Effective Institutions Project

We’re very excited to welcome some new folks to the EIP team! Leslie Gross has joined our board of directors. Leslie is Managing Director (Americas East) for Forward Global, a community of high net worth individual donors, institutions, philanthropic advisors, and intergenerational wealth professionals. Leslie has spent her career crafting solutions for high-profile and high-stakes challenges at the intersection of public policy, the private sector, and philanthropy, including as former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's chief counsel and Deputy Assistant Secretary of the US Department of Homeland Security. Jeremiah Stanghini has joined us as Senior Program & Partnerships Manager. Jeremiah has a decade of leadership within the Canadian government as a ‘Free Agent,’ where he managed high-profile projects, including an award-winning AI initiative. His expertise in geopolitical forecasting as a ‘Superforecaster’ is complemented by nearly ten years as an Adjunct Professor teaching organizational behavior at George Mason University. Jeremiah will be helping to lead our AI program and supporting general management needs across the organization. Spencer Orenstein joins EIP as a Senior Research Manager leading our US government work and peace and security work. Spencer has nearly fifteen years of experience in public policy research and development. While serving as a legislative director, his office was rated the most effective legislative office in the 114th Congress by the Center for Effective Lawmaking, and his research work in the nonprofit sector has been cited in multiple federal rule-making processes. Spencer comes to us most recently from the Pew Charitable Trusts, where he was an officer working on higher education policy. Latisha Harry is supporting our AI governance team as a Senior Strategist. Hailing from and based in Trinidad and Tobago, Latisha currently is a Schmidt Futures International Strategy Forum Fellow, and has worked with a range of organizations on projects at the intersection of technology and society such as the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, the International Labour Organization, Global Witness, the Commonwealth Secretariat, Global Voices, and CIVICUS. Congratulations to Leslie, Jeremiah, Spencer, and Latisha, and to the rest of us at EIP for being lucky enough to work with all of them!

Last Thursday, we hosted the third in a series of AI strategic clarity workshops in Washington, DC. We brought together 40+ leading AI funders, civil society organizations, and policymakers to: ➡ Share visions of the ideal future state of AI and its interaction with humans ➡ Identify underlying strategic assumptions and think about how we may test those, and  ➡ Clarify how we can work together to make these visions of an optimal future with AI a reality We were grateful to have such a broad array of perspectives represented, with really thoughtful discussion around prioritization of objectives. Participants proposed and voted on their top goals for humanity's relationship with AI in 2030, then discussed in small groups how to make progress on those goals and forecast how much we thought the portfolio of strategies might move the needle toward a better future. We closed with an exploration of how the goals and proposed actions might support or trade off with one another, and how to manage those tradeoffs. A big thank you to our partners Omidyar Network, Americans for Responsible Innovation, and Forecasting Research Institute for helping make the event such a success, and to Epoch AI for an engaging presentation on the drivers of and bottlenecks to AI progress. We’re excited to build on the conversations and connections made.