About us

We are a community of people who help each other do good as well as possible. Our members come from different backgrounds, fields and experiences, but we share the wish to be more effective at doing good.

To support your altruistic goals, we:

  • organise events, recommend reading and make introductions, so that you can make better career and donation decisions;
  • offer support and lasting friendships with like-minded people.

Whether you heard about effective altruism yesterday or have known about it for a long time, we want to help you.

If you'd like to become a member, work with us, learn more or just talk, sign up for a chat with one of our volunteers. You can also join our next public event.

Join the EA Estonia community⁠⁠Chat with a volunteer

Our three main focuses

1. Building a lasting effective altruism community in Estonia

We want the community to stay lively and active even if its current organisers move on. We hope to find people who can develop our team, above all with skills in communication, organising courses and events, team building and/or strategic thinking.

If you'd like to contribute to the community but aren't sure which role would suit you, write to us and we'll find the right role for you together!

2. Guiding, developing and motivating promising people to do more good

One of EA Estonia's aims is to help promising people take career steps related to effective altruism. We focus on people at every stage of their career, including students. We also work to get more and more Estonians to direct their donations to effective organisations.

3. Contributing to the global effective altruism community

As part of the international effective altruism movement, we also support other EA groups. We organise and take part in projects with other groups (e.g. the Nordic AI safety course) and share lessons from our mistakes and successes with other countries. EA Estonia members also attend international conferences together and represent Estonia there.

What we do and what we can offer you

Our activities include:

  1. The introductory course twice a year
  2. An AI safety course
  3. Monthly events in both Tallinn and Tartu
  4. Personal development and mentoring
  5. A career course (depending on the number of participants)
  6. An in-depth course (depending on the number of participants)

Get in touch!

Get in touch with us if you'd like to:

  • become a member;
  • learn more about effective altruism;
  • find out how to do more good with what you do;
  • help with our activities and projects;
  • explore other aspects of effective altruism.

Come to our next event, which you'll find in our events calendar, and meet like-minded people, sign up for a one-on-one chat with one of our volunteers, and join our Facebook discussion group⁠⁠ and our newsletter.

You can reach us at .

If you'd like to support our work, you can set up a (monthly) donation here or transfer a donation straight to our account:

Mittetulundusühing Efektiivne Altruism Eesti
EE187700771009281285
Description: Annetus EA Eestile

Our leaders

  • Triin Teesalu

    Triin Teesalu

    Co-director

    Triin is one of EA Estonia's leaders, responsible for reaching both our short- and long-term goals. She works towards a sustainable and growing EA Estonia community. She is also in charge of events in Tallinn and runs introductory courses. Outside EA Estonia, Triin is a biostatistician and statistical programmer working on clinical trials.

  • Kadi Kaljurand

    Kadi Kaljurand

    Co-director

    Kadi is our career coordinator and leads our career advising. She was one of EA Estonia's leaders from autumn 2024 to winter 2026. Before that she served on the board and was responsible for the people team. Kadi has long experience in farmed animal welfare as a project manager, telefundraiser and operations manager. She completed a master's degree in biology at the University of Tartu in spring 2025.

  • Laura Maria Kull

    Laura Maria Kull

    Board member

    Laura has been one of EA Estonia's leaders since 2024. She has been in charge of the introductory course and ran the first weekend courses in autumn 2025. She has also helped organise EA conferences in the Nordics and represented EA Estonia at the Opinion Festival⁠⁠. She is most interested in animal welfare, environmental problems and making better decisions. In her free time she enjoys hiking, snorkelling, mixing music, reading and pub quizzes.

  • Karl Sachris

    Karl Sachris

    Introductory course coordinator

    Karl is responsible for the introductory course, which helps newcomers discover the foundations of effective altruism and how we can improve the world more effectively. He is interested in building strong communities and how they work. Outside effective altruism he works as an engineer in environmental technology. In his free time he dances, runs and reads fiction.

