I was a hero for the Seattle Chapter of The Humane League. I hosted monthly meetups and helped coordinate protests. I organized tables for farmers’ markets and planned victory parties. I messaged every community member personally before each event. I didn’t do everything alone: I had a leadership team who contributed their talents to the community. But at the end of the day, most things that needed to get done ran through me. Only after my community wilted did I start reflecting on the downsides of my heroism. I’ve come to think that while heroes can be highly productive in the short term, heroism can unintentionally weaken the community in the long run.

Heroism does not weaken a community immediately, but influences the community over time. Because of the hero’s initiative and drive, they get sucked into picking up all the stray bits of work. The other volunteers let them. We all have busy lives and volunteering is already going above and beyond. So everyone gets used to the hero doing the lion’s share of the work. Eventually, this results in the hero propping up the group and no one else knowing what the group needs to keep running. Hero supported groups are fragile. When they leave, the group collapses.

And heroes inevitably leave. Sometimes, they move on to bigger and better things; too often, they burn out. All that work the hero keeps taking on ends up burning through their stamina. Maybe it takes a few months, maybe it takes a few years, but it happens eventually. When it does, the hero pays back the energy they spent with interest. If we’re lucky, they just go into hibernation. If we’re not, they drop out of the movement entirely and we lose a driven activist.

Heroism is an unsustainable dynamic. Leaning on a hero creates short-term returns at the expense of long-term organization building. This happens through dozens of little choices, each of which seems rational or necessary in the moment. Therein lies the trouble. Heroism is not a single choice and is rarely conscious. Rather, it’s a continuous seductive pull that infects our way of thinking and doing.

Origin Stories

We work in an environment that’s built for churning out heroes. The movement is tiny and empathetic. With only a few dozen activists in a medium sized city, being a hero is practically a pre-requisite for running a group. “If you don’t do it, no one will do it” is our default state of being. And “no one doing it” is not an option: putting down the work feels like letting the animals suffer and our empathy will not allow that. So we soldier on.

We may also derive just a teensy bit of status and identity from being heroes. It’s cool (at least among a very small group of vegans and advocates) to work long hours, to fight harder than anyone, to keep it all going. We don’t want to give up that part of ourselves. Not to mention the fact many of us are operating in a direly individualistic culture.1 We’re surrounded by stories of heroes: political leaders, entrepreneurs, athletes, scientists, etc. Despite the fact that most of these people are supported by a whole mountain of people, they’re the ones who get the biographies, the documentaries, the credit. Being a hero just seems like the right thing to do.

Let It Burn

Things have to get worse before they get better. Since the problem with heroes is that they’re substituting their hard work and know-how for a more sustainable organizational dynamic, responsibility has to be transferred from the strong individual to the weak organization. But that means that the group will suffer while it sorts things out. Tasks will go uncompleted. Event quality will go down. Balls will be dropped. Those are important moments. They tell us where we need to grow.

Paying attention to what goes down when the hero steps back is critical. Not having anyone to help with food or tabling is a signal that our communities aren’t compelling enough. We can ignore that signal and put in the work ourselves to keep things running as they are, letting our heroism mask bad strategy, or we can heed the signal and realize that we might need a new strategy. A vibrant community doesn’t have to scrape the barrel to find people to help, it has people jumping in to lend a hand.

It is worth noting that even though we don’t have a ton of activists waiting in the wings, we do have some. Many of us are chronically bad at asking for help, especially if we’re used to taking responsibility for everything. Many of us don’t even know where to start. For that case, I’ve assembled a menu of roles that activists can take on to help strengthen their communities. And for those of us2 who feel like it’s more work to have someone else do a task or that the task will just come out worse, we have to let people build these muscles so that our group as a whole can grow stronger.

Teams Not Heroes

The ultimate goal is to have teams, not heroes. We want organizations that can survive the loss of any individual. Replaceable leaders are a sign of group health, not a sign of a flawed leader. We want groups where a lot of people handle small tasks and a few people handle larger tasks. We want skills and knowledge to circulate among group members and for members to continuously explore roles within the group.

Our groups have a lot of growing to do before we reach the point where we have a bunch of replaceable leaders and widely distributed skills. For those of us that are carrying too much right now, I invite you to step back. Look around. Is there anyone we can ask for help? How can we think outside of the box to draw new people in? We’ve been heroes for far too long. And for all the heroism, our movement remains small, fighting at the fringes of a behemoth industry. If we’re going to bring it down, we need to trade our capes for strategy and teamwork.

Three Things to Try

1. Drop some balls. If you have too many tasks, put some down. As many as you can. One if it makes you uncomfortable, more if not. Watch what happens. Does anyone pick them up? Does it hurt the community?

2. Take a little step up. If you’re not a full blown organizer and have a little bandwidth, find a fun way to help. Check out our role personality quiz. See if you can take something off the organizer’s plate that brings you joy. You don’t have to be a full organizer to make a big difference.

3. Fill a gap. Pick something that your community is missing (ex. social media). Look for someone in your social circles who can help with that and ask them to participate. If they can’t, talk to them about what attracts them to projects.

Informed By

• The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim, Kevin Berr, and George Spafford

Thanks to Beta Readers: Kim Evans

It was a question I deliberately left open-ended. I’m a big believer in activists’ ability to think strategically and diagnose what’s going on in their community. I didn’t want to come from the outside and impose a specific goal or way of measuring that goal. Frankly, I didn’t even have a clear formulation of what problems I thought needed to be solved, other than the severe lack of activists in the movement.

When faced with the question of “how will you know if your experiment succeeded?”, a majority of applicants (72%) answered “surveys and qualitative observation.” I’m not sure what I expected, but it wasn’t that. In hindsight, my theory is that most animal advocacy projects are trying to produce a change in attitudes, either changing omnivores’ attitudes towards animals or activists’ internal sense of efficacy and engagement. A survey is a natural fit for these, and a tool that most people have seen.

The problem with relying on surveys is that they fail to produce accountability to change. It’s very different to survey meat company executives about how they feel about cage free eggs, for example, than it is to actually watch who goes cage free. For accountability, the ideal is an observation of a specific behavior, like showing up to meetings or taking online actions. Not to say we don’t also need surveys: Measuring behavior change without surveys (or other qualitative research methods, like interviews) leaves us with no data of participants’ inner experience. We need both. Surveys to help understand people’s experience and quantitative measures of behavior to hold us accountable.

Providing a strong quantitative metric is going to be one of the bigger changes in the 2027 Hatchery Fund. Rather than leaving things open ended and requiring grantees to fill in the blanks, I will be providing some recommended measurements for different types of campaigns, while allowing applicants to propose alternatives.2 Providing recommended measurements has the added benefit of allowing applicants with less of a social science background to have a strong starting point and not have to worry as much about pitching a good measurement. Rather, they can focus their attention on designing a creative experiment.

All that being said, I was impressed with applicants willingness and interest in diving into the details of how to assess success or failure. Surveys are much more complicated than picking a simple measure: they require more design and analysis to parse. The fact that so many of the applicants proposed surveys tells me that a lot of advocates understand the importance of understanding their constituents. It suggests that there is an appetite for MEL (Measurement, Evaluation, and Learning) best practices at the grassroots level of the movement. I hope we can find a way to bring more MEL to activists.

These activities (protesting, street conversations, digital activism) are the cornerstone of our grassroots efforts. They’re also miserable: they require high levels of confrontation, they’re boring and repetitive, and they make people feel like we’re just looking for warm bodies. Out of the three, street conversations provide the most interesting experience and an opportunity for people to develop persuasive skills, but still largely appeal to the type of person who’s capable of difficult conversations with strangers. If these activities don’t work for you, there aren’t many obvious ways to participate.

We can do better. Direct actions are only the tip of the iceberg. If we want to build more vibrant communities and thereby expand our base of activists, we’ll need to start engaging volunteers in more capacities than just showing up on the front line. As anyone who’s helped out with a neighborhood block party, a local food drive, or a school fundraiser knows, there’s a lot of work that goes into making sure that people can show up and do their thing.

Our communities need to develop three core competencies: recruit, retain, and campaign. Recruiting keeps a steady stream of people flowing into our communities. Retaining makes sure that people stick around for the long haul, enabling us to develop deeper relationships and build power over time. Campaigning is the application of our collective power and is currently where we put most of our limited resources. These core competencies provide a broad surface area for volunteers to engage and strengthen the community. There’s plenty of opportunities for people to participate in a way that works with their disposition and abilities, even if they don’t fit the mold of a vocal activist.

To that end, I’ve put together a collection of roles for strengthening a community. Each role focuses on a narrow set of responsibilities that improve a specific aspect of recruiting, retaining, and campaigning. In a small community, one person could hold a dozen roles (I certainly did when I organized for THL); as communities grow, people can specialize and raise the quality of the work. My hope is that local organizers and volunteers can use these roles as a menu of options that go beyond “just show up at our next event”. There’s also a quiz for figuring out which might fit you best.

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There is the possibility that most people needed more than $1,000 to run their experiments, and so they asked for as much as they could get, but I’m skeptical. Most of the grantees I offered $750 instead of $1,000 did not have to make any substantial adjustments to their experiments, which makes me think that $1,000 was a convenient amount to ask for rather than a number coming from a specific budget where every dollar was critical.

People requesting the default maximum grant amount might seem harmless, but it has negative side-effects. Notably, I don’t know the true cost of 72% of the proposed experiments. Not knowing the true cost means that we can’t evaluate how cost effective different interventions are, or at least that we’ll get an inflated value for the real price. It also means we can’t tell how much it would cost to scale the interventions. It’s all fine and good for me to spend $1,000 on an experiment, but there’s a big difference between a $100 intervention and a $1,000 intervention if we’re rolling out the intervention to 20 cities.

There’s no easy way to fix this problem; whatever I set as the maximum grant amount will be what people gravitate towards. I do have some ideas for the next round to mitigate the effects of this kind of behavior:

1. Lower Grant Ceilings: The simplest way to get people to be more efficient about their experiments is just to limit how much money is on offer. The problem with this kind of approach is that some experiments may genuinely need more funding.

2. Reward Smaller Grants: An adjacent approach would be to offer tiers of different grants. Ex. Four $250 grants, two $500 grants, and one $1,000 grant. The money-to-frequency ratio would naturally make the larger grants more competitive, which should incentivize people to design and apply for smaller experiments.

3. More Detailed Budgets: I could ask grantees to not just put together a budget, but to explain why each line item is at the given amount. The downside is that every explanation required adds more weight to the application, which is something I’m trying to avoid for easy experiments and small grants.

4. Scaling Costs: In a similar vein, I could ask grantees to give budget amounts that would be required to scale their experiments to other settings. This would potentially get a more honest amount, since they’d be thinking about someone else doing the work and not how much they can get in the moment.

Grantees gravitating towards the maximum grant size reflects a larger problem with activism and the nonprofit sector: we’re under much less pressure than the for-profit sector to be efficient. As long as you can tell a compelling enough story to keep getting funds, it doesn’t matter if you’re accomplishing your stated goal. The Hatchery Fund reflected this problem in its own little microcosm. If we’re going to build a powerful movement, we need to develop strategies to ensure we’re using our resources effectively.

There’s a particular mindset among animal activists (and the wider culture) that I like to call the “right kind of activism” mindset. It goes like this: There is a right way of doing activism, which is the activism I do. If there were a better form of activism, I would be doing that. Anything else is inefficient,2 ineffective, or even actively counterproductive.3 Since animal activism is such a life-and-death pursuit, it’s my duty to convince other activists that their forms of activism are inferior and to get them to join my cause.

This narrative is dramatized, though I’ve certainly met a few advocates who act like this. Even those of us who don’t have that level of conviction often embody milder versions of the mindset. Perhaps we’re accepting on the surface, but harbor doubts about whether other forms of activism are worth the time or money. Perhaps we have doubts about our activism, but still carry a quiet confidence that it is still better than everything else. In some ways, this attachment is difficult to avoid: when we commit so much of ourselves to an approach, it’s hard to see it as anything but the right approach.

Nor is the mindset localized to animal advocacy. There are numerous facets of Western culture that reinforce the idea that there’s a right way (and consequently a wrong way) to do things: our entire school system is built around percentage grades, where it’s possible to be 100% correct. The popular conception of science is that it uncovers unbending laws of the universe.4 Influencers and magazines blare that there are right ways to look, dress, be. The message that there is a right way of doing anything echoes throughout our culture. It would be fine if this “right answer” mindset actually helped us, but it doesn’t. It breeds a fragile movement.

The Fragility of Certainty

On their face, the premises behind the Right Kind of Activism mindset seem reasonable: There are more and less effective forms of activism, so there must be a best kind of activism. If we know the best kind of activism, we should try to convince people to follow that form of activism. But when we look at these premises from a strategic perspective, they start to fall apart.

You’d think that if we can assess better kinds of activism, we can determine the best kind of activism. I’m not so sure. There’s a great deal of uncertainty in our evaluations: we’re dealing with society scale forces that no one can reliably predict.5 Our best activism is really more like our best guess activism. But that’s not how we act. We make proclamations about how cage-free will allow omnivores to continue eating eggs or how culture change is a waste of time since it can’t be measured. Our desire for a good solution and our personal affiliations make us overconfident in our approaches.

