Yale Effective Altruism

Our Mission:

To spread the ideas of effective altruism through outreach, advocacy, education and collaboration, and to engage with and enable effective altruistic practice using the immense resources and opportunities available at Yale.

Our Activities:

Yale Effective Altruism Introductory Fellowship
Advocacy, or Activism
Yale Effective Altruism's Fellowship is designed to prepare students to maximize their positive impact in the future. Open for undergraduate, graduate, and professional students, fellows deeply engage with ideas and strategies for improving the world through evidence and reason.

Speaker Dinner with Seth Baum
Advocacy, or Activism
YEA will be inviting Seth Baum, executive director of the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute, to give a talk regarding existential risk, and will provide a catered dinner for all attendees.

Professor Mushfiq Mobarak Speaker Dinner
Advocacy, or Activism
Yale Effective Altruism will be inviting Professor Mushfiq Mobarak to give a talk regarding issues of global poverty and will provide catered dinner afterward to all attendees. Alongside being an economics professor, he is a co-chair of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab's Urban Services Initiative and its Environment and Energy sector, as well as the lead academic for Bangladesh at the International Growth Centre.

YEA Discussion Dinner
Advocacy, or Activism
YEA Discussion Dinners are events where participants can discuss important global issues (ex: animal welfare, cryptocurrency, etc) in an informal but still structured setting.

Yale Effective Altruism In-depth Fellowship
Advocacy, or Activism
For those individuals who have already completed the Introductory EA Fellowship or have spent a significant amount of time reading about core principles of effective altruism, the In-Depth Effective Altruism (IDEA) Fellowship provides a space to further develop ideas on how to maximize the amount of good we can do.

The IDEA Fellowship is a 9-week program in which fellows complete assigned readings and meet for a 90-minute discussion each week. Topics span from moral philosophy, rationality and epistemology, high-impact cause areas, to longtermism and more. The first three weeks of the program include a structured reading list, while the remaining weeks give fellows the flexibility to deeply dive into topics that interest them.

Speaker Events
Advocacy, or Activism
Yale Effective Altruism is a hub for students to not only know more about effective altruism but also a place to build a community and get to know other students professionally and personally. As a result, we host a variety of speaker events with prominent individuals such as Molly Crocket, Mushfiq Mobarak, Jeff Sebo and Shelly Kagan. We typically host a handful of speaker events each semester including talks by alums or Yale professors.

Giving What We Can Pledge Drive
Fundraising
Taking the Giving What We Can pledge means joining a community of people promising to donate 10% of their lifetime income to the most cost-effective nonprofits and interventions seeking to doing the most good in the world. As Yale students, we recognize our incredible privilege and our future capacity to make significantly higher salaries than the vast majority of the world, which is why we run a pledge drive each semester where we encourage other Yale students to take the Giving What We Can pledge.

Yale Effective Altruism Fellowship
Research & Public Policy Analysis
The Yale Effective Altruism Fellowship focuses on helping Yale students think about how they can make an impact not just now, but for their entire careers. The fellowship is an intensive program that encourages students to think about how they can use their donations and especially careers to do good in the world.

In-Depth Effective Altruism Fellowship and High-Impact Career Planning Intensive
Research & Public Policy Analysis
While the Yale Effective Altruism Fellowship provides a starting point at getting students acquainted with and discussing the principles of effective altruism, these programs encourage further and more nuanced engagement with this topics. Students will not only read and discuss up-to-date research and evidence supporting certain interventions and cause areas, but they will also make actionable steps towards pursuing high-impact careers in the spaces of social justice and preserving the long-term future.

Student Leaders:

Alexa Pan - Coordinator/President