Lorenzo Fong Ponce 🔸
Bio
Participation4
- I co-organise in-person events for London's Effective Giving Community: https://lu.ma/london-effective-giving-community
- Community Ambassador at One for the World
- Day job building strategy + operations + leadership career capital at Amazon's EU Supply Chain organisation
How others can help me
To counterfactually raise 100+ effective giving pledges by mid 2027, I'm making a serious attempt to become LinkedIn-famous: building an audience, writing persuasively, maybe giving talks, dressing up pretty, idk, "professional branding"? Send help :)
How I can help others
- Managing early-career professionals (particularly interns and apprentices)
- Building transferable career capital in the private sector
- Job interview practice / CV review
- Navigating the work world as an immigrant
Posts 1
Comments8
Considering writing a post on how EAG(x) Effective Giving meetups MUST drive a call to action (pledge, pledge advocacy, learning more about EG, running an EG-related project)
IMO intellectual discussion about EG without action does not meet the bar for engagement or expected impact for an EAG(x).Â
Example meetup dicussion topics I personally did not like at past EAG(x)s: talking about how cost of living / mortgages get in the way of giving, talking about giving now vs accruing interest then giving later, back-and-forth about how improving farmed animal welfare results in higher wild animal suffering. Valid personal concerns and intellectually stimulating, but I'd reserve it for local meetups. These discussions do not yield impact nor meaningfully increase community bonding.Â
Mental framework here captures 80% of my experience as an in-person / events-based effective giving advocate.
That said there are ways to make impact-focused EA funds deeply relational. I passionately tell people a large part of my pledge goes to GiveWell's All Grants Fund. "Since the beginning of 2025, 14 million lives could be lost due to entirely preventable deaths from malaria / TB / HIV. This was since the Trump administration and Elon Musk decided to shut down USAID. I give to ensure the most critical frontline organisations can keep their lights on to protect and empower some of the world's most vulnerable".Â
An important 3rd point: relational altruists might not start with the highest-impact malaria-reduction charity, or other EA golden standard charities. That said, t hey are still giving. It's still counterfactual impact (as opposed to giving nothing), and they should be deservedly praised and acknowledged. Further effectiveness can come incrementally as along as you help nurture their altruism. Make them feel supported and part of a like-minded community of people with skin in the game (people who take concrete action improving the world by donating)
Kes, this was such a great weekend, so thoughtfully put together. It really helped me recentre. I came away feeling more authentically connected to people in the EA community I hadn't met before.
Outing myself as the effective giving community-builder who ran the outreach and advocacy workshop. Was genuinely surprised how engaged and high-agency everyone was. Strong +1 on the value of this sort of workshop for highly-engaged EAs. Probably the best hour I've spent in the last few months. Substantially better than most EG group sessions I've attended at EAGs.
Really hoping EA in the Lakes becomes an annual thing, and that Pardshaw being is used more in general. Place felt truly EA: unpretentious, humble, a little basic but all the more charming. Great place for honest conversations and reflections.
If you currently don't get much meaning or fulfilment from giving effectively, it might help to notice the areas in your life that do give you that sense of meaning and fulfilment. The fact that this question has stayed with you for six years, even during times when you weren’t actively donating, suggests it’s something important to you, something that continues to pull at you.
For me, I’ve welcomed pledging as part of my identity, and that’s where I draw meaning from it.
Like you, I don’t tend to feel a big emotional connection to my giving. I give because I believe it’s the right thing to do. I’m at peace taking longer to pay off a mortgage if it means more people in the world get the chance to live their lives. These are lives that might otherwise be cut short by preventable causes far beyond their control.
Effective giving has become part of who I am. It shapes my relationship with money, my decision-making, my career planning. That’s been my path. I’d be curious to hear what might work for you.
Timetable:
- 09:00-10:30 — Early Bird entry
- 10:30–11:00 — Friendly introductions + goal-setting (whiteboard)
- 11:00–11:50 — 1st sprint
- 12:00–12:50 — 2nd sprint / Earlier lunch
- 13:00–13:50 — 3rd sprint / Later lunch
- 14:00–14:50 — 4th sprint / Effective Giving workshop (run by Lorenzo)
- 15:00–15:50 — 5th sprint
- 16:00–16:30 — Reflections, next steps, in-office social
- 16:30 onward — After-co-work social at a nearby cafe/pub? 🤔
Lightly edited from an email chain I had with Aaron
The content and high-level format of it being "hosted" on the forum looks super promising!
It also made me wonder whether the scope the project should increase:
Does it make sense to translate everything in the 3rd Edition of the EA Handbook? What sort of considerations arise from here?
According to your post, this could be a "living document that grows and changes as the movement does", which means most, if not all material in there are by nature high fidelity. I believe with this new edition, a lot of the traditional fear of irreversible lock-in, translation difficulties, and out-of-dateness don't apply, and most countries can benefit a lot from an ongoing translation effort.
The way I'm intending to do this for EA Spain is to allow relatively new-but-engaged members to take up like a "miniproject" translating some of these texts to be shown on EA Spain's website, so it serves as both an engagement and educational tool at the same time.
Hey team! Late comment but really curious about this:
Counterfactual: We estimated the counterfactual factor, the part of donations received that have happened as a result of our work, at 0.5 → Now, our best guess is 0.64
This seems very high versus how GWWC attributed their counterfactual impact of a pledge (at least when I went through their Pledge Advocacy programme last year, they tentatively recommended a factor of 0.2)
Also, given a factor of 0.5 or 0.64, I'm not sure how accurate this statement follows: "50% / 64% of the decision-making of the pledger had not come from the pledger, but rather through active outreach and influence of Mieux Donner". I'm probably wrong. How would I interpret this factor more accurately? :)