That confidence also leads us to costly attempts to persuade other activists to join us. Debate and feedback are healthy, but how many resources did PETA spend on those posters? How much time do we spend arguing with each other? I’ve seen multi-hour conversations debating the right way of approaching animal activism, with participants sometimes spending more time arguing about activism than actually doing activism. As long as we’re trying to persuade people who are already involved, we’re playing a zero-sum game. The movement doesn’t grow, people just get shuffled from one organization to another. Better to focus on reaching beyond our existing circles.

Overconfidence and expensive persuasion are bad enough, but what I really worry about is an organization successfully persuading a significant portion of the movement to focus on their single approach. We’d be putting all of our eggs into one basket, risking our resources if it turns out that there’s a flaw in the strategy or the environment changes. This isn’t just an animal activism phenomenon: monoculture crops are famously vulnerable to diseases and pests. When farmers plant a monoculture field, it drains the ecosystem of nutrients. We don’t want to turn animal activism into a monoculture movement.

A Diverse Ecosystem

Instead of a monoculture movement, we want a diverse ecosystem. Specifically, this looks like promoting a variety of theories of change that work under different conditions. For example, culture change and economic innovation rely on different assumptions: culture change is based on the premise that a small group of dedicated people can influence the culture and that cultural status is instrumental in people’s decisions. The economic innovation (i.e. clean meat) approach rests on the premise that factors like price and convenience are the primary drivers of behavior. By investing in both, we’re prepared to capitalize on whichever assumptions end up matching closer to reality.

Diversity-based thinking recasts our relationships. Rather than competing with each other to prove who’s right and pick up volunteers, we can see ourselves as an ecosystem. Every organization has their strategy and our strategies complement each other. The more distinct the strategies, the better: a bunch of variants on street outreach is much less diverse than a group doing street outreach, another making social media content, and a third running grassroots protests. No matter what turns out to be effective, we’ll already be investing in it. Diversity makes us resilient to the unknown and to changing conditions.

Room to Grow

Once you’re inside a specific strategy in the ecosystem, there are clear ways of grading effectiveness. If you’re working on street conversations, the best activism is whatever conversational practices convert the most people to veganism. Rather than worrying so much about evaluating across different strategies, we can focus on improving effectiveness within strategies. We can run scientific experiments on our tactics. We can incorporate feedback into our activism to promote learning. Within a strategy is a more productive space to think in terms of “better” or “worse” activism.

With how much time we’ve spent criticizing each other, we should know where our weak points are. Instead of using those critiques as a reason why someone should stop doing cage-free campaigns (street outreach, digital activism, whatever), we can reframe them as a way to bring those forms of activism into their best selves. Yes, street activism often lacks long term feedback; let’s figure out how to track our impact. Yes, there’s a danger of reinforcing the system with corporate welfare campaigns; let’s pick better campaign targets. Yes, our activism is flawed; let’s refine our strategies instead of abandoning them.

Even with the ecosystem mindset, we still have to make large scale decisions about how to allocate our resources. Some forms of activism will end up getting more resources than others. These choices should be informed by our best understanding of what strategies are most effective, but are not a reason to write off a strategy wholesale or stop looking for the best version of a strategy. We can invest in what seems to be working and still preserve diversity. We can build a robust movement that thrives no matter what’s going on around us.

Three Things to Try

1. Steelman Your Skepticism: Pick the theory of change you find least convincing and build the strongest case for the conditions where it wins.

2. Heed the Critics: Take one weak point critics have raised about your strategy and design a small experiment to address it.

3. Build a Bridge: Reach out to an activist working in a different strategy and ask them about their activism. When do they think it works best? What do they see as the strategy’s strengths and weaknesses?

Informed by

• Seeing like a State by James C. Scott

• The Evolution of Everything by Matt Ridley

Existing Strategies. There are forms of activism we’re heavily investing in: plant-based defaults, street conversations with the general public, cage-free campaigns. These strategies and their related tactics lack rigorous evaluation. Their popularity makes it even more important that we verify their effectiveness and see if there are ways to refine our approaches. This research direction provides a sanity check on how we’re spending our resources. The core question: Is what we’re doing working?

Existing Strategies in New Contexts. There were several applications that ran along the lines of “Vegan messaging is US/Western centric. It would never fly in my home culture. I want to create messaging that does resonate for my culture.” Given that the majority of farmed animals exist outside North America and Europe, it’s a no-brainer to invest in figuring out how to adapt our existing approaches into new contexts. We can’t assume that what works in the US works elsewhere. This research direction is about scaling our movement to places it hasn’t reached before. The core question: Will what we’re doing work somewhere else?

New Strategies. These are the approaches that no one is really doing right now, including strategies and tactics from other movements. These are the kinds of experiments I was trying to get at with the Hatchery Fund, ideas that break out of our box. These obviously need to be evaluated: since we’ve never tried them, there’s no evidence going in any direction. This research direction concerns making our movement more effective than it has been. The core question: Is this new strategy or tactic better than what we have?

We need funders and experimenters addressing each of these research directions. They represent distinct and complementary problems. We need to be critical about what we’re doing, figure out how we can scale it up, and keep pushing the boundaries of what tools we have access to. I intend to keep The Hatchery Fund focused on new strategies; I’d love to see other organizations pick up the torch for evaluating our existing strategies and importing those strategies into new contexts.

Art by Kim Evans

Suppose you’re a vegan and an omnivore friend offers you a deal: they’ll cut their meat consumption in half if you start eating meat once a week. They want you to prove you’re not totally inflexible and that you don’t look down on them for eating meat. You’ve known this person for a long time and you can trust they’ll follow through. Given that they usually eat meat a couple times a day, this represents at least five meals worth of animal products compared to the one you’ll be adding. What do you do?

This is not just a thought experiment. What if being less than 100% vegan makes you more effective at persuading people to reduce or eliminate their meat consumption? If you were 99% vegan, which translates to about one non-vegan meal a month, would people be more willing to listen?1 There’s evidence that the answer is yes, people are more receptive to non-vegans about reducing their meat consumption. More research is needed, but there is a real possibility that we could save more animals by not being fully vegan.

The fact that people who eat meat might be better at saving animals than us should give us pause. We’re in the habit of treating veganism as the primary criteria for someone’s morality and respectability. Yet when we focus on veganism, we obscure the many shades of gray within omnivorous diets and the ground we can gain from working within that space. Someone who eats meat once a month and successfully advocates for other people to reduce their meat consumption gets thrown in the same bucket as someone who eats bacon for breakfast, ham sandwiches for lunch, and steak for dinner. Call me crazy, but I don’t think those two people should be regarded as the same.

If we zoom out even more, it becomes clear how arbitrary veganism is. We act like veganism is permanent, a reflection of someone’s enlightenment and virtue. Yet when we look to the past, present, or future, this permanence doesn’t hold up: most of us grew up eating meat; self-identifying vegetarians and vegans often eat animal products; and most people who are vegan now will no longer be in ten years time. There are very few people who will be 100% vegan for their whole lives. The truth is that we are all fractional vegans.

The Virtue of Growth

If we leave behind veganism as our standard for people, we may want another way to evaluate whether someone is committed to the cause. I propose growth. Are they reducing their meat consumption? Are they exploring animal advocacy and contributing their talents to the cause? If someone continues to improve, they will become a more valuable ally as time goes on, regardless of where they are in the present.

Growth is much more forgiving than a specific cutoff. It allows for the fact that we live in an environment that opposes veganism and that becoming vegan is a journey. Growth supports set backs and slip ups and all the difficult parts of being human. It’s a standard that can apply equally well no matter what situation someone is in or what background they come from. As long as someone keeps growing, they will eventually surpass someone who finds an arbitrary standard and holds to it.

It took me six years to complete the journey from vegetarian to vegan. During that period, I never stopped pushing to reduce my animal product consumption. I volunteered for The Humane League and fought for better living conditions for animals. What would have happened to me if I had not given myself the grace to take the time I needed to complete the journey? I’m not convinced I would have remained in the movement, but I will never know.

The grace I gave myself is the grace I hope to see reflected in our movement. Everyone is in a different position, making difficult choices. We are all trying to do what we can with what we have. If we can focus more on helping people along the journey and less on always making the right choice, we can build a movement where anyone can find a home and that’s what we will need to set the animals free.

Informed By

• The Growth Mindset by Carol Dweck

Thanks to Beta Readers: Kim Evans

How did a fund run by an American activist with a mostly North American and European audience draw 60 applications from Africa? I have to credit Hive as the gateway. The international community they’ve built let the fund spread much further than my limited network. My working theory is that the Effective Altruism community in Nigeria provided the social channels for the fund to spread and the greater purchasing power of $1000 in most African countries provided a stronger motivator for applications.

It’s been inspiring and humbling to see all the energy coming out of the rest of the world for animal advocacy. Even though I’d known about international coalitions like the Open Wing Alliance, I haven’t had any direct contact with international activists until now. Hearing activists’ stories and reading about their ideas made the abstract into the real. I saw the same sentiments that fuel my Seattle comrades reflected in dozens of lives around the world.1

This is great news. The Western world may have been the first to develop factory farming, but we will not be the last. Around 85% of the world’s population lives outside of North America and Europe, and the demand for meat is skyrocketing as countries in Asia and Africa become more prosperous. The picture may be bleak, but the knowledge that there are so many activists ready to work for change is not.

If you’re a Western activist like me and have mostly focused on getting our house in order, consider donating abroad as well. The money goes further and we can help the activists fighting there to prevent their countries from ever reaching the stage ours is in. If you’re an activist outside of the Western world, I salute you. May you have good fortune in changing your city, state, or country for the better.

Thanks to Björn for putting together the farmed animal populations by continent chart.

Imagine you’re learning to cook, but you can’t taste or smell your food. What’s more, you must give your food to people who say they’ll eat it, but they take it away and you never see them again. Will you become a good cook? Probably not. There’s no feedback. Feedback is to learning as oxygen is to animals: without feedback, learning promptly dies. It tells us where we’re bad and good, which allows us to make adjustments to move away from the bad and towards the good.

This is the situation we face in our activism. From having conversations on the street to protesting outside a restaurant, the feedback is missing or incomplete. People might commit to going vegan in front of us, but then they walk away and we never hear from them again. A restaurant owner might remove foie gras from their menu, but we can’t see their thought process or what tipped them over the edge. These gaps will leave us unable to adapt. To close the gaps, we need to understand what feedback is and how it fits into the learning process

Feedback is signals plus attribution. More specifically, it’s getting signals (good or bad) about our performance, then being able to attribute those signals to specific actions. In the cooking example, when we taste our food, we get signals from all the flavors and their combined effect. If we taste after adding a spice, we can attribute the change in taste to the spice we just added; if you only taste at the end, you don’t know which steps had which effects. The signals and attribution provide crucial information about how we’re performing.

Feedback graduates into learning when we make adjustments. It’s not enough to taste the food, we also have to decide what’s missing and try it out. By making adjustments and getting further feedback, we learn what ingredients work together and the subtle art of balancing different flavors. During the process, we develop mental models for how to cook, like which combinations of spices go together. Learning consists of these small iterative loops of action, feedback, adjustment, feedback. Over time, these loops build into an understanding of how things work.1

What this means for the movement is that we are largely incapable of learning. Not even necessarily that we don’t want to learn, but that we simply can’t learn without proper feedback. It’s difficult to tell what works and what doesn’t if you never see the results of the choices you make and the actions you take, or if you can’t see which actions led to which results. If we want a movement that learns, finding feedback is the top priority.

Filling in the Blanks

The ideal environment for feedback is one where you get signals about performance throughout the activity, a strong signal at the end of the activity, and the ability to accumulate lots of these signals over time to establish levels of performance. Take football. A football player will get lots of moment-by-moment signals, from feelings in their body to how well they placed a kick. There are intermediate signals of performance in the form of points scored and a capstone signal based on who won the game. Games and points are tracked over time, so we can build a picture of the best football players and then learn from them.

Animal advocates have a much patchier set of signals. If you’re on the individual change side persuading people to go vegan, you might get lots of in the moment signals through body language, tone, and the content of the conversation. But the “winning the game” signal is missing: there’s no way to find out who actually goes vegan as a result of the conversations. No winning means no keeping score over time, and that keeps us from learning who the best persuaders are or which techniques actually get people to shift their values.

The institutional change side has the opposite problem. You can tell if your campaigns win or not (it’s pretty clear to tell if a policy has been adopted), but there’s a general lack of frequent, small-scale signals during campaigns. The activists throwing a protest outside a hotel will be lucky to get a few pieces of relevant feedback, maybe a positive or negative comment from the manager. It’s difficult to adjust when you don’t know whether your activities are moving the needle. And the fact that you only get “winning” signals every few months or years limits the amount of feedback you can accumulate, making it harder to discern what strategies are working.

We have to look for ways to fill in the blanks. For convincing more people to go vegan, we need indicators of success. If we can’t know whether someone goes vegan, we can at least look for behaviors that precede veganism. We The Free measures how many people watch videos after following a QR code from one of their conversations. We can take this a step further: how many people would sign up for something like Challenge 22 after a street conversation? How many people who start Challenge 22 will finish the program? These steps form a funnel that we can use to assess how people are progressing through the vegan pipeline.

