Episode Details

We (Aiden, Alex, Saul, Jesse) ran the first[1] West Coast EA Retreat, from April 10–12 2026, in Bass Lake, CA. We’re interested in sharing our retrospective with the broader EA community, and in having a public artifact of the retreat — hence this post.

This post was mostly written by Aiden, with substantial input and edits from Alex, Jesse, and Saul (who do not necessarily endorse everything in this post).

Broadly, we ran this retreat for the following reasons:[2]

• Retreats are an extraordinarily good way to motivate people to delve deeper into EA ideas, especially people who have some but not a lot of context on specific cause areas.
• Retreats help people transition to impactful careers by giving them access to relevant professionals that they might not otherwise have had in-network.
• Retreats can be a gateway into broader social integration into the EA community and ecosystem.

Information about the event 

Attendance and venue

We held the retreat over a weekend in April in Bass Lake, CA, a three-hour drive east of Berkeley. We initially expected around 30 attendees, but ended up with 63 total attendees (50 university students, 13 non-student special guests). The majority of [...]

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Outline:

(01:11) Information about the event

(01:15) Attendance and venue

(02:36) Budget

(03:05) Organizers

(03:28) Schedule

(03:44) Feedback form results & analysis

(04:38) What went well

(08:29) What could have been improved

(08:42) Schedule

(09:37) Attendees

(10:29) Venue

(11:47) Planning and meta-organization

(12:32) Other logistical issues

(13:33) A few general lessons

(15:49) Other things we learned

(16:59) Conclusion

(17:27) Thank yous

(18:39) Other resources

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First published:
April 28th, 2026

Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/KbSrfqp6u36goHtDG/retrospective-on-the-first-west-coast-ea-retreat

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Images from the article:

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