EA - 2023 update on Muslims for Effective Altruism by Kaleem

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: 2023 update on Muslims for Effective Altruism, published by Kaleem on May 15, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Summary:Muslims for Effective Altruism made progress this year through our three projects: “The Muslim Network for Positive Impact”, “The Muslim Impact Lab”, and “Afterfund”, as well as continued behind the scenes work on fundraising, incubating new projects, and developing our short and medium term plans. The number of members of Muslims for Effective Altruism has continued to grow at a rate of ~25 members per year since mid-2021 (now at ~50 members).“Verdict”:It was a good (but not perfect) year for us, and we’re looking forward to doing even more interesting work, and having more of an impact, in the next one!Introduction:Around a year ago we posted our first post which gave a high level overview of why we think strating EA projects aimed at Muslims, or focusing on the intersection between EA and Islam, would be a high value endeavor. We were really pleasantly surprised at the amount of interest and support expressed about this endeavor, and continue to be grateful for the encouragement and feedback we receive from the community.Perhaps the most notable change before reading the rest of this post is that we’ve moved to thinking about Muslims for Effective Altruism’s structure as a federation of independent projects, rather than as one large org. We think this is useful because it prevents our lack of managerial capacity from holding back or interfering with our motivated project leads, as well as allowing us to increase our likelihood of expanding our network as other impactful projects can get off the ground without our knowledge or input.Kaleem will be attending EAG in London in May as well as hosting the “Muslims in EA” meetup there - so we thought it would be a good time to update everyone on what we’ve been up to in case you’d like to meet to discuss any aspects of our work.So, this post aims to provide an update on some of the work on which we’ve managed to make headway over the past year, as well as things we have fallen short on, and ways in which our plans have changed since the initial post.Projects:The Muslim Impact LabThe Muslim Impact Lab is a research and advisory body. This dynamic multi-disciplinary team is focused on collating and producing content on the intersections between EA ideas and Islamic Intellectual history, as well as providing expert consulting services to EA-Aligned organizations doing outreach in Muslim communities.The Lab assisted GiveDirectly by co-authoring their post in which they launched the Yemen Zakat Fund and previously advised them on their plans. Nayaaz Hashim, one of the co-founders of the lab, also published a piece on Unconditional Cash Transfers from an Islamic perspective on the Muslim Impact Lab substack. To date, GiveDirectly has raised $165,000 for the Yemen program, however it is difficult to quantify our counterfactual impact on this figure, given that other organizations such as Giving What We Can, and GiveDirectly themselves, have also been involved in raising funds. In the future we should look into ways of building in mechanisms to our processes that may help us establish our counterfactual impact with regards to raising effective Zakat.The lab is currently working on a survey to understand the moral priorities of the Muslim community, and developing a research agenda for, and producing content on, exploring intersections and challenges between understandings of Islam and current theories of effective altruism.The plan for the Muslim Impact Lab is to continue doing this research and, in collaboration with the Muslim Network for Positive Impact, put together a structured fellowship in the near future.Core Team: Maryam Khan, Nayaaz Hashim, Faezah Izadi, Mufti Sayed Haroon, Ahmed Gh...