On the pressure campaign side of the aisle, there are some intermediate steps we can study between taking action and winning a campaign. We can look at how many people we are mobilizing for campaigns as a proxy for success. We can have our negotiation teams deliver feedback, good and bad, on how protests are affecting the targets. It’s especially important to get this negative feedback - if our protests aren’t actually pressuring the target, we need to know so we can adjust. It might be a little demoralizing in the short term, but not as demoralizing as finding out years later that our protests did nothing.

In general, getting feedback is a matter of breaking down a complex event into intermediate steps. For someone going vegan, these steps could be watching videos, talking with friends, trying recipes, and so on. Tracking the steps provides footholds for feedback and measurement, just like when we taste our dishes while we’re cooking them. So if you’re trying to figure out where you can get feedback, first write down the different steps on the way to your goal. Once you have those, see which you can collect data on and start keeping a log. The signals should flow from there.

Tracing Cause and Effect

Once we have signals, we need to know which of our actions produced them. This is another area where animal advocates are playing at a disadvantage. We’re operating in a complex environment where it’s difficult to trace a single line of cause and effect, a problem common to the social sciences. It’s easy to see how a good move can win a chess game; it’s harder to see how a protest shifts a company. Fortunately, there are practices that make it easier to attribute signals.

First, we can establish a strong baseline. We can gather data on what our average performance looks like: average meetup size, average number of new recruits in a month, average campaign duration. This allows us to notice when something departs from that average and analyze why. There is no above- or below-average without an average. Getting a good average means collecting data before we think we need it.

I once ran a “Digital Action Buddies” initiative in Seattle where I paired up local volunteers to be accountability buddies for taking digital actions together. I was excited about the initiative and got an enthusiastic response. Sixteen Seattle community members signed up. If I’d stopped there, I would have called the initiative a success. But fortunately, I’d been collecting data about how many actions we took in a month and when they were taken. Net effect of the initiative? Zero. No one followed through with their buddy.2 I never would have known that the program failed without the prior months of collecting action data.

The next practice is comparing notes across contexts.3 If every local organizer for The Humane League collects some data on their volunteer base, suddenly we have the ability to compare and contrast across cities. This helps wash out some of the ambiguity. If a technique only works for one organizer, then it’s probably something else the organizer is doing (or something about the city in general), and not the technique. This practice builds on the last: we all have to keep good records and talk about them with others.

In the same vein, it helps to have records on both inputs and outputs. It’s great to know that we got twelve people at a protest; it’s even better to know what day the protest happened, what neighborhood it was in, and what kind of advertising we did beforehand. These are the kinds of details that blur with time and memory. When we’re running dozens of protests over the span of years, it can be hard to keep track of exactly what we did and when. Putting all of the information down allows us to track across time.

At its heart, attribution relies on knowing what happened and the various surrounding conditions. Traditional science handles the challenge of attribution by trying to change only one variable at a time and holding everything else constant. Operating in a complex, ever-shifting space, we don’t have that luxury. Instead, we have to collect as much relevant data as we can and work on sifting out the signal from the noise.

Signals to Start With

So far, I‘ve been focusing on the more abstract virtues and principles behind understanding signals and attribution. To close out, I want to share some signals to use for recruiting, retaining, and campaigning:

1. Recruit: How many people do you tell about your group’s instagram/meetup/facebook in a month? How many new people does your group get in a month?

2. Retain: How many people come to at least one meeting every three months? How many people come to one or two meetings and never come back?

3. Campaign: What is the average turnout at an action event? What percentage of your regular volunteers come to each event? For pressure campaigns, what’s your win percentage and average campaign length?

These signals are not comprehensive, but give a rough sense of how a community is doing and provide a specific numerical basis for comparison across time and with other groups.

There’s also qualitative feedback we can gather. There’s no substitute for just having conversations with your community members, people in neighboring communities, and even your campaign targets. Asking how the community is doing and is perceived can get you a lot of information that won’t show up in simple numbers. These kinds of conversations can help uncover the “why” behind the numbers and chip away at the problem of attribution.

Collecting signals and reflecting on feedback only takes a few minutes to start. Take attendance at a meetup, tally postcards written on a whiteboard, hang onto those sign up sheets from the farmer’s market. When you get a quiet moment, dump all that data into a spreadsheet. The early bits of information might not seem like much, but as it piles up over the years, it will be worth its weight in gold.

Three Things to Try

1. Write down your funnel. For whatever you’re working toward (someone going vegan, a policy win), list the intermediate steps on the way there. These steps will help you find places to get feedback.

2. Start a spreadsheet. Pick a couple numbers you already work with (meetup attendance, new faces, postcards written) and log them after every event. Don't design the perfect system; just start the pile.

3. Compare notes. Find one person running a similar group in another city, and swap whatever data you each keep. See what patterns emerge.

Informed By

• Peak: The New Science of Expertise by Anders Ericsson

• Thinking in Systems by Donna Meadows

Art by Kim Evans

Since the Hatchery Fund focuses on innovation, I prioritized novelty as my main deciding factor. This led to a different portfolio of experiments than if I were focusing on other features, like scaling existing successes, reliability, or scope of impact. There were plenty of strong applications that would be valuable to the movement, but did not quite fit into the novelty model. I have not included those experiments in the post, since there are too many, but am happy to discuss them with anyone interested in directing funding to those initiatives.

Fund Experiments

29 — Community Kitchens for Plant-Based Cooking (Lawrence Phambana, Blantyre, Malawi, $750)
Can community-led “village kitchens” plus cultural storytelling raise household acceptance of plant-based meals in rural Blantyre? The idea is cultural rootedness, familiar Malawian dishes, and youth cooking competitions will make plant-based eating relatable rather than foreign. Women’s groups will run the kitchens and the experimenter will collect data on community behavior at home. Success looks like families cooking at least one plant-based meal per week at home; failure is people attending but saying they wouldn’t eat these at home.

51 — Islamic-Framed Farmer Outreach (Abdulhakeem Salahudeen, Zaria, Nigeria, $750)

Does Islamic framing (Hadiths, stewardship) move Muslim livestock farmers more than welfare-science framing (stress hurts productivity)? The idea is that religious obligation sticks better than economic self-interest for practices with no short-term payoff. Forty farmers will be split into two groups of 20, each getting a one-on-one conversation with a different framing. The experimenter will follow up with pre/post surveys and a 4–6 week check-in on actual practice change. Success looks like a more consistent change for the Islamic-framing group; failure is no difference or the framing backfiring as preachy. If successful, the experiment may lead to a replicable protocol for Muslim-majority farming regions across West/Central Africa.

56 — Social Gatherings for Next Generation of Activists (Jesica Bon Denis, Argentina, $750)
Does community and belonging recruit young people (18–30) into the movement better than the standard “join the cause” ask? The idea is that moralizing invitations trigger exit before a positive first experience, while friendship lowers the barrier to later involvement. Four low-pressure social events (~15 people each: vegan dinner, games, speed-friending) will target people who care about animals but don’t identify as activists. The experimenter will run pre/post surveys and a later check-in on whether anyone actually joined a group or attended another event. Success looks like sustained interest and new connections; failure is people enjoying the night out but going no further. The applicant brings 15+ years in the movement and frames this as a generational pipeline problem.

78 — Local Scorecard Canvassing (Katie Arth, Ventura County, CA, $500)
Can a pledge-and-scorecard canvassing model activate a durable “animal voter” identity and drive turnout? The idea is to tap into local identity, where party ID is weak, with the scorecard as the concrete activation tool. Tabling at farmers markets will convert engaged people with an “I vote for animals” pledge (button, QR-coded scorecard), followed by two pre-election emails and a voter-file cross-reference. Success looks like pledger turnout above comparable baseline; failure is turnout indistinguishable from it. The measurement is rigorous with separate QR codes for pledgers vs. info-seekers and voter-file segmentation by prior history to isolate who was actually moved.

85 — TTRPG for Animal Welfare (Fiel Aquino, Philippines, $750)
Can a cooperative tabletop RPG expand the moral circle to farmed animals without triggering defensiveness? The idea is layered: players inhabit pigs and chickens in a rigged resource economy they can’t beat through clever play (forcing a structural reading over pity), kapwa (FN) supplies a relational starting point, and burying the moral content in mechanics lowers defensiveness. The game is co-designed with advocates, gamers, and skeptics, then will be tested with different groups. Success will be measured by the Moral Expansiveness Scale, recorded debriefs, in-game behavior, and a persistence check; failure is players staying in puzzle-solving mode or flat scores on the Moral Expansiveness Scale. There are no cooperative board games for farmed-animal perspective-taking. If the game goes well with the pilot group, it may be scaled to other groups and eventually published.

95 — Increasing Investment in Alternative Proteins (Asampana Maxwell, Accra, Ghana, $750)
Will Ghanaian financial institutions engage on food-system investment, and which of four frames (Risk Mitigation, Market Opportunity, Food Security, or Animal Welfare) will be best for motivating that engagement? The idea is that economic frames (risk, market opportunity) land best and the welfare frame will be the weakest alone. The experimenter will reach out to ~30–40 banks and lenders with one of the four frames for each. For poultry-exposed institutions, the concrete ask is that the institutions require borrowers to meet GS 1404:2026, Ghana’s new national welfare standard, turning “higher welfare” into a lending condition. Success looks like ~8–10 meetings and directional patterns by frame; failure is consistent declines or no differentiation. The experiment is notable for testing the financial lever rather than consumer behavior.

79 — “Inside Job” Activist Training Program (Kinga Judit Kalla, $750)
Does breaking corporate advocacy into 5–10 minute micro-tasks lower the barrier enough to raise engagement, confidence, and long-term retention? The idea is compounding confidence: easy early wins build toward self-initiated advocacy. Participants will work through progressively harder tasks over 4–6 weeks, with the program also feeding the Plant Based Treaty’s “100 Cafés Challenge.” Success looks like 20–50 participants with 15–30 reporting feeling more effective, and half staying active long-term; failure is high dropout rates. The experiment centers onboarding and retention while supporting an existing corporate campaign.

Additional Experiments

4 — Just Food Systems Leadership Fellowship (John Nyambane, Kenya, $750)

Does a structured fellowship combining peer community, coaching, and micro-grants successfully transition students from passive interest into effective animal advocates? The idea is that providing a supportive environment and actionable steps lowers the barrier to sustainable activism. The experimenter will run a fellowship program where students receive training, materials, and small funds to implement their own advocacy micro-actions. Success looks like at least half of the participants undertaking meaningful advocacy activities during or immediately after the program; failure is participants merely attending sessions without translating their learning into real-world action. If successful, this could create a scalable pipeline for building dedicated student activists.

6 — Peer Engagement for Veterinarians (Sadiq Surajo, Nigeria, $750)

Can structured peer engagement and small stipends motivate veterinarians to participate actively in animal welfare activism? The idea is that while vets already care deeply about animals, institutional and social barriers often prevent them from taking public advocacy stances. Ten veterinarians will participate in a six-week program featuring weekly advocacy activities, with a small stipend to cover their time and internet access. The experimenter will use pre- and post-program surveys to measure shifts in attitudes, confidence, and willingness to take public action. Success looks like a measurable increase in active engagement and public advocacy from participants; failure is no change in behavior or participants remaining silent on welfare issues.

13 — 30-Day Advocacy Challenge (Ikeneche Ebubechukwu Favour, Nigeria, $650)

Can a 30-day “advocacy challenge” featuring small, low-pressure tasks recruit and retain new student advocates better than standard volunteer asks? The idea is that breaking activism into bite-sized daily actions within a supportive community prevents burnout and builds sustainable habits. Participants will complete simple daily tasks, supported by a combination of online coordination and small in-person meetups. The experimenter will track completion rates and follow up after the challenge to gauge ongoing interest. Success looks like a high retention rate throughout the 30 days and participants opting to continue their activism post-challenge; failure is a high drop-out rate or zero continued engagement once the challenge ends.

30 — Tilapia Quality of Life Improvement (Rachel Mugure Kabue, Kenya, $750)

Can a low-cost intervention—providing basic water-quality monitoring tools and support—lead to lasting welfare improvements in cage tilapia farms? The idea is that high mortality and poor welfare are driven by a lack of routine monitoring (like dissolved oxygen and pH levels), and equipping farmers with the right tools will incentivize better practices. After a baseline study along the Migori County shoreline of Lake Victoria, the experimenter will provide equipment (e.g., handheld dissolved-oxygen meters) and four weeks of support to local farmers. Success looks like farmers independently continuing to use the meters and record observations 60 days after the support period ends, alongside a measurable reduction in fish mortality; failure is the abandonment of the tools once the trial is over.

92 — Rabbit Welfare Champions Youth Group (Oliva IMANIBIRIMO, Rwanda, $750)

Can a youth-led peer support model improve rabbit welfare practices in rural farming communities better than standard, one-time technical trainings? The idea is that behavior change requires continuous encouragement, practical demonstration, and trusted relationships, rather than just isolated information drops. The experimenter will train 20 youth volunteers as “Rabbit Welfare Champions,” who will then provide ongoing support and demonstrations to local rabbit farmers over an 8-week period, focusing on proper housing, hygiene, and respectful handling. Success looks like clear, measurable improvements—such as cleaner shelters and consistent clean water access—in at least 70% of the participating households; failure is farmers reverting to or maintaining poor welfare practices despite the continuous youth-led intervention.

