EA - UGAP Starter Program Retrospective by jessica mccurdy

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: UGAP Starter Program Retrospective, published by jessica mccurdy on October 24, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. TLDR The CEA uni groups team piloted running a starter program before the University Group Accelerator Program (UGAP) to: Provide resources to more groups. Gain more context on groups to see whether UGAP was right for them. Improve our mentor-group matching. We had 81 groups participate in the starter program from over 20 countries. We faced challenges due to rapid scaling, capacity constraints, and trying to accommodate different target audiences. We are pleased with the results and are glad we scaled quickly but have noted many improvements to be made going forward. We found that having the starter program separate from UGAP was confusing for organizers and that we would like both programs to have the same criteria for admissions. We also were able to better provide specific start-of-the-year resources to newer groups. Therefore, next semester we will integrate the starter program into UGAP as one single program. This program will likely be open only to new groups. We are looking into different programming for existing groups such as a continued mentorship network (which will be explained further in a future post) This post is part of our efforts to communicate more transparently what we are doing. This is the first post in a series of posts and will serve as mostly an update about the starter program specifically. Future posts will dive further into our strategy, Metrics & Evaluation (M&E), and our future plans. What was the UGAP Starter Program? We had a virtual two-week starter program that was open to a larger group of schools than UGAP itself. It provided groups with virtual training and resources to prepare for the semester. This was our first time running this program and 81 universities participated, of which 56 were accepted to UGAP. Groups were given a starter program guide that pointed to specific resources, attended a kickoff session focused on strategy and getting ready for the semester, and had a meeting with one of our starter program mentors where they discussed a plan for the coming semester. Participants who were preparing to facilitate fellowships were able to participate in facilitator training through EA Virtual Programs. We also offered two optional workshops, one on outreach and another on reasoning. During the program, individuals from groups were invited to apply for UGAP where they could receive continued mentorship and a stipend. Ultimately, 56 groups ended up having at least one organizer participate in UGAP (which is going on now). Why the starter program? Overall, the starter program itself aimed to provide the following: Help advise and steer group strategy for new groups We think that group strategy is one of the highest leverage ways to make a big difference in group outcomes. We go over the core of our current advice in this post. Increase motivation and excitement about running a group We focused on why we believe community building at universities can be so impactful, tried to create the sense of being part of a much larger international project, and expressed encouragement and gratitude to organizers. Make sure groups were ready for the start of the semester We think the start of the semester is one of, if not the most important time of the year for university groups. We wanted to make sure that groups were going into the semester with a plan and the resources they needed. Running the starter program separate from UGAP was an experiment to do the following: Provide resources to a larger number of groups, unconstrained by UGAP mentor capacity. Last summer we realized that there was a lot of interest in UGAP. While we only had ~30 groups participate in the Spring, our interest form had ~50 additional groups interes...