Meet Avi!
"Growing up, I recognized that if I'm able to donate to help people in extreme poverty, then I have a
moral obligation to do so. In my early 20s, I began donating to Mercy Corps to help the global poor. I had concerns though: How did I know my donations would actually help people? Could I donate elsewhere and do even more good? The term "effective altruism" did not even exist at the time, so it was far from obvious where to find the answers to these questions. A few years later, I discovered
GiveWell, whose founders, Elie and Holden, were working on the same questions. I was quickly convinced of their approach, and began donating to GiveWell recommended charities. A few years after that, I learned about effective altruism, with its focus on cause prioritization and additional willingness to take risks. In 2015, I discovered and joined EA NYC, and in 2017 I joined the organizer team.
Nowadays I'm most well known in the effective altruism community for the
EA Giving Tuesday project, which I lead. Because of this project, I'm among the few with bragging rights to raising more than $1 million on Facebook fundraisers, far surpassing Lady Gaga's
$68k. If you have money to donate to effective nonprofits, you should sign-up at
www.eagivingtuesday.org and we'll try to help you get your donations matched by Facebook on December 1st, 2020.
Aside from that, I'm currently on a career transition towards information security, with the goal of applying information security skills to reduce
global catastrophic risks."