114 — Stray Dog Narrative Investigation (Aeshah El-Morsy, Egypt, $750)

Can an on-the-ground investigation uncover whether Egypt’s current “stray dog crisis” narrative is being artificially driven by parties with competing financial interests? The hypothesis is that the dominant public debate is a coordinated messaging campaign designed to benefit specific actors, rather than an organic crisis. The experimenter will conduct field research across multiple governorates—including deeply under-reported areas in Upper Egypt—to access witnesses, government offices, and field sites to document severe animal violations. Success looks like the final investigative report being utilized by a legal or academic voice outside Egypt and generating enough evidence to file a formal legal petition; failure is the inability to find concrete evidence of coordinated manipulation.

Shortlist

27 — Soybean Wara Leadership Demonstration (Ahmed Saheed Olaide, rural Nigeria, ~$980)
Can respected locals (elders, market leaders, corps members) eating soybean wara publicly strip its “poor man’s food” stigma and get people to choose it over animal protein? The idea is that everyone already knows wara — the barrier is what eating it signals socially, so a high-status demonstrator changes the meaning.

31 — Local Ingredient Culinary Challenge (Doe Kwabla Seyenam Nyamadi, Ghana, $970)
Can a plant-based cooking challenge using only indigenous Ghanaian ingredients make plant-based eating feel accessible to people outside vegan spaces? The idea is that veganism reads as foreign and expensive, so routing it through familiar local foods lowers resistance.

35 — Igbo Christian Congregation Outreach (Orji Peter Chibuzor, Southeast Nigeria, $930)

Does a pastor-delivered Sunday segment shift congregants’ attitudes and buying intentions on cage-free eggs and humane slaughter more under a biblical Creation Care framing or a food-safety framing? The idea is that the barrier is values-based rather than informational — so scripture-rooted stewardship should have more leverage than facts alone.

41 — Vegan Internships for Adjacent Allies (Zuleka Waldman, low-vegan-population country, $1,000)
Can non-vegan “allies” in adjacent professional fields be an effective recruitment and movement-building lever where vegans are scarce? The idea is that students exposed to animal material become influential professionals receptive to advocacy goals, easing the solo-advocate burnout problem.

43 — Listening Event for Advocate Recruiting (Gemunu de Siva, $1,000)
Can a music/listening event built around an album made from undercover-investigation field recordings reach people who’d never attend an advocacy event? The idea is that promoting through arts/cultural networks pulls in non-advocates who arrive for the sound art and stay for the stories.

68 — Animal-Welfare vs. Farmer-Centered Outreach (Gbolade Olumayowa Kujero, Nigeria, ~$1,000)
Can practical, farmer-centered messaging delivered through trusted peers engage poultry farmers more effectively than conventional animal welfare outreach? This experiment tests whether framing welfare around bird health, productivity, and disease prevention encourages farmers not only to adopt welfare ideas but also to share them within their own networks, creating measurable peer-to-peer diffusion of animal welfare practices.

70 — Newsletter vs. Direct Ask Recruiting (Anna Acsai, Hungary, $1,000)
Which digital volunteer funnel works better — newsletter-first (warm up, then ask) or a direct volunteer ad? The idea is that direct ads yield fewer but more active sign-ups, while the newsletter path is cheaper and higher-volume but leakier.

80 — Children’s Veg Fest (Naijha Wright-Brown, $1,000)
Does engaging kids through hands-on vegan cooking and youth speakers lower family resistance to plant-based meals? The idea is that children are empathetic and experiential, and that kid ownership of food prep drives household grocery decisions.

85 — Trauma-Informed Reflective Group (Leigh Tucker, $1,000)
Can facilitated peer-support groups reduce burnout and moral distress among animal-welfare practitioners and build psychologically sustainable org cultures? The idea is that nonjudgmental space to share values normalizes the struggle and seeds durable support networks, ultimately aiding retention.

88 — Vegan Taboo Student Tournament (Berna Köse, Turkey, $1,000)
Is an adapted Taboo game (cards on animal ag, speciesism, food systems) an effective entry point for veganism with non-vegan university students? The idea is that a game lowers the defensiveness that lectures and debates trigger, and that repeated explain-and-guess aids retention.

90 — Islamic Ethics vs. Traditional Welfare Farmer Outreach (Miftaudeen Abdulgafar, Zaria/Kaduna, Nigeria, ~$1,000)
Does Islamic ethical framing (Rahma, Prophetic tradition, the prohibition of Ta’dhib) shift smallholder farmers’ attitudes more than standard welfare framing? The idea is that a local vet activating an internal moral framework rather than importing an external one will be more effective at getting people to change.

93 — Animal Rights through Constitutional Values (Anjor Bhaskar, India, ~$850–1,000)
Does framing animal rights through constitutional values (liberty, equality, justice) reduce resistance better than direct animal-rights messaging? The idea is that in India, animal advocacy gets dismissed as casteist/elitist before the ethics land, and a constitutional entry point defuses that.

111 — Standup Comedy for Vegan Promotion (Pedro Garutti, Belo Horizonte, Brazil, ~$1,000)
Can a stand-up show featuring well-known comedians who aren’t known for animal advocacy reach people who would never attend a vegan event? The hypothesis is that an hour of laughter builds trust and lowers defensiveness before introducing animal issues. All ticket revenue will be donated to animal sanctuaries, and the performance will be released online for free to test whether the format can scale beyond the live audience.

If I had unlimited funding, I would have funded 20-30 of those applications under the Hatchery Fund. Another 30-40 were valuable experiments, but didn’t match with my intended focus for novelty: they mostly took established practices and imported them to new contexts. That kind of work is more scaling than innovation, so I’d want to set up a separate fund for those. Altogether, there were ~60-70 experiments potentially worth funding. This has a couple implications.

First, individual donors can support innovation and research in animal activism, especially those of us who live in high income countries. For the price of a weekend getaway, you can pay for a small scale experiment. This is an opportunity for mutual aid and community building: we don’t have to rely on large scale donors or foundations to explore new approaches. And you get the satisfaction of knowing that you made an experiment happen. I don’t think we need to radically shift our donations, but paying for a few more experiments could go a long way.

Second, it would take about $110,000 to fund every single experiment in the application pool. This might be a lot for an individual, but a lot less for a grantmaking organization: funders like Coefficient Giving routinely give out multi-hundred thousand dollar grants. This seems like a reasonable price to pay for potentially opening up new avenues of activism. Doubly so given that the EA movement, and by extension the animal advocacy movement, may be about to see an enormous influx in funding from AI companies going public.

Third, this means the Hatchery Fund will have another round (or more) in 2027. There were enough experiments and energy around the fund to convince me that it’s worth running again. One of the primary failure modes for the fund was the risk that there would not be enough appetite for experimentation in the community or that word wouldn’t make it out. Neither of these happened; instead, we got an upwelling of support. The next part of the theory of change to verify is whether the experiments yield useful results, but that’s something that will take years to properly evaluate.

When I went to the Animal and Vegan Advocacy (AVA) Summit in May, there were several sessions on using AI to automate various nonprofit processes. They were all asking roughly the same question: what can AI be used for in our movement? How do we take advantage of this new technology? Here I want to turn the premise on its head: as AI tools become increasingly capable, is there anything we should not use it for? Not on moral grounds, as so much of the American left has objections to AI, but on practical grounds. Are there ways that the use of AI will make our advocacy worse?

The key to the question lies in our relationship to automation. AI is not the first way we have of automating labor, not even close. The history of technology is the history of being able to substitute mechanical labor for human labor. From the earliest farming implements, technology was geared towards reducing the amount of human labor that went into the essential tasks of life. The current wave of AI is one more step in this direction. Thinking about how our activism would suffer from AI means thinking about how our activism would suffer from automation.

Whenever I think about automation, there’s one interaction that always comes to mind. I used to send out personalized text messages to our monthly coffeeshop meetup. One day, a friend asked me why I didn’t set up a program to send out the texts automatically. We were both software engineers, after all. It would take me a few hours at most, then I wouldn’t have to worry about bothering with the text messages. I’d make up the time spent automating in a couple months. I asked him whether he read automated text messages. He said no. I told him that’s why I didn’t automate the process.

My friend was thinking of the text messages in terms of their logistical value: people need to know when the meetup is in order to come. I was thinking of them in terms of their relational value: people need to know that their participation matters and someone cares if they come or not. It doesn’t matter who accomplishes a logistical task as long as it gets done. A relational task, on the other hand, can only be done by someone in the relationship; you can’t have someone else take your girlfriend on a date for you.

To take it one step further, the core of relationships is inconvenience. The fact that those text messages take time is what lets my community members know I care. The dinner you spend hours preparing for your spouse is what lets them know you care. These labors of love are antithetical to automation. Technology and automation exist to make our lives easier and more convenient. If used in a relationship, they effectively tell the other person that we don’t care enough to make the effort. This is an important warning, because grassroots activism is a fundamentally relational pursuit.

Spam is Not Outreach

AI cannot replace grassroots power. Grassroots power is built on people demonstrating that they care about an issue to force the hand of those in charge. Postcards to senators or phone calls to corporations work because the senators or corporations know that real people are upset. They know that ignoring us has consequences. The inconvenience is what sends that message. In fact, the more inconvenient, the better. Postcards are better than emails. AI and automation take us in the opposite direction. Automated outreach is not outreach at all, but spam. As long as we remain the constituents for these organizations, we’ll retain the ability to influence policy.

Nor can AI replace grassroots organizers. Grassroots groups are held together by relational ties. Activists show up not just for the animals, but for the organizer and community members. We build up communities by connecting with each other and accumulating relational capital. These are the little gestures that cannot be automated away. If you take an organizer out of their city, they lose a lot of their pull. They can rebuild in a new city, but it takes time to develop those relationships and trust. If you try to replace an organizer with an AI, you’re quite likely to wind up with a hollow shell. An AI organizer might be able to tell people what to do, but it will not be able to create the same kind of relational exchange as a human organizer.1

That’s not to say that AI will be useless in organizing. Far from it. AI can help with all the logistical tasks, so that we can spend more energy building relationships. Less time writing grants, more time connecting with our supporters. This, after all, is what technology should be for. Not just for making immense profits, but for enabling us to spend as much of our limited time on the good things in life as possible. And one of the best things in life is time with other people. It just so happens that time for other people is also one of the best things for organizing. These are the principles we’ll need to keep in mind as we grow the movement.

The Promise of Scale

Beyond the use of AI or automation to complete specific tasks, there is also a mindset that shapes how we approach the project of changing the world: the idea of scaling. Every would be tech founder or social media star wants to scale. They want to get their product in front of millions of people. We do too. Veganuary boasts that 30 million people worldwide tried the challenge in 2026. Whether you’re selling an app or an ideology, this kind of scaling depends on technology, writing, or other media: the creator(s) make something once, and then millions of people get to interact with the content. It’s a seductive idea that you can make something simple that will be used by millions and change the world.

This model of scaling does not work for activist groups. An activist group is not an artifact, not a product that can be replicated and shared around the world. An activist group is a collection of relationships and those relationships are built around mutuality and inconvenience. These things are impossible to copy the way we can copy writing, software, or media. If they could be copied, they would no longer be unique to their participants, and thus would lose their meaning. Activism will always be a local, relational affair.

In order to scale our activism, we need more than well-written books or catchy social media. We need organizers who are willing to embed themselves in communities and cultivate networks of relationships. If we were a religion, these people would be our missionaries. Activist power grows not like a meme spreading online, but like a cell slowly dividing. A successful community becomes vibrant and strong, then inspires community members to take what they love about the community into a different space and build up something new. It will not be an exact copy of the old community, but an offshoot with its own character.

This is good news and bad news. The bad news is that there is no fast or easy road to scaling. Building an app or writing a book is certainly not easy, but it is a much more finite task. You do it and it’s done. Communities, in turn, require constant maintenance. You have to keep maintaining the relationships that make up the body of the community. The good news is that the resistance to easy scaling means there will always be a need for grassroots activists. Community serves a vital role that defies automation and easy scaling. It’s built around people and a web of relationships.

No Shortcut to Harmony

Our relationships are a peculiarly human thing, one that does not yet exist between us and our AI agents. A relationship is a meeting in the middle of two people’s lives and needs. The AI agents have neither. They will never argue with you,2 never demand anything of you, never ask you to change or be better. Not so with other people. We are in constant, unending disagreement with each other. We squabble about what to eat, where to go out, how to handle the latest project, ad nauseam. We struggle and strive and make our relationships out of coming together over countless compromises.

The whole business is difficult and often painful. But so is exercise. We don’t exercise because it’s easy, we exercise precisely because it’s difficult and that makes us stronger. So too with relationships. Overcoming all the disagreements, minor and major, is what makes our relationships rich and rewarding. We lose that working with AI - they’re always at our beck and call, always willing to support us however we want, but not how we need. It’s empty calories; you can’t trust someone who always agrees with you.

Our communities, our power, will not be built by people who always agree with each other. If we are going to win the day, we have to be willing to fight and make up and work with people we never thought we would. There is no way to automate social harmony. The challenges of dealing with people are not a barrier to our destination; they are the road by which we reach it.

Things to Try

1. Audit logistics vs. relationship. List everything you do as an organizer in two columns: tasks where it doesn’t matter who does them and tasks that only work because you did them. Automate the first column; protect the second.