  • Pilleriin Jukk

    Pilleriin Jukk

    Community wellbeing

    Pilleriin is EA Estonia's community wellbeing contact. Her aim is to notice whether everyone in the community feels well and safe. Even if Pilleriin isn't at every event herself, she is there for the community, and you can always turn to her with a worry or a problem.

    Feedback⁠⁠

Our community's history

EA Estonia was founded on 7 April 2016, and its first big event (a film night and panel discussion) took place in April 2017 with about 30–40 people. The discussion was moderated by Mats Volberg, a philosophy researcher at the University of Tartu, and the panel included Kristina Mering, president of Nähtamatud Loomad, Taivo Pungas, a data scientist at Starship, and others. Students of Tallinn University who were learning about effective altruism took part as well.

In September 2018, CEA (the Centre for Effective Altruism) funded EA Estonia's organiser Risto Uuk for a year to develop the community. During that time the number of members and their activity grew noticeably. Many members applied to EA organisations and took the giving pledge, together pledging over €100,000. We started an Estonian-language EA podcast, ran an impact assessment project for an Estonian NGO and attended several EA conferences. We also translated and wrote articles, made videos⁠⁠, recorded radio shows⁠⁠ and worked with EA groups in Finland, Denmark and Cambridge. From that year on, the groups in Tartu and Tallinn were active in parallel. You can read more here (in Estonian).

From 2019 the organisation was led mainly by volunteers: Richard Annilo, Mihkel Mooste, Mihkel Keerdo and Ville Sokk in Tartu, and Sille-Liis Männik and Liisa Sekavin in Tallinn. We held regular discussion evenings, started AI discussion groups, ran giving games⁠⁠ and pledges⁠⁠, applied for scholarships and jobs, and organised a fundraiser⁠⁠ that raised more than €5,000. We put more emphasis on strategy and planning. The Tartu group joined the OLE ROHKEM.⁠⁠ student network.

From 2019 to 2023, Richard Annilo worked on developing the EA Estonia community. We started personal development evenings, fortnightly dinners, virtual lightning talks and existential hackathons, focused on career development and created a career planning workshop.

In summer 2023, Keidi Roosimäe and Triin Teesalu took over running the organisation, funded for a year by the Effective Altruism Infrastructure Fund⁠⁠. As the core team that had run EA Estonia and its events had moved on to focus on their careers, to make even more and more effective change in the world, the main focus was on reviving the community and finding a new core team. In spring 2024, EA Estonia also joined the Network of Estonian Nonprofit Organizations⁠⁠, to help other organisations measure and evaluate the impact of their work better.

With the tremendous progress in artificial intelligence in recent years, our second important aim is to guide people towards working on AI safety. To that end we run short AI safety courses that cover both the technical side, how to align AI with human values, and policy and regulation that can ensure AI is developed safely.

From summer 2024, EA Estonia continued building the community with the help of enthusiastic volunteers, and in October Kadi Kaljurand started as co-director. Her salary is funded by EA Estonia's donors. Triin Teesalu continued as a volunteer co-director. The focus is still on helping members make more effective choices in their studies and careers, and on guiding people to direct their resources to more impactful causes, both in everyday choices and in how they give.

Throughout the 2024/25 academic year we held a regular series of virtual discussion evenings, each with a new speaker and a discussion on a chosen topic. In February 2025 we also held our first Winter Conference, which brought together EA Estonia members and people from EA Finland and EA Latvia for an active weekend at Nelijärve. In spring we started planning career advising, which launched successfully in autumn 2025, and for the first time we held two discussions at the Opinion Festival⁠⁠.

People interested in effective altruism include Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn, Urmo Kübar, head of the think tank Praxis, Kristina Mering, head of Nähtamatud Loomad, Jaan Aps, co-founder of the Estonian Social Enterprise Network, and Bolt co-founder Martin Villig.

Public information