
“Building Ideas-First EA” by Mjreard
From EA Forum Podcast (All audio) by EA Forum Team
June 11, 2026 · 7 min
About this episode
Matt Reardon and Sarah Bluhm discuss their initiative to support ideas-first Effective Altruism community builders at various universities.
TLDR: Sarah Bluhm and I are funding and mentoring ideas-first (as opposed to, e.g., careers-first) EA community builders. If you’re at one of these universities or know someone who is, we want to talk to you, especially this subset: University of Toronto University of Michigan UCLA USC NYU Columbia Claremont Colleges (Claremont McKenna, Scripps, Harvey Mudd, Pomona, Pitzer) Stanford Harvard MIT Cornell Georgetown Northwestern **Contact us here or at contact@nest-ea.org** The Network for EA Support & Training (NEST) We (Matt Reardon and Sarah Bluhm) founded NEST, whose mission is to build vibrant in-person EA communities by teaching organizers the craft of communicating EA ideas with courage and authenticity. I (Matt) am a former lawyer and 80k advisor who blogs, tweets, and podcasts about EA. Sarah worked on CEA's university groups team and has a background in bioengineering. NEST's philosophy is that EA communities should be platforms for individuals to form their own views on the central questions of Effective Altruism: what are the most important issues in the world, why those issues, and what should I do about them? This contrasts with approaches to community building…
People in this episode
Host: Matt Reardon
Guest: Sarah Bluhm
Topics covered
- Effective Altruism
- community building
- mentorship
- university groups
- communication
- ideas-first approach
Keywords
- Effective Altruism
- community building
- mentorship
- NEST
- university groups
- communication
- ideas-first
- EA communities
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Network for EA Support & Training
Places: University of Toronto, University of Michigan, UCLA, USC, NYU, Columbia, Claremont Colleges, Stanford, Harvard, MIT
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