2. Run an inconvenience A/B test. Make your next ask two ways: one frictionless and one that costs you a little effort. See which actually produces action.

3. Host something effortful. Cook the dinner, hand-write the invitations, run the event the slow way. See whether the labor itself reads as care to the people who show up.

Informed By

• Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman

• Swarmwise by Rick Falkvinge

• Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky

Art by Kim Evans

Postscript

I spend a couple paragraphs in this essay talking about how AI cannot replace grassroots power or relational organizing because AIs are not customers and cannot have relationships with people. This may not always be the case. It’s entirely possible that once AI gets close to human level intelligence, it will be able to possess money (and thus act as a constituent) or be convincing enough to carry on relationships (and thus act as an organizer). We don’t know whether these capabilities are coming in five months, five years, or fifty years, although many folks are expecting them sooner, rather than later. Once these kinds of changes arrive, the fabric of society as we know it will change much more significantly and the whole premise of grassroots organizing may be thrown into question. But co-existence with another human-level intelligence on the planet is a whole other conversation.

Recruiting covers anything that brings new people into our activist communities, like tabling at a farmer’s market or advertising on social media. It’s the problem of how people outside the movement learn about us and become engaged. If we can’t effectively bring people in, the community will never grow beyond a handful of activists. We need a steady flow of people before we can properly evaluate how we’re doing with retention or campaigning.

Retaining concerns taking care of the community members we already have and making sure they stick around, perhaps by throwing potlucks or parties to help connect the community. Retention is all about giving people a reason to come back - whether that’s meaning, fun, connection, career opportunities, or something else. If people aren’t staying, we can recruit all we want, but those people will just end up leaving after a meeting or two. It’s like trying to fill a leaky bucket.

Campaigning involves using our community power to pressure organizations into change; it’s what we typically think of when we think of activism. Whenever we throw a protest or do a postcard writing session, we’re campaigning. Having people around doesn’t do much good unless we can get them to actively participate in effectively run campaigns. Good campaigns can in turn help our efforts to recruit and retain people.

Recruiting and retention form the hidden part of the iceberg that support campaigning; they’re the invisible work that makes powerful campaigns possible. We need to understand how each of the three processes work in order to systematically improve how we build our activist communities.

Recruit: Draw People In

The first step in recruiting is making sure people know we exist and promoting positive associations with our activist groups. In business terms, this is marketing. There are dozens of different ways to market ourselves: we could buy billboards, take out ads on social media, start social media channels, table at farmer’s markets, go door to door, have our community members visit other groups, the list goes on. Marketing boils down to getting our ideas and groups in front of people and showing them in a positive light. Money is the easiest way to do that, but given that the movement isn’t exactly swimming in cash, we will usually have to get more creative with social media and events.

The second step is converting people from passive observers to active participants. Call it sales. Sales often come through someone making a direct ask: just look at the history of door to door salespeople, missionaries, or political canvassers. Recruiters benefit from being able to understand what their target wants and how what they’re selling meets those wants. We usually don’t do great with this - we’re so determined to help the animals that we don’t spend much time thinking about how our groups benefit the activists.

If we want to build up our movement, we have to invest in our recruiting, marketing, and sales. We have to be willing to prioritize getting out into unfamiliar spaces and spending dozens of hours having hundreds of conversations all for the sake of getting a few converts. Either that, or we have to get so good at throwing events and creating a social media presence that people end up seeking us out. Both of those paths will take a considerable resource commitment that does not go directly towards our campaigns, which is a very different distribution than what we have right now.

Retain: Keep People Around

If recruiting is about presenting people with a compelling vision to join the movement, then retaining is about delivering on that vision. Does being part of the animal advocacy movement make people’s lives better? I’ve written before that in most cases, it does not. Why would people stay with a movement that simply adds another demand to their already hectic lives?

There are lots of ways to make people’s lives better. There are positive experiences, like fun, meaning, and connection. There are material improvements, like food, childcare, or insurance. Other movements have used both: Unions provided health insurance and hosted dances. The Black Panthers provided free meals for children and hosted benefit concerts, including one headlined by the Grateful Dead. This mutual aid was a natural extension of the groups’ activism, since the oppressed groups were both the providers and recipients of the aid. Animal activists are in a unique position - helping activists and helping animals are separate tasks. Historically, this led us to prioritize animals at the expense of activists. But that’s not a sustainable strategy. We need to take care of each other in order to take care of the animals.

There’s no single solution for how we can retain community members. We need to understand why people are leaving and what kind of support they need to continue engaging in activism. To reach that understanding, we have to talk to them. Not just to invite them to another protest, but on a personal level, to connect with them and know what they’re going through. Once we get a better sense of what challenges people are facing and which are causing people to leave, we can take steps to meet those needs. Ex. Can we help people find jobs (any jobs, not just jobs in the movement) or provide childcare? We can develop more systems and institutions to help meet the day-to-day needs of our volunteers.

Building this kind of infrastructure is a commitment. It’s one of the reasons why strong activist organizations or religious institutions have paid employees who are responsible for the care of the community. It takes a lot of legwork to keep up with all the members and organize community services. Moving to that world would mean accepting that we have to spend some of our resources on the overhead of maintaining a community. It might be less efficient in terms of dollars per lives saved, but the overall number of lives saved could be much higher if we can maintain stronger communities.

Campaign: Send People Out

Campaigning is mobilizing the people in our communities to fight for change. There’s been a lot of contention in the movement around the best kind of activism, notably between incrementalism vs abolitionism.1 Beyond wasting a lot of energy infighting, those labels elide the underlying mechanisms and necessary skills for making change. If we look instead at what we’re trying to accomplish, we can split our activism into two types of changemaking: changing individual behavior or changing institutional policy.

Changing individual behavior shows up in activism like Veganuary, street conversations (like the Cube of Truth), and mutual aid. Individual change activism is easy to get into: all you need to do is show up and start talking with people. It’s also easy to stagnate. Once we learn a set of talking points, arguments, and counterarguments, we can get into a routine with our conversations.

If we want to elevate our conversations, we can spend time studying and practicing persuasion techniques. There’s no shortage of practices from psychology and sales we can incorporate into our activism. We can also look for ways to measure how people respond to our conversations. We The Free does a good job of this by tracking how many people follow the links to vegan videos based on individual street conversations. Practice and feedback are essential to making sure we improve our individual conversations, not just have more of them.

Changing institutional policies is usually built around pressure campaigns, direct action/open rescue, and political campaigning. Institutions move a lot more slowly than individuals, so institutional campaigns require a lot more prep work. We have to pick the targets, plan the campaign, and mobilize activists. The easy default that a lot of institutional campaigns fall into is a campaign where we pick something we don’t like, get some activist friends together, and show up with signs outside the company’s headquarters. These often fall short because the company has no reason to negotiate - we’re a nuisance at best.

The more strategic version is doing research about who the key decision makers are, what options they’re likely to accept, and what pressure they might respond to. It’s also important to meet with the decision makers first and see if we can hash out a deal before applying pressure. If we can’t, steadily escalate until they fold. The challenge with this kind of approach is that it requires more patience to do the research and empathy to understand what kinds of carrots and sticks to offer the target company.

Where Do You Stand?

There is a lot more to dig into about how to recruit, retain, and campaign. These are complex topics, with whole books written about each of them. What I hope to accomplish with the framework is less a definitive guide for how to build an activist community, and more of a set of diagnostic questions we can ask ourselves to help make sure our communities are growing and effective. It can help us identify weak points and where we might want to invest more effort.

So, how is your local activist community doing? Does it have a steady influx of new members? Do people tend to stay around for years, or do they trickle out when their lives get busy? When was the last time you won a campaign? It’s up to all of us to answer these questions as best we can and build a stronger movement for it.

Three Things to Try

• Recruit: Lead with a question, not a pitch. At your next tabling or outreach event, before you say anything about animals, ask the person what brought them over or what they care about.

• Retain: Reach out to someone who’s drifted. Pick someone who used to show up but hasn’t lately and message them just to see how they’re doing. Not an invite to the next protest — a real check-in.

• Campaign: Talk to your target before you protest them. Before the next institutional action, try to get a meeting with someone who can actually say yes. Even if it goes nowhere, you'll learn what they might accept.

Informed By

• How to Create a Vegan World by Tobias Leenaert

• Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky

Thanks to beta readers: Kim Evans

If you find yourself in Seattle on a Friday evening with nothing to do, I recommend stopping by the Emerald City Contra Dance. Contra is a folk dance, easy to learn with simple patterns of moves called out by an announcer. But what really sets the Friday night dance apart is the energy. The music is live and lively, with a different band every week playing fiddles, flutes, and more. The room is packed, dancers forming three long lines from one end of the room to the other. Everyone is happy to be there, decked out in colorful clothes and dresses that flair out when they twirl. It’s an electric experience.

To me, the Contra dance community represents the epitome of a successful community. They’ve been around for decades, putting together weekly dances, finding musicians, and collecting money to pay for the room, all without a single employee. They are thriving in every way that the animal advocacy community is not: they’re large, enthusiastic, and self-sustaining. Where we struggle to scrape together a dozen activists, they have a multi-generational community spilling out of their rented room.

The obvious difference is that Contra is a fun, social activity. It’s easy to get people to go dancing with friends on a Friday night; it’s hard to get people to stand on a busy street chanting protest slogans on a Sunday afternoon. One way around this limitation is to hitch the events together: If we build a community that throws dances on Friday, people will connect and get invested. When a respected member of the community says they’re going to a protest on Sunday, people will be motivated to give back to the community and go with their friends.

It’s not a fool-proof connection. Some people will never graduate from the Friday dances to the Sunday protests. The key factor is what proportion of people make the leap and how big the community gets. As long as we have a big enough community or high turnout ratio, it doesn’t matter that everyone isn’t coming.1 Our direct actions will grow. It’s counterintuitive, but if we spend less time on direct actions and more time on fun activities, we may wind up with a larger, more energized base of activists.

This is not just speculation - there’s historical data to back up the idea that advocacy groups drive more turnout when they also focus on the social lives of their members. Take unions. Many of them hosted dances and picnics, as well as providing their members with essential services like childcare and healthcare. They knew it was big to ask their members to risk their jobs and safety in the fight for better working conditions. In order to make that ask, those members would have to feel supported and cared for. It worked. Unions were a powerful force for change from the late 1800s to the mid-1900s, until big businesses and the government conspired to crush them. We could build that kind of power, too.

Planting the Flag

We are a far cry from having the infrastructure needed to do something like providing our activists with insurance,2 but we can start today by growing vibrant communities around specific activities: dancing, sports, movies, writing, and so on. The activity doesn’t matter as much as the fact that people enjoy it. Nor is there special training needed for starting a community. Some hosting skills help, certainly, but those are also developed over time. What matters most is planting a flag and inviting people in. That’s not much to go off, so I have a few nuggets to share from my time as an organizer.

First, pick an activity. Personal hobbies are a great place to begin if they can be done in a group. It can also be beneficial to visit groups around your city and see which have traction. Seattle, for instance, tends to have a lot of writing and reading groups, perhaps because of our long, dark winters. Physical activities like sports or dancing are perennial favorites, no matter where you are. Being distinctive can help, although it’s not strictly necessary - crocheting is a much more specific vibe than a general art night. There’s a balance between broad appeal and being specific enough to not be lost in the noise.

Consistency is key. Having a group that meets at least once a month, and preferably closer to once a week, is a major element of building a community. The knowledge that people can come back and get to know others is a draw. With that in mind, it’s important to pick something that you as an organizer genuinely enjoy. Us animal advocacy folks can be a self-sacrificing bunch and we might feel an obligation to host the kinds of events we think will be most popular. That’s a sure path to burnout. Find something that you really want to do that also intersects with other people’s interests.

Once you have an event, you have to do it well enough that people want to stay and come back. Here are a few of my favorite ways of making people feel welcome:

1. Bring food. It doesn’t have to be a full meal; snacks can go a long way. Nothing brings people together like food.

2. Pay special attention to new people. They’re taking a risk by coming to a new event. Going out of your way to make them feel welcome is a great way of getting them to come back. Contra, for example, gives new people a free coupon for their next dance.

3. Practice learning people’s names. It’s an easy way to show you care about who comes and that they’re not just faces in a crowd.

4. Have a post-event hangout. Make sure there’s a good place for everyone to hang out after the main structured event. Structure is great for giving people a low pressure way of connecting, but the real magic happens at the after party. Go get drinks, go to someone’s house, give people space to eat and mingle.

Hosting can be overwhelming but even a few small, thoughtful details go a long way.

Once things get large enough, charge for the event. It helps cover basic costs and with a little luck can help pay the hosts. Real communities pay for leaders - just look at unions and religious organizations. There’s also the unfortunate reality that many public spaces charge for reserving rooms. Organizers paying out of pocket to cover those costs is not sustainable long term. Charging for events is one step towards building durable institutions. We are going to need money to provide community members with services and support that improve their lives.

Expect to iterate. Hosting is a skill, and like any other skill, takes some time to learn. Not to mention the fact that finding an activity that appropriately suits you and your city will take some trial and error. As you’re iterating, be mindful of doing it in a sustainable way: the biggest thing I wish I’d focused on earlier was enjoying and pacing myself. Building a community should fill the leaders’ cups as much as it’s filling the community members’. When we have events that bring all of us joy and connection is when we’ll have a community that everyone works to keep alive.

