Our Story

The Effective Altruism Consulting Network was founded in November 2019 by Jona Glade, a strategy consultant at BCG. Jona, and a small team of fellow consultants, were united by their shared belief in the potential for business consultants — highly ambitious professionals, with a passion for using data to solve problems – to have an outsized-positive impact when they focused energy on the world’s most pressing problems.

 

The group started small and hosted events at firms and online to raise awareness about Effective Altruism and its core ideas. In 2020, the EA Consulting Network started to slowly build momentum and consultants across other firms reached out for advice on how to build their own EA workplace group and maximize their own career impact.  

 

Today, there are 10 Effective Altruism workplace groups, across the world’s most elite consulting firms that support over 600 consultants. These EA workplace groups provide a space for consultants to meet other professionals at their firm who share their values, limit value drift,  work together on high-impact projects to increase their consultancy’s impact, and share EA resources to deepen their members' knowledge and skills.

 

By 2022, the EACN had transformed from a distributed network of volunteer consultants to a professional organization with a full-time team dedicated to identifying how consultants can do the most good. In June of 2022, Sarah Pomeranz joined the EACN as the first full-time, Managing Director and spent the early months refining the organizational strategy and building the infrastructure needed to ensure EACN’s sustainability as a community. In October, Sarah hired Zachary Thomas to join the EACN team as the Community Operations Manager. 

 

With the support of a full-time team, the EACN has expanded beyond workplace group support to offer career conversations for consultants, talent matching for high-impact organizations, weekend EA retreats and EA Global meetups, and new approaches for maximizing consultants' impact!