I left my finance job in 2018, after 15 years in the sector. I spent the next year really beating around the bush and not knowing where to start. I tried volunteering for organizations in the NGO space, but I often found them inefficient and disorganized. None of them ever made me think, "This is something that I would want to spend my time doing."
Thankfully, my wife received an email about the Charity Entrepreneurship incubation program and forwarded it to me because she thought “doing good with data” suited my personality. The moment I read it, I knew it was what I'd been trying to find.
"It was a really exciting new way of looking at how to proactively improve the world."
When I first read about effective altruism, I took a deep-dive into some of the introductory texts. Reading Famine, Affluence, and Morality by Peter Singer showed me that there are really important issues that are highly neglected, and that I could make a difference on them with my skills.
"This idea that I could be saving lives is one that caught me."
In 2021, I launched the Shrimp Welfare Project with my co-founder, Aaron Boddy. When I first read about the concept of shrimp welfare, I thought that effective altruists had taken their logical conclusions to a crazy extreme. But there were half a trillion shrimp out there, there was some evidence that they could experience suffering, and there were zero people working on this. Since then, evidence of shrimp suffering has been mounting, and our project now affects the lives of roughly four billion animals every year.
The financial sacrifice of moving from a job in finance to the animal NGO space was a challenge, but the promise of meaning outweighed the costs for me. The EA community fuels me to keep doing good in the world. I can do more knowing that I have a community behind me.
My best advice for anyone new to effective altruism is to
attend an EAG or EAGx— it's a great crash course in learning about the community and seeing if it's a good fit for you. Listening to EA-aligned podcasts can also be informative. If you listen to an episode and think, "Ah, that was cool,” then it might be that EA is for you.