Keeping Our Activist Edge

Once we’re throwing our fun events and bringing in new people, how do we make sure they actually convert into activists? We don’t want to put in all this work building up communities and then have no one show up for our direct actions. It’s a little hard to evaluate given that we don’t have that many vibrant communities to begin with, but there are some cues we can take from social psychology and established groups.

The easiest way to make sure our groups keep a hand in activism is to make small activist activities part of the events. Get people to write a postcard or send an email when they come in the door. Give them some way of engaging that takes a few minutes and stays within the event. Encourage them to participate, but don’t force them. If your fun event gets 20 or 50 people, that’s 20 or 50 more postcards than you’d have otherwise and that’s a major improvement. Then there’s the fact that when people start doing an action, their beliefs about themselves will start to follow along. If they do a few small actions at fun events, people may start thinking of themselves as activists, especially if we encourage them.

We can also talk about activism. In the spirit of the land acknowledgement, we can give brief reminders of the state of the world and potential actions at the beginning or end of our events. Acknowledgments keep these issues at the top of everyone’s mind and make sure that new community members know about the related activism. We can also shape our acknowledgments so that they directly tie the community’s values to advocacy and emphasize the importance of taking action together.

When we charge for events, we can put a portion of that money towards activist causes. There are some events where paying is expected - like dances or trivia nights. Sliding scales and recommended donations can help keep events accessible, if need be. Or if you’re not comfortable with charging, you can always recommend organizations for participants to donate to. Donations can even be a draw for some people - one of the most successful events I’ve seen in Seattle was a happy hour where a portion of the proceeds went to a different charity every month.

We may also benefit from putting the good we do up front.3 We can market ourselves as a community for people who love and care about animals, have fun, and take steps to make animal and human lives better. This can set us apart. People are hungry to make the world a better place and if we can offer that hand in hand with the opportunity to connect and enjoy themselves, we’ll have more of the energy we seek.

Filling Our Cups

Taking a step back from direct action to plan dances and book clubs is not where I thought I’d find myself. Four years ago, riding a wave of energy coming out of the pandemic, I was so sure the Seattle THL community was on its way to big things. But after watching the community go bust after half a decade of effort, I ran out of steam. I know I’m not the only one who’s flared out in that time - I’ve watched other local organizers come and go and their communities wax and wane with them.

Building vibrant communities is not just about attracting new activists, although that is certainly a major concern. It’s also about sustaining the organizers and activists who have been here all along, the people who have already given so much to help the animals. In a world that takes and takes from us, finding a way to give to each other is itself a radical act. Joy is not a luxury but a necessity. It is the foundation we will build our revolution on.

Three Things to Try

1. Bring food to your next event. Test one hosting principle at the smallest scale: snacks at a meeting, cookies at a tabling shift. See if it makes a difference

2. Reflect on the best community you’ve been part of. What made it good? What would it take to recreate those conditions?

3. Attend a local non-activist event you’d enjoy: How many people do they have? How does the energy of the community feel? What are they doing (or not doing) to make people feel welcome?

Informed By

• The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker

• Mutual Aid by Dean Spade

• Politics Is for Power by Eitan Hersh

Header image: Flurry Festival 2019 contra dance, CC BY-SA 4.0

Update: Applications for 2026 are now closed. If you’re interested in applying in 2027, sign up here.

Innovation in Animal Activism

It’s easy to settle into a groove as an animal activist. Once you’ve been involved for a few years, you start running on autopilot. Show up for protests, write postcards, cause a ruckus. We look around ourselves and see that everyone is doing the same. This kind of habituation would not be a problem if we were winning. We’re not. Despite all the progress the animal movement has made, meat consumption continues to rise. The number of engaged activists is tiny. Our campaigns drag for years with minimal progress.1 We can’t keep doing things the same way that we are and expect to win. We need change. We need innovation.2

Change and innovation do not happen easily or automatically. They take dedicated time, energy, and money. That’s why so many governments and corporations have dedicated R&D departments. We can bring the same kind of scientific thinking to activism and back it up with funding and manpower. It would be an investment both in terms of discovering better ways of doing activism and developing the human capacity of the movement. There is already some exciting work being done at organizations like The Optimist’s Barn in terms of technological and policy development, but one lab is not enough. We need a range of research and development organizations approaching different problems.

One of those big areas, says the social sciences blogger, is the social sciences side of the movement. There’s a lot of good psychological research out there already and activists who are applying it, but we can do better by field testing specific interventions and figuring out what works. How do we recruit people to the animal advocacy movement? How do we build strong communities? How do we campaign more effectively? We already sink countless hours into fighting for the animals; we should be figuring out how to make the best use of our time.

That is what the Hatchery Fund is for - hatching new ideas into strategy and tactics that strengthen the movement. The Hatchery Fund will provide microgrants up to $1,000 to run a single experimental project that tackles one of the big problems in animal advocacy. After running the experiment, grantees will write up their results and share them on The Chicken Coup for other people to learn from. It’s a fund for and by frontline activists. Whether you’re just starting out or you’ve been volunteering for years, all you need is an idea for how the movement can be more effective.

The Hatchery Fund vs. Existing Funds

There are already a lot of great funds out there: ACE Movement Grants, the EA Animal Welfare Fund, Coefficient Giving’s Farm Animal Welfare Fund, to name a few. These funds tend to focus on building up promising organizations, distributing millions of dollars to groups around the world and creating full-time non-profit jobs for grantees. They require considerable commitment on both the part of the grant makers and recipients. These funds don’t discriminate between types of solutions - they’ll fund public policy, direct action, or technological projects as long as they’re backed by evidence and a good theory of change. They represent the movement’s most confident bets on what works for making animals’ lives better.

In contrast, the Hatchery Fund is focused on learning, experimentation, and discovery in a narrower sphere: the world of direct action and animal activism. Rather than trying to create successful organizations that save animals, the Hatchery Fund is trying to uncover promising directions for tackling key problems in animal activism and encourage volunteer activists to become more involved in the movement. They’re small grants that last for the duration of a project, not a chunk of an operational budget for an organization. If everything goes well, there will be some successful grantees who can take their findings and apply to other grants to scale up. The Hatchery Fund can serve as an incubator for new ideas that aren’t ready for serious investment yet.

Accordingly, one key difference is the fund’s relationship to failure. The existing funds put a premium on evidence and a strong theory of change. If you’re committing hundreds of thousands dollars to an organization, you want to know it will work. Those kinds of investments are good for achieving big results, but don’t create the best environment for experimentation. Because the Hatchery Fund focuses on discovery, there’s a different set of expectations around success and failure. If we try something and discover that it doesn’t work, that’s a natural part of the learning process. There’s also no pressure to prove that an intervention works to continue receiving funding and keep people employed - the funding is up front and the experiments are one-offs. By prioritizing learning, the Hatchery Fund creates a safer environment for the innovation we need.

How It Works

Applicants submit a short proposal covering their goal, their hypothesis, how they’ll measure success, and a rough budget. Grantees are encouraged to set aside part of the grant to compensate themselves for their time and effort. The proposal doesn’t need to be long or formal, but should have a well-designed hypothesis at its core and be set up so that results help us learn as a movement. Applications are due June 12th, 2026

Once the grants are submitted, I’ll take a couple weeks to review the applications and select the most promising experiments. I will be prioritizing ideas that are novel, creative, and target big problems in the movement. The first round of the fund is limited to $5,000, which means that I will only be able to select a handful of recipients, likely around 5-10. Depending on how successful the first round is, there may be future opportunities for additional experiments and funding.

After grantees are selected, I will reach out to them to collect information to transfer the funding, coordinate on dates for when the experiments will be running, and discuss publishing logistics. I’ll also be available to consult on the experiments based on my field experience and science background.3 Once grants have been finalized, I will publish cleaned up descriptions of the experiments on the Chicken Coup.

In the coming months, grantees will run their experiments and write up the results. Grantees will write an 800-1,000 word essay on what happened — what worked, what didn’t, and what they learned — which will also be published on The Chicken Coup. The write-ups will be an opportunity to share learnings with the wider community and give other activists a chance to try out some of the ideas.

The Hatchery Fund is itself an experiment in developing the R&D wing of the animal advocacy ecosystem. There’s evidence that science and industry need to churn through many failed experiments to get a few high value discoveries, but how well that transfers to the activist world is yet to be seen. I have high hopes for the fund, but I truly don’t know if it will work. If it fails, that will teach us something as well. At the end of the day, I believe that our movement is full of creative, dedicated people who can find ways to get things done that no one else can, especially with a little support.

Important Details

• Applications for 2026 are now closed. If you’re interested in applying in 2027, sign up here.

• Apply through this google form

• Applications are due June 12, 2026 at Midnight PST

• Grants selected and recipients will be notified by June 26, 2026

• A summary of experiments will be published on July 2, 2026

• See a sample set of answers here

• Questions, comments, or want to get involved in some way? Contact me at zachary@hatcheryfund.org

Animal activists aren’t running around giving people mercury (thank goodness), but we are guilty of the same kind of motivated reasoning. We will leaflet or protest, hear people say they’ll change, and assert that our work is done. When we win, it’s an indicator that we did the right thing. When we lose, well, the system is just too entrenched for us to have done anything. While this doesn’t always happen, there’s a dangerous lack of accountability to results in activism. Incorporating scientific principles and practices into our activism is a big way of closing that accountability gap.

The challenge is that few of us are actually familiar with these principles. The average American’s exposure to doing science is a class in high school involving black composition books and prewritten experiments. For folks who did science in college, we may have done some research that involved writing incredibly dry papers which we submitted to a journal and never thought about after the fact.2 These experiences portray science as formal, clinical, boring, and worst of all, predictable. In truth, they’re watered-down versions of the real thing.

If you strip away the trappings of science (the lab coats, the papers, the equipment, the degrees), what you’re left with is the willingness and ability to test our stories about the world. Humans are born storytellers - we’ve been telling stories for as long as we’ve been human. Some would even argue it’s what made us human. What we have not been doing is rigorously testing those stories to see how they hold up.3 That’s what science is about - wading into the uncertainty of the world and testing to see which of our ideas survive under pressure.

The Hypothesis: The Beating Heart of Science

The heart of science is making and testing predictions. If I do X, then Y will happen.4 Making predictions is easy. We make predictions all the time: “People like happy hours and they’ll be more likely to join our activist efforts if they go to a fun event first”; “If we tell people about the horrors of factory farming, they will stop eating meat”; or “if we send a bunch of emails to a CEO, they’ll get really annoyed and change their policy”. Formally, these predictions become our hypotheses. Once we have a hypothesis, we have to figure out how to test it.

The most important feature of a hypothesis is that you have to be able to prove it wrong.5 If we can’t demonstrate that the prediction failed, then it’s all too easy to keep on believing what we already want to believe. Then we have faith, not science. In order to be able to fail a hypothesis, we have to be able to observe the results of our experiment. For example, if you’re doing vegan street outreach, it would be a bad prediction to say that lots of people go vegan after talking to a street activist. What does “lots” mean? How would we know that they actually followed through? It would be a much better prediction to say that 10% of people put down their email or that 10% of people say they’re eating vegan when we call them six months later. These claims are more specific, which makes it possible to definitively say whether they happened.

Making specific, testable hypotheses benefits from a little quantification. It’s nice to be able to count something: donations received, event attendance, postcards written, etc. Counting removes a lot of subjectivity - however you feel about your street outreach conversations, it’s hard to argue with emails registered or signatures on a petition. Quantification can also help us come up with hypotheses. You can always ask what you want to see more of and then look for a way to count that. An easy structure for a lot of hypotheses is “if I do X, I will get more of Y”.

If you’re going for something a little more intangible, there’s room for surveys or interviews. Surveys can be on a scale (“On a scale of 1 to 10, how much do you like vegan food?”) or use freeform answers (“What are your associations with veganism?”). An easy way to fold surveys into an experiment is by giving people a before and after survey, ex. asking how good they think vegan food is, giving them a sample to taste, then asking again. Surveys are a great option if we’re trying to sway people’s opinions or improve people’s experience.

Thinking in terms of counting emails or writing surveys can be counterintuitive. Hypotheses don’t follow the dramatic arcs that our story-loving brains crave; instead, they focus on picking over details for exactly what happened (or didn’t). But that’s where the magic comes from. By forcing us into the weeds and holding us accountable to observing the results of our actions, science enables us to build an understanding of what works and what doesn’t. This understanding is what gives us the power to reshape the world and it all starts with a well-made hypothesis.

Campaigns are Experiments

Once you have a hypothesis, the rest of the scientific process can fit seamlessly with activism we already do. We don’t have to go out of our way to run experiments; our events and campaigns are our experiments. Every event we host or campaign we run can be built to test a specific hypothesis about what works. The biggest change is being consistent about recording the results of our events and campaigns. You may already be doing this - we collect sign up lists, count postcards, and take attendance all the time. If you’re not, keeping records just takes a few minutes of time during or after the event.

Analyzing the results of our experiments meshes with the reflection we already (hopefully) do about how our events and campaigns went. Most activists I know spend plenty of time thinking about what they’re doing and if it works. With a hypothesis in hand and good records, we’ll have the data to discover what works. Picking up some stats can be useful if you want to formally analyze the results, but there’s also room to eyeball things.6 We’re not trying to get published in Nature; we’re looking for interventions that can make a big difference.

