The boards of Effective Ventures Foundation UK (EVF UK) and Effective Ventures Foundation USA, Inc. (EVF US) have established Interim CEO roles at each organisation. We’re excited to announce that Howie Lempel and Zachary Robinson have taken on these roles, respectively.
Howie Lempel has been Interim CEO of EVF UK since mid-November. To take this on, Howie took leave from his role as CEO of 80k, one of the largest EVF projects. In light of Howie’s move, Brenton Mayer was appointed as Interim CEO of 80k in December. Brenton was previously Director of Internal Systems at 80k. We apologise for the delay in communicating about Howie’s role.
Before he worked at 80k, Howie went to Yale Law for two years. He left Yale to join Open Philanthropy while it was still being incubated at GiveWell, working as their first Program Officer for Global Catastrophic Risks. Howie has also worked on white collar crime at the Manhattan DA’s office and on U.S. economic policy as a research assistant at the Brookings Institution.
Zachary Robinson starts full time as Interim CEO of EVF US today. Zach comes to EVF US from his most recent position as Chief of Staff at Open Philanthropy. There, he managed comms teams, helped set org-wide policies, and worked to identify new Global Health and Wellbeing cause areas for Open Philanthropy, among other things. Prior to his work at Open Philanthropy, he was the director of product and strategy for startup Ivy Research Council and worked as a consultant at Bain and Company.
We believe that Howie and Zach are great people to be leading these organisations and we look forward to seeing the work that they will do.
On the creation of the roles
Effective Ventures (“EVF”) is used to describe two separate legal entities — Effective Ventures Foundation in the UK (“EVF UK”), and Effective Ventures Foundation USA, Inc. in the US (“EVF US”) — that together act as host and fiscal sponsor of many of the key projects, colloquially referred to as ‘orgs’, in effective altruism (such as CEA, 80,000 Hours, Longview Philanthropy, and Forethought Foundation).
These charities (EVF UK and EVF US) previously did not have the position of CEO, and project leads (for CEA, 80k, etc.) reported directly to EVF boards for management oversight. The FTX situation has given rise to a number of new challenges, including financial and legal issues that occur at the level of the charities (EVF UK and EVF US), not at the project level. In response to the new challenges from FTX, the boards appointed Interim CEOs to each charity.