning. Check out these notes about “The Art of Gathering” for a summary.
Some options for a purpose could be:
- Moving people down the funnel of engagement in EA. Your event could facilitate one of these transitions:
- Moving people from being unaware to being aware of EA
- Moving people from having basic awareness to deeper knowledge, by holding events that help people become more knowledgeable about EA topics.
- Moving people from having knowledge of EA to taking action, e.g. by providing support for people to conduct projects, donate, or take steps on their career plan.
- Enjoyment and bonding
- Make progress on an issue (e.g. the event could involve group members working on a project, or fundraising)
When holding more serious events for community subgroups, there are a few different ways to advertise to a target audience.
- Consider sending personal invites, adding small sign-up hurdles (like having to RSVP to find out the details) to weed out less engaged people, and being explicit about the event’s ideal audience.
- If these strategies don’t work, then you could have application processes where you might reject event attendees. But being too selective, you risk losing attendees that you’d rather keep. Selectivity may also create an elitist reputation for your group, which we generally want to avoid, so be mindful of the tradeoffs you are making.
Excluding people who cause problems
Being inclusive to literally everyone can actually make your group less inclusive for many people. Sometimes keeping a group healthy means asking someone to step back. If a person’s behavior makes others uncomfortable, disrupts conversations, or harms the group’s atmosphere or mission, it’s okay to act. More advice on when and how to manage people who cause problems here.
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