After we have our results, we share them. We discuss activism constantly. Having some actual data to make a point is a great way to spark discussion. Maybe you’ll get some valuable feedback, ideas on what to test next time, or inspire someone to try your experiment for themselves. Science advances on discussion, on people looking at each others’ experiments; proposing and debating theories; and then going out and doing it all again. Science, like activism, is a collaborative project that needs all of us.

Science in the Wild

As a local organizer for The Humane League (THL), I’ve spent a lot of time worrying about whether my work made a difference. My main responsibility was to host events that supported THL’s national cage free campaigns and drive activist turnout. Given the tiny size of our movement, growing our community was one of my chief preoccupations. As a math major, I promptly started recording all of the data I could get my hands on. Eventually, I realized I could run experiments and use the data to see how they affected turnout.

I tried a lot of things to get people to attend digital action meetups and protests over the years. I posted on Facebook, Meetup, and other social media. I tabled at farmer’s markets and Veg Fests. I sent personalized texts. I went to socials for unrelated groups and talked to people there about THL. I put up posters around local coffeeshops. When the meetups and protests rolled around, I recorded everyone who showed up. That gave me the data I needed to know who came when and as a result of which experiments.

Take a moment. Which of these experiments do you think would work? Why? I’m sure you can come up with all kinds of reasons for why each idea would either succeed or fail.

As it turns out, most of them accomplished very little. Social media posts and posters resulted in new volunteers once every couple months. Tabling and going to social events were more effective, yielding a new volunteer per two to four hours of effort. By far the most consistent way to get people to show up was the personalized texts - attendance fell from 6-8 people when I texted people to 1-2 people when I didn’t.7 These results are not what I would have expected; I would have expected tabling to be a lot more effective and personalized texts to not matter so much. But they’re what I got and what I worked with.

From these results, I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s no substitute for a human touch when it comes to event invitations and the most reliable way to build a community is a lot of legwork by someone more social than me, putting in the raw hours to network and table. Am I 100% confident in these conclusions? Of course not. Maybe I’m just bad at writing social media advertisements and that’s why no one showed up. Maybe Seattleites crave personal communications more than other folks, which is why the texts worked so well. We won’t be able to tell without more experiments and more data. This is why we need a range of activists running experiments and seeing what works across different contexts, so we can find the more general principles behind good organizing.

Three Things to Try

1. Make a Prediction. Next time you attend or host an event, write down something you’re expecting will happen. Be specific - not “it’ll go well,” but “we’ll get ten email sign-ups” or “three people will say they’re interested in coming back.” Then check afterwards.

2. Find Something to Count. Pick something you’ve been doing regularly and look for something you can count to assess success, like email sign ups or people coming back. A notes app on your phone is all you need to get started.

3. Try a New Approach. When you attend or host an event, change one thing - a new venue, a different opening line, a shorter ask - and see how it affects the results you’ve started tracking. Running it a few times will tell you more than a single attempt.

Thanks to Beta Readers: Kim Evans, Vishnu Amrit, and Jacob Waters

As it stands, the animal activism movement says that only vegans get to participate. No one sat down and made this decision. It’s a message we communicate through countless choices and interactions, from the most radical vegans yelling on the street that people are eating corpses to moderate activists spending the bulk of their time swapping stories about veganism. By centering so many of our activities and so much of our discourse around veganism, we are saying: This is not a space for you. You do not belong. You are not worthy or welcome. Through these messages, the animal activist movement becomes a hostile environment for omnivores. It is not a place where they can see themselves, not somewhere they can imagine meeting friends, earning respect, or making a life.

So we get a movement populated almost exclusively by vegans and vegetarians. A largely vegan movement fits seamlessly with our story about ourselves - we are, after all, trying to end the suffering of animals, especially those raised for food. The most obvious way to do that is to not eat animals. Letting people who are currently eating animals join our movement seems counterintuitive or counterproductive. The problem is that by excluding everyone else, we’re curtailing our power.

In an earlier essay, I discussed how sorely the movement lacks activists and how difficult our activism is to sustain over time. Omnivores, Reducitarians, and sometimes even vegetarians, are a massively untapped market for new animal activists. Instead of recruiting from the 1% of the population who are vegan or the 5% who are vegetarian, we could recruit from the full 100% of the population - a 20 to 100 fold increase in potential audience. Even limiting ourselves to the 10% of people who volunteer for animal and wildlife causes, it’s still a 2x to 10x increase in our recruiting pool from just vegans and vegetarians.

On top of raw numbers, there are many situations where omnivores will be more effective activists than vegans or vegetarians. They are the people that corporations care the most about: paying customers. Corporations might carve out product lines for vegans and vegetarians, but omnivores remain their main audience. If omnivores perform a coordinated boycott, that would hit restaurants and grocery stores where it hurts. Omnivores have the ability to provide testimonies and change their purchasing patterns in a way that supports our goals. Organizations like The Humane League particularly benefit from this ability, since we’re targeting the system, as opposed to groups that are trying to make more vegans.

If more activists and better activists isn’t enough of an incentive, we should take heed of other movements. Can you imagine an anti-slavery movement that didn’t have support from white people? Or the women’s suffrage movement unwilling to work with men?1 We have to be able to recruit from the dominant power group and convert people who are sympathetic to animals into active participants in the fight. By creating spaces that aren’t omnivore friendly, we’re reducing our power to accomplish our most cherished goals. If we’re willing to give up traditions and walk away from family and friends for the animals, we should be just as willing to work with people we don’t see eye-to-eye with for the animals.

Opening up the movement is no small task. It will require a reckoning both on the personal level and on the community level. We have to find acceptance for omnivores and figure out how to include them as peers. We need a movement where omnivores can grow, a movement where they can be accepted and celebrated.

Building Bridges

If we’re going to build a movement that includes omnivores, we have to accept omnivores and build warm, working relationships with them. Collaborating with omnivores can produce a visceral reaction from a lot of vegans and animal activists -- why would we want to work with people who pay money to companies that abuse and exploit animals? This reaction is worth exploring; it touches on key beliefs around acceptance, bad behavior, and the nature of relationships.

For many vegans and activists, one of the biggest blockers to having relationships with omnivores is the simple fact that they are participating in a system that abuses and exploits animals. We don’t put up with people who lie, steal, or cheat; why put up with people who pay for animal abuse and meat? I do think there’s a difference here. The former set of behaviors show a lack of care and respect for the relationship, while eating meat is woven into larger systems that give people little choice. Everyone makes choices that are harmful to the world at large, like flying, shopping at Amazon, or buying cheap tech.2 What matters is not that someone participates in harmful systems (nearly all of us do), but that they’re willing to show up and do better. And any omnivore who turns up at an animal activism event is certainly trying to do better.

There is also the idea that having a relationship with someone signals a tacit approval of their behaviors, like omnivorism. While this idea has a lot of traction in left-leaning movements, it does not bear out in practice. There’s substantial evidence (Pettigrew & Tropp, 2006) that personal connections across ideological divides make people more open to other beliefs and separation of groups is what drives extremism. In other words, acceptance does not mean approval. Acceptance is about acknowledging someone’s flaws without constant criticism and being able to appreciate what’s good about them for the sake of the relationship. When someone feels safe and valued, they are much more likely to make personal changes.

Of course, that’s easier said than done. We have to come to terms on an emotional level with people’s participation in the system before we can have those relationships. That emotional equanimity is where self-actualization intersects with practical community building. There’s an almost spiritual quality to exercising compassion and nonjudgment towards those who defy our basic moral tenets. It’s easy to be compassionate towards people you already agree with; the real test is whether you can be compassionate towards people you vehemently disagree with. Accordingly, one thing we can learn from wisdom traditions and religion is that compassion doesn’t just happen; it’s something we have to cultivate.

There are lots of ways to cultivate compassion. There are a number of religious and secular compassion-based meditation practices.3 These are time-tested and time-intensive. For a lighter-weight, modern psychology-flavored option, we can reflect on our commonalities with people. Focusing on differences is a reliable way of driving people apart; focusing on commonalities helps people feel closer and makes them more willing to work together (Gaertner & Dovidio, 2000). It can also help to remember that few of us started vegan - we were all omnivores at some point.4 In a similar vein, we can shift our stories about people. Stories shape our interpretations and how our anger is channeled. Rather than blaming people for individual choices, we can recognize that we’re all trapped in a larger system that pushes meat consumption and makes going vegan difficult.

What these practices all help us do is see and embrace people for the full range of who they are, rather than getting stuck on one specific behavior or expecting them to meet a certain bar to win our acceptance. The end goal is to find a way to be supportive and enthusiastic of how people show up. Just as we’re not expecting others to be perfect, we don’t have to be perfect in our acceptance either. People can sense when we’re trying and that goes a long way.5 And just like with veganism or activism, the more we practice the appropriate behaviors, the easier they’ll get and the more our beliefs will follow.

Opening Doors

It won’t be enough to change our individual behavior; we also need to restructure our communities. We need to make sure our communities are easy to explore, appealing to join, and present clear ways to get more involved. What we need to avoid is making it so that immediate, major lifestyle changes are prerequisite for joining. That’s a cult. Instead, we can focus on building stronger, more vibrant communities. On top of stronger communities, we do need a specific perspective shift. We need to consider how our communities will come across to the uninitiated and make sure everything we do is accessible to them, from activities to conversation to values.

For omnivores who are activism-curious, our biggest goal is to make sure they have a good time, do a little good, and want to come back. A big chunk of this is quality hosting skills - being able to host fun, engaging events that leave people feeling motivated and connected. On top of this, we need to make sure that we’re not throwing random vegan-based barriers in their way. If we mandate bringing a vegan dish to a potluck, that’s another barrier for omnivores; instead, we can provide food, offer support for learning how to cook vegan, or have a recommended list of snacks. What matters is that there’s a way to ease into the community without a full commitment to veganism.

Once someone is more invested, we need to offer them incremental ways of getting more involved and winning respect. There’s a lot of ways to recognize people,6 from simply reading people’s names out loud for attending a protest to giving people badges or symbolic trinkets for reaching specific milestones. Don’t just have a vegan badge, have a Meatless Monday badge, a badge for donating a certain amount to animal charities, and a badge for protest participation. Having your progression chronicled and publicly recognized is an essential tool for allowing people to gradually increase their commitment to the community while keeping them motivated. As long as people keep moving towards a better version of themselves, we’re winning.

On a more philosophical level, these changes may require shifting our values and how we think of ourselves. A lot of our bonding is currently anchored around veganism. Instead, we can focus more on shared values and action. We can encourage progress over perfection, prioritize action over ideals, and talk in terms of reforming systems over individuals. Everyone who shows up feels empathy for animals and does not want to see them hurt and suffering, whatever their diet may be. Instead of looking down on people who haven’t taken as many steps as us, we should be celebrating every step that they do take. We can honor incremental progress and still venerate the people who best embody our values: the vegans, the community leaders, the people donating a large chunk of their salary.

The point is to open the movement so that omnivores can step inside without leaving their identities at the door. Once they’re inside, they can begin climbing the steps to become more dedicated, more vegan, more of an activist. But in order for them to want to climb those steps, we have to make it possible for them to get inside and give them a reason to stay.

Where Omnivores Fit

Not every animal activist group has to adopt an “open to omnivores” stance. Groups promoting veganism would do perfectly fine keeping a vegan-centric focus. For people who want their veganism to remain entwined with their activism, there should still be places in the movement which support that philosophy. Having a range of attitudes is good for differentiating groups from one another, which makes it easier to recruit widely, and more extreme groups can shift what behaviors are seen as normal or acceptable.7

Groups that target industry reform or incremental change, like The Humane League (THL), are well positioned to welcome omnivores into the fold. THL’s activism is on the more moderate side, which is easier for people to swallow. Omnivores are both paying customers for many of THL’s targets and stand to benefit from reforms, which would let them enjoy a more ethical standard for their food. We can use messaging that focuses on the fact that we’re going after evil corporations; highlights what omnivores have to gain; and leverages the “common sense” angle that no one wants to see animals tortured. We can provide a landing pad for omnivores in the movement, many of whom may graduate to other groups if they stay long enough.

Inviting omnivores in will inevitably change the movement. Our spaces will be transformed and, like any transformation, that will come with some grief. We won’t be able to rely on veganism as an easy glue to hold us together; we will have to figure out other, more creative ways to connect. We will have to shoulder some discomfort as we go through the growing pains of figuring out how to integrate omnivores into our communities. If we’re able to do all of this, we will be rewarded with a broader and more powerful movement.

Let Them Convince Themselves

Here’s the real secret: the best way to get people to be more vegan or more activist is to let them try a little bit and see how good it is for themselves. People rarely jump into a movement, hobby, or community feet first. There’s a trial period where they come to events and see if the community members are people they’d want to be around. Once they decide it’s worth sticking around, they’ll begin adopting the community’s values. Participating in community activities will open some cognitive dissonance with their past values and the community will support them in making a healthy, gradual transition. In the end, they’ll talk themselves into veganism or activism because that’s what the most respected members in the community are doing.

