I grew up in a Buddhist family with a strong emphasis on compassion and care for all sentient beings. Now I'm the Partnerships Manager at Giving What We Can, where I build relationships with organizations and high-profile individuals who share our mission of creating a world free from preventable suffering.
I was really unsure how my life was going to unfold, but I knew that I wanted to make a difference and live a life in service to others. As a teenager, I wrestled with questions about how I could contribute to making the world a better place. I thought that the only way I would make a difference was by pursuing a career in politics, with a focus on climate change and other ecological disasters.
My perspective changed when a friend at school sent me Peter Singer's TED Talk about effective altruism. His drowning child thought experiment leads to the uncomfortable realization that if you’d save a child drowning right in front of you, you should also save a child dying far away if you can do so without sacrificing something of moral significance. Singer shows how actually, in many cases, that is the moral condition we find ourselves in as people in high-income countries. If we give some money to the right places, we could be saving lives every year. I didn’t come from a rich family, but I was still among the world’s most privileged people. I went straight from the video to Giving What We Can's website and signed the 10% pledge immediately.
"It just clicked for me. It made so much sense that I would have this responsibility to help alleviate the injustice that was afflicting so many people in countries far away from me."
After school, I travelled and taught English in a small school in Nepal. There I met people who were living in very different economic circumstances. That really grounded this intellectual insight from the TED Talk for me. Over time, being increasingly exposed to the horrors of factory farming also deeply affected me. I became vegetarian because I came to see factory farming as this really terrible thing that humans are doing in the world and that moral progress isn't inevitable, but something for which we have to actively strive.
I think effective altruism resonated with me because it's really about fairness. The inequality between people in the world is just so huge, and effective altruism has helped me see that I can do something about that in a concrete, tangible way.
"Effective altruism at its best, or at my best, is a constant push to try to think about how I can do a bit better or a bit more to make the world a better place."
This perspective has shaped how I approach my work, even when it creates tension with other communities I care about. I've been very involved in the environmental activist movement, particularly during my time at university. Sometimes the way that effective altruism tries to create impact in the world and the way that many activist communities try to do that can be quite different. This can lead to disagreements about how we should be trying to make the world a better place. That's a tension that I try to make peace with. One thing I appreciate about the effective altruism movement is the real celebration of disagreement while trying to move forward collaboratively.
For anyone curious about effective altruism, I recommend trying to meet people in the movement. I've found people in this community to be amongst the kindest, most generous, most humble people I've met in my life.
