Become a Leaf Facilitator or Counsellor

Please note: Applications are now closed, although we still welcome expressions of interest in being a mentor. You can sign up for updates here.

This summer, support a thriving community of smart, curious, and ambitiously altruistic 16-18 year olds to explore how they can best save lives, help others, or change the course of history.

There are two role types available, detailed on this page:

  • 8-20 Counsellors: Low responsibilities, high flexibility. Options for paid tasks. Find collaborators, get feedback on your work, and develop mentorship skills.

  • 6-12 Facilitators: More responsibilities, both safeguarding and leading workshops. Paid. Develop facilitation and mentorship skills and explore paid community building work.

Key details:

  • Pay: Ranges from voluntary but all-expenses-paid, to £2,400 in payment, depending on the responsibilities taken on. Food, accommodation, travel etc are provided.

  • Time requirements: Ideally you’d come for the full week-long programme, but this is flexible. 0-10 hours of pre-prep, and optional paid follow-up opportunities

  • Location & dates: Wycliffe Hall, Oxford, UK (18th-27th August, 2023)

  • Only open to people normally resident in the UK, for both counsellors and facilitators (and with the right to work in the UK unless you are solely volunteering)

Leaf is an independent nonprofit that supports exceptional teenagers. We are seeking staff for our Changemakers’ Fellowship, an 8-day residential with follow-up mentorship support.

The participants in Leaf’s last residential were fantastic. For example, 36% achieved all grade 9s at GCSE, compared to 0.6% of the UK.

They were also diverse: 66% selected an ethnicity other than white, which compares to 14% of the UK and 24% of the effective altruism community, and 46% were female, which compares to 29% of EA.

We select participants for intelligence, curiosity, and altruistic intent. Most are not yet familiar with effective altruism or longtermism.

We have already received 650 valid new applications for our Summer programme. Combined with some of the participants in our online programmes from earlier this year, plus some returnees from last year, we expect to gather a very promising cohort together.

Previous speakers

  • Anders Sandberg

    Future of Humanity Institute

  • Varsha Venugopal

    Suvita

  • Jonas Vollmer

    Atlas Fellowship

  • Janvi Ahuja

    Future of Humanity Institute

  • Michael Aird

    Rethink Priorities

  • Bella Forristal

    80,000 Hours

  • Lucia Coulter

    Lead Exposure Elimination Project

  • Caroline Humphries

    UK Civil service (climate change)

  • Peter McIntyre

    Non-trivial

  • Avital Balwit

    Future of Humanity Institute

  • Jan Brauner

    University of Oxford

  • Danielle Duffield

    Baker Botts LLP

  • Angela Aristizábal

    Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México

  • Sam Clarke

    Centre for the Governance of AI

You can also see last year’s facilitators here. The counsellor positions are new.

Benefits to you

  • We’ll pay for you to travel to and stay in Oxford, join meals, and join the evening social activities like bowling, walks, board games, etc. It’s really fun!

  • You get to work with really smart, curious, and altruistic young people as they explore lots of exciting new ideas. The experience is pretty magical; you can get some sense of this from our testimonial video.

  • You’ll get to spend a bunch of time with some amazing people; compared to a conference, you’ll meet fewer people but spend much more time with them and have more memorable shared experiences.

  • There will be opportunities and sessions where you can host a talk or workshop, plus plenty of opportunities for one-to-one conversations, where you share what you’ve been working on. Feel free to share unpolished ideas and invite critique so that you can refine and improve.

  • If the attendees, staff, or guests map on decently well to the target audience for whatever you’re working on, you can schedule one-to-ones or host sessions to enable you to test hypotheses or get feedback. Then there will be time to refine your plans/drafts, arrange for more feedback, and iterate.

  • Our participants are usually eager for concrete opportunities to help make a difference, plus for work experience in general. If you could benefit from having a relatively inexperienced but smart, curious, and altruistic person doing some work for you, this would be a great place to find that.

  • You’re welcome to attend as many of the talks or workshops by Leaf staff, participants, and guest speakers as you’d like to.

  • It’s not the main advantage of attending, but for counsellors there will be time to just work on whatever you want. We’ll have at least one room set up for co-working, or you can work from your own room if you need to get away for a bit or take private calls.

  • Mentorship is a key component of management, which seems like a bottleneck in a lot of impact-focused research organisations at the moment.

  • The facilitator role might be great career capital for teachers interested in effective altruism and longtermism or organisers of local EA groups interested in gaining paid experience of community building in a new context.

  • Leaf will likely run future programmes — they might look very similar to this one, or quite different (e.g. online, subject-specific, different countries etc). You might be able to help out with or lead these future programmes.

  • You’ll be helping the next generation of researchers, policymakers, entrepreneurs etc to explore how they can do the most good. Leaf finds exceptional students, but we need you to support them to engage with the question of how they can do the most good and develop sustainable, healthy, and productive habits for high, long-term impact. (Here’s our theory of change.)

    Much of the expected value of working on this programme comes from helping Leaf refine its model before we scale; international talent search for exceptional 16-18 year olds around the globe is a potential megaproject.

How previous staff found Leaf

  • “The team is great and the work environment is inspiring, open-minded and ambitious - just the way I prefer it. The Leaf in-person programme was the most meaningful week of my life and it stands out as one of my fondest memories.”

    Frederik

  • “The sessions were fantastic — really well prepped, and they generated a lot of productive discussion — although I appreciated the autonomy and flexibility to change structure and materials around. The speakers were amazing.”

    Jenny

  • “I think that Leaf was really quite successful in opening the minds of students to a variety of unconventional ideas… It was really great to see also many students following up, and facilitators arranging independent calls etc.”

    Jason

Responsibilities

  • Be present at the programme site most of the week (19th-27th August) plus participate in staff onboarding on the 18th. 

  • Join for most shared mealtimes and at least some of the activities (daytime and evenings).

  • Be available, accessible, and welcoming to Fellows, staff, and guests who’d like to chat to you.

  • Give at least one talk, or run at least one workshop. This could be short and informal.

  • Ideally: Proactively take steps to create a challenging, rewarding, and engaging experience for Fellows.

  • Ideally: Provide ongoing one-to-one mentorship for 1-5 students after the residential programme for 1-12 months; these ranges are wide and largely up to you. We’ll support you to provide this; don’t worry if you don’t feel qualified for it!

Additionally, facilitators (not counsellors) will:

  • Take the lead on 4-12 hours of teaching and learning during the programme, including doing some prep for this beforehand. The resources for the sessions will already have been prepared, but you are welcome to modify them slightly to your preferences. (E.g. here are last year’s schedule and resources.)

  • Have direct responsibility for the 12-20 participants in your group, shared jointly with 1-2 other facilitators. This includes both safeguarding and engagement/learning.

What we’re looking for

  • Normally resident in the UK, e.g. a UK citizen or living here indefinitely with the right to work here.

  • Expertise in (or strong potential for) high-impact career paths and cause areas.

  • A scout mindset — the motivation to see things as they are, not as you wish they were. For example, you need to:

    • Encourage and engage with criticism of claims, values, and behaviours commonly associated with effective altruism;

    • Model good epistemics;

    • Make disagreement feel easy and welcome.

  • Supportive, caring, and excited to support young people.

  • Ability to communicate clearly and engagingly (in English) with young people.


For facilitators rather than counsellors, communications skills are much more important than relevant expertise. You’ll also need a solid general knowledge of the ideas, research, and tools of effective altruism and longtermism — though sceptics and critics are welcome!

Payment

The base payment is £1,200 for facilitators and £0 for counsellors. Beyond this, we will pay:

  • £100 for any core curriculum session that you lead (0-3 for counsellors, 4-12 for facilitators)

  • All your travel costs to the residential and your accommodation and food costs during it

  • A stipend for counsellors, if needed

  • A stipend for offering ongoing one-to-one mentorship, if needed

Note: if you earn more than £1,000 in a year from self-employed income such as this, you will need to submit a self-assessment to HMRC.

Application process

  1. A short expression of interest form (~15 minutes for counsellors, ~30 for facilitators)

  2. A short call (<30 minutes for counsellors, <60 minutes for facilitators)

  3. If conditionally accepted, you’ll need to get a DBS check and provide a reference.

Priority will be given to applications received by Sunday 11th June.

Please note: Applications are now closed, although we still welcome expressions of interest in being a mentor. You can sign up for updates here.