But in order for that to be possible, we have to welcome them with open arms and enthusiasm, not grudging acceptance or open disdain. We have to make spaces where people can win respect and make friends without being full vegan (activist, etc.). We have to recognize the big step of trying something new and communicate how important it is for them to be here. We have to be people worth emulating and that starts with extending our genuine joy to more activists.

Four Things to Try

1. Sit with your own imperfections. Identify a domain where you haven’t lived up to your own values — climate, labor, consumption — and sit with how that feels before judging someone else’s diet.

2. Find your common ground. Think of someone in your life who is omnivorous (or otherwise doesn’t live up to one of your moral standards) and write down three values you share with them.

3. Audit your community. Look at one of your events or spaces through the eyes of a curious omnivore. What would make them feel unwelcome?

4. Celebrate a small step. The next time someone takes a step toward veganism or animal advocacy, no matter how small, celebrate it out loud.

Thanks to Beta Readers: Kim Evans, Nimisha Mehta, Evan Rysdam, and Maddi Laffitte

We, the vegans and the animal advocates, hold a lot of anger. Anger is a natural, empathetic response to injustice and we have enough injustice to last for many lifetimes. If the injustice weren’t enough, we also have to deal with scorn and ridicule.1 So anger is an essential part of the vegan and animal advocate experience. That’s important. When we get mad, we’re motivated to do something. It pushes us to fight for the animals, to protest and evangelize, to take matters into our own hands. Anger is the emotion of change and we’re all about changing the world.

Of course, that’s not the way that anger is typically viewed. Anger is typically regarded as a negative emotion that should be resolved promptly. It’s understandable. Anger is great for short bursts of activity, like when you need to flee a lion, but it’s not a fun emotion to stay in. Long term, it’s hard on the body, leading to elevated risks around heart disease and a weaker immune system. It’s also hard on relationships - most people would not want to be friends with someone who is angry too often. While anger can be a useful place to visit, it’s generally not somewhere you want to live.

All the negative side effects and social implications of anger put us in an awkward position. In addition to experiencing it, now we have to deal with the stigma of anger. Not to mention the Angry Vegan™ stereotype and the knowledge that running around being angry probably isn’t the best way to recruit for our cause. Perhaps most importantly, a lot of us are deeply empathetic people, which is why we’re in the movement in the first place. We’d rather connect with people than be mad at them, but we feel like we have no choice. Our anger is here and here to stay. So we have to figure out what to do with it.

A few vegans and other activists lean into their anger and the feelings of strength and conviction it provides. These are often the folks picking fights with everyone, including other vegans and activists who don’t live up to the standards they set. Most of us, I think, find a more ambivalent relationship with our anger. We keep it tucked away on a shelf, to be let out in the company of other like-minded folks where we can vent about the injustices of the system. We try to be friendly and open to people who don’t share our beliefs in the hope of winning them over to our side.

There is a problem, though. Tucking away our anger is not a permanent fix. It limits our ability to connect with people outside our movement, since we feel like we cannot share our anger with them and be our authentic selves. It flattens many of our discussions inside the movement, since inside is one of the only safe places we can vent. It keeps our emotions bottled up, unresolved and unable to be used to its full capacity. Instead, we need to examine the roots of our anger and the stories we tell that bring it into being.

Stories shape and direct all of our emotions, including anger. They tell us who to be angry at and what to be angry about. They set expectations. If your significant other does not take out the trash, you’ll have a very different reaction based on whether or not it was their turn to take out the trash, how busy you are, other nice things they’ve done for you recently, and so on. The action is the same, but the stories are different. One of the best ways of channeling our emotions is to examine the underlying stories and seek more generous or constructive alternatives. With that in mind, let’s look at two stories about our culture.

The Story of Moral Failure

Here’s a story: Animals are sentient beings who feel pain and suffer just like we do. This fact makes consuming meat morally unjustifiable. Consequently, everyone who chooses to consume meat or support the production of meat, from the CEO of Tyson Foods down to your mom, is doing something deeply wrong. The only ethical choice is to go vegan and opt out completely. Anyone who doesn’t is causing inexcusable harm.

The Story of Moral Failure is the story that brought a lot of us into veganism. We saw that what we were doing was wrong and changed. It was a revelation. After getting our own diet in order, we promptly went out and started proselytizing the same story to anyone who would listen. This usually didn’t work. We might have convinced a few individuals, but most people around us weren’t ready to change. We’d push harder and get bogged down in a pattern of arguments and counterarguments. After trying and failing, our inspiration warped into frustration and anger that people can’t see or don’t care about what’s wrong. Not every vegan followed this track,2 but it’s a common enough experience that it’s shaped the character of our spaces and the general sense of anger with non-vegans.

Notice how the Story of Moral Failure focuses our energy and anger on the people around us. By doing so, it throws us into conflict with our loved ones. We want them to live up to our ideas of being a good person, which means giving up animal products. At the same time, the story makes it harder for us to convince them: Any non-vegan who adopted this story would be subjecting themselves to self-judgment and shame. Not something most people would sign up for. The only way they can join is by relinquishing their former lives and adopting our belief system wholesale. So people dig in their heels and we end up in a grueling back-and-forth.

What makes these dynamics worse is that the story also splits the world into heroes (vegans) and villains (non-vegans). Seeing ourselves as moral exemplars is great for morale and group cohesion, but seeing ourselves as different or even better than the people around us is a fast-track to triggering our out-group biases.3 We start looking down on non-vegans, sometimes even taking pride in our superiority, and that attitude leaks through in our interactions. In turn, it becomes a lot harder to build bridges between groups or collaborate on campaigns focused on changing policies.

The Story of Moral Failure leads to an animal activist movement that’s focused heavily on individual responsibility. It encourages us to push people through a moral reckoning with their choices, which effectively puts us in the same position as every other religion that’s trying to save people. Unfortunately, that’s not a place we’re well positioned to be. Going vegan and becoming a good person is a much tougher sell than converting to Christianity and going to heaven. No religion has managed to convert the whole world, and we’re certainly not going to be the first one to do so.

It’s probably pretty clear by now that I don’t like this story. It has a lot of negative side effects. I want to stress that just because I don’t think it’s a good story, doesn’t mean that the opposite story is automatically true, i.e. it’s okay to eat meat and everyone is absolved of responsibility for their choices. Stories can both contain truth and be harmful, as demonstrated by anyone who’s ever used the truth to hurt a loved one in the middle of a heated fight. We do not have to give up this part of the truth; we just need to find a different way of holding it.

The Story of System Failure

Here’s another story: Animals are sentient beings who feel pain and suffer just like we do. The reason people eat animals is because it’s deeply woven into our cultural and social institutions, which come from a time when eating animals was more necessary for survival. It’s only with industrial farming practices that suffering started taking place on an unimaginable scale. Technological advancement also made meat consumption totally unnecessary. There is no single person choosing to perpetuate the system; the system perpetuates itself through countless rules, beliefs, and choices. Everyone is a victim to the system, albeit to different degrees. If given a real choice for a better world, most people would take it. The real enemy is the system of modern, industrialized farming and the culture of eating meat.4

This story is a weird story. It’s born of systems thinking and second-wave feminism.5 It focuses on environment over individuals. We like to think that people are responsible for everything, not far away and abstract forces. Abstract forces are much less fun to be mad at. It also cuts against the grain of the Western notion of individual choice and responsibility. This story is about as native to our usual modes of thinking as veganism is to our usual mode of eating.

What the Story of System Failure offers us is a target for our anger that lives outside of any individual. We are working against a malevolent force that permeates our world, a monster with no head. Rather than trying to convince people that they are the problem, we can spend our energy trying to convince people that there is a problem. If we keep our righteous anger pointed at larger institutions, there’s space for omnivores to join without immediately overhauling their life. They can keep their diet and relationships the same while exploring their anger at the larger systems and working towards change. We can be angry together and that anger may in turn motivate them to change themselves.

By directing our anger towards these larger forces, the Story of System Failure gives us a banner to unite under. It’s no longer vegans vs. non-vegans; it’s people vs. suffering, waste, and ecological disaster. Instead of splitting us apart, it allows us to focus on what we share: an anger with the harms of the current system. Those harms are how we should be bringing people in - letting people know not what wrongs they have committed, but how they have been wronged. It’s a much easier way to get people to join the party.

The Story of System Failure pushes us towards an animal activism movement built around coalitions and policy change. It encourages us to think about what points of leverage we might have in the larger system, whether social, political, or technological, and how to apply those for greatest effect. It reminds us that the real goal is the overhaul of the system rather than the mass conversion of non-vegans to vegans. It lets us keep our anger and channel it outwards, rather than against people we need to swell the ranks of the movement.

A Choice of Stories

It’s not a question of which story is true; there are elements of truth to both the stories. It’s a question of which story is better for healing and power, which story brings us closer to the people we want to be and the movement we want to build. Stories are self-fulfilling prophecies. Whether you treat someone as an enemy or a friend, that is what they will become. There are some limits to that ability — you’re probably not going to talk an introvert into enjoying loud bars. But people will live up to their roles enough of the time that giving people a more positive role is worthwhile.6

Changing our stories does not happen just because we’ve read a blog post. Stories live in our groups and our minds. Shifting them takes discussion and reflection. Watch how your vegan friends talk about non-vegans or how non-vegans talk about vegans. Pay attention to your own thoughts when you grow angry. Who are you blaming and why? What’s the worldview underneath those stories? How do those stories make you act towards yourself and others? The stories described here are two broad archetypes with countless variations. It’s up to you to find the stories that resonate with you, help you be a better person, and promote our ultimate goals. What story will you live?

Three Things to Try

1. Journal about your stories: Reflect on a time you got angry about veganism and write down what the underlying stories are. Pay attention to who or what your anger is directed at.

2. Try the “wronged, not wrong” pitch. Next time you bring up factory farming with someone, lead with how they’ve been lied to or failed by the food system rather than what they’re doing wrong. Notice if the conversation lands differently.

3. Invite someone into the anger. Share something outrageous about factory farming with a friend who cares about food waste, climate change, or worker rights. Don’t share it as an argument, but as “I saw this and I’m pissed about it.” See if they’re pissed too. You might be surprised.

Informed by

• Rage Becomes Her by Soraya Chemaly

• Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg

• The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible by Charles Eisenstein

Thanks to Beta Readers: Kim Evans, Aditya Nair, Sam Bernecker, and Maddi Laffitte

Why are 40% of Indians1 and only 4% of Americans vegetarian? In a word, environment. It’s not that Indians are magically more ethical, empathic, eco-conscious, or enlightened than Americans. Instead, they live in a culture that promotes and supports vegetarianism. It’s much easier to be vegetarian when your whole family is vegetarian and there are vegetarian options everywhere you go. Yet when we discuss diet or activism, we often talk in terms of personal choices and values rather than environmental forces. In doing so, we’re leaving half the puzzle in the box.

Culture, government, work, and community are the water we swim in. These interlocking systems define our day-to-day. We go to work because we need money; attend church (temple, mosque, etc.) because we believe in God and it’s where our community is; and try to be the best person we can be for our families. We choose some of these places and people. Others, we are born into.2 Each of these institutions has its own norms about what the ideal person looks like - what does it mean to be a good American, employee, Christian, or parent? - and a variety of enforcement mechanisms for pushing people toward that ideal.

The most obvious enforcement mechanisms are carrots and sticks. You get cheap insurance rates for a clean driving record; you get higher rates and your license suspended for too many tickets. Some enforcement mechanisms are more formal and others are more informal. There’s a law requiring you to get a driver’s license before you start driving, but most teenagers start driving because it’s what their peers expect. The most subtle enforcement mechanisms show up in how the environment makes certain choices easier and others harder. It’s easy to navigate a city by car and hard to navigate by bus, which is a result of government policies that push a norm of car ownership without ever explicitly telling anyone what to do. Often, norms are enforced by a combination of these mechanisms - carrot and stick; formal and informal; easy and hard. It all adds up to a whole lot of push and pull on a person.

I don’t mean to make it sound like we’re solely driven by the forces around us. There’s plenty of wiggle room within and between systems for individual choice to emerge. We choose our career path, pick up hobbies, and make friends who fit with our idiosyncrasies. We decide what’s worth pursuing and avoiding. In extreme cases, we end up defying the systems that we started in. There wouldn’t be many vegans or vegetarians running around if we couldn’t buck these larger trends. But neither can we forget that all of our individual choices take part against the backdrop of the larger culture, institutions, and communities.

Being vegan or an animal activist is never going to catch on if making that transition ends up alienating you from your friends and family. We can get a lot more mileage from our efforts if we pay attention to and harness the forces swirling around an individual. Thinking in terms of external forces has big implications for how we plan our activism.

Go After Environment, Not People

One of the first things someone with an addiction does when trying to quit is remove the source of the addiction (ex. alcohol) from their home. If the object of their addiction is available, there will come a moment when their self-control flags and they fall right off the horse. Most of us don’t have addictions, but we still share the same trait of reaching for whatever comforts our environment provides, whatever is easily available. If we change the environment, behaviors shift almost automatically. Whether you have fruit or candy bars in the house, that’s what you’ll end up snacking on.

In the context of activism, aiming for environmental shifts bypasses a whole lot of trench fighting over individual choices. For example, New York City public schools participate in Meatless Monday. Like swapping candy bars for fruit, this program switches out meat-forward meals for vegetarian meals. The school system serves one million students a week, the equivalent of creