We're a community at UW–Madison aiming to solve the world's most pressing problems.
Our student group is part of the effective altruism community — a social movement that asks: how can we best improve the lives of others, using our limited time and resources?
Effective Altruism at UW–Madison aims to offer students tools to figure out how they can make a greater social impact, combining our compassion with evidence and reasoning. We're also a community of people supporting each other in our shared pursuit of helping others.
What is effective altruism?
Effective altruism is a project that aims to find the best ways to help others, and put them into practice.
It’s both a research field, which aims to identify the world’s most pressing problems and the best solutions to them, and a practical community that aims to use those findings to do good.
This project matters because, while many attempts to do good fail, some are enormously effective. For instance, some charities help 100 or even 1,000 times as many people as others, when given the same amount of resources.
People inspired by effective altruism have worked on projects that range from funding the distribution of 200 million malaria nets, to academic research on the future of AI, to campaigning for policies to prevent the next pandemic.
They’re not united by any particular solution to the world’s problems, but by a way of thinking. They try to find unusually good ways of helping, such that a given amount of effort goes an unusually long way.
Upcoming Events
All events are free and open to the public unless otherwise noted.
The fellowship was an enriching experience both professionally and personally — from learning how to apply EA concepts in my career to participating in genuine intellectual conversations with like-minded people who are interested in critical thinking, altruism, science, and technology.
The best student organization on campus for making friends who are serious about making the world a better place.
The EA UW–Madison Introductory Fellowship encouraged me to think about the world in a new way. I learned how to think critically about the problems I care about and how to use my skills to make a difference.
