About Us
Hi! We’re Kyle and Marina, and this is a bit about us and how we got to starting Insightful Giving together.
TL;DR
While working at LinkedIn, we bonded over a shared passion for the concepts of Effective Altruism, and a fancy for helping our colleagues make more informed donation decisions. We started out by holding some workshops and sharing resources within the company. Then, when Marina moved on to a new job, we decided to evolve Insightful Giving from a LinkedIn-only to a company-independent initiative.
-- How we met --
During Christmas of 2019, Marina spotted one of Kyle’s posts on the internal LinkedIn Employee Group. There was a call for employees to publicly share a charity we were planning to support financially during the holidays and Kyle had just shared his plans to donate to the Against Malaria Foundation - the same organization Marina regularly donates to!
Though we did not know each other -we were quite literally oceans apart! - Marina filed the info away for later and went about her business.
Then, in early 2020, while trying to find like-minded colleagues in the Effective Giving space, Marina remembered the post, spent way too long scrolling through LinkedIn’s Company Page searching for it, finally found it after what felt like eons, and reached out to Kyle to connect.
And that’s where the Insightful Giving collaboration started.
-- Who is Kyle --
The philosophy of Peter Singer was my first introduction to the effective giving mindset.
In 2015, I came across several of his ideas and, after some considerable online rabbit-holing, found myself at the doorstep of a much larger rationality community, made up of sites like LessWrong and the EA forums.
The rest, as they say, is history.
Over the past few years, having facilitated several EA fellowships for both Stanford University and the Centre for Effective Altruism, I've cultivated a strong passion for examining the application of moral philosophy on the modern world. Insightful Giving draws much of its inspiration from these robust programs, while attempting to make such explorations more accessible and relatable than ever before.
-- Who is Marina --
I first heard of the concept of Effective Altruism in 2016 while reading “Doing Good Better” by William MacAskill and was instantly intrigued. Having worked with some non-profits at this point and read many other books in the development economics space I’ve been very disillusioned on what aid can do and felt defeated and disappointed that there seemed to be no effective way to do good.
Once I read about cost-effectiveness and looking at giving with an analytical mindset I felt like somebody finally spoke my language. I got excited that there is a way that I as an individual could make a difference and that other people were thinking through these problems with an analytical mind.
This revelation and the realisation that data-driven decision making was so interesting to me led me to focus my career towards data analytics and I have worked in the field since 2017, currently as a Data Scientist at a tech company called Intercom.
Throughout my career I have consistently donated 10% of my income and I still feel that this is a valuable way for me to do good. In order to share the knowledge about Effective Altruism I’ve accumulated over the years I have now started this little project with my former colleague Kyle and I’m excited to learn more about doing good in the best way possible.
-----
If you’d like to say hello or have any questions or feedback drop us a message, we’re always excited to chat to people about effective giving
Kyle Fraser & Marina Schink