How can you make a difference? Effective Altruism Club prompts big questions and conversation

The start of the spring 2025 semester came with the launch of the Effective Altruism Club, a new student organization on Hope College’s campus dedicated to examining the “best ways to do good” in the world. Founded and led by sophomore Wyatt Snyder, the club is an offshoot of the international U.K.-based organization by the same name. 

“Effective altruism is the idea that you have a limited number of resources in the world, so how can you do the most good?” said Tobias Shaw (’27), another member of the leadership team. “You might say that’s just utilitarianism–it kind of is, but, first off, it doesn’t go to ridiculous extremes,” he said. “It’s a lot about prioritizing causes in terms of charities and quantifying the number of lives, or ‘life years’ saved by charities, [to measure] how effective they’re actually being. A big part of it is also about how you can aim your own personal career to have the biggest impact in the field you want to go into.”

Snyder sees the club as filling a niche on campus and in the broader world, where the motivation to address pressing areas of need – global poverty, climate change and the lack of access to healthcare – is high, but knowledge about the best course of action may be lacking. 

The idea of effective altruism comes from the realization that “there’s a huge variance between how much your money can do depending on where it goes,” according to Snyder. Instead of allowing intuition or emotion to guide charitable donation decisions or career choices, the effective altruism movement believes that impact can and should be measured. The current medium for the club is discussion, in which students are invited to engage in weekly pre-readings and conversations on topics like scope sensitivity, cognitive biases and radical empathy. At this point, Snyder envisions the club as a ‘discussion generator,’ with the unifying principle being an interest in discussing impact in a reason- and research-based way. 

Although the club focuses on objective measures of impact, it also makes room for disagreement about what the best course of action may be. The concept of effective altruism is broad and the issues are serious and often difficult, but the club’s leaders believe in the importance and relevance of these conversations. For Snyder, his personal research into effective altruism has broadened his career outlook: “I guess what I’m trying to get at is there are a lot of trajectories to impactful careers that aren’t just advocacy, though obviously those are very important…I think the real question [is], ‘what are you working on?’ That’s kind of the crucial consideration.”

“Even changing one or two people’s trajectories, in terms of their career, to be conscious of effective altruistic or just generally being smart with how they’re donating could have a really outsized impact,” said Shaw. The club leaders are optimistic about the ripple effect of these conversations. They view the recommended readings as a way for students to get plugged in with the larger effective altruism movement and with professionals like AI safety researchers and biomedical scientists who share these interests. The curriculum, which is summarized in a colorful Google document filled with links to read in order of priority, “is kind of like a launching point, so people don’t need to be limited by what we talk about in our meetings,” said Shaw.

The club leaders see a place for all academic interests in these conservations about how to do good in the world, ranging from philosophy to psychology to economics and the STEM fields. “I really do think everyone can find a unique angle that’s still interesting to them,” said Shaw. “Showing up for one meeting is not a commitment for months. If this sounds vaguely interesting, people should sign up.”

(Featured image source: Our Father’s House Soup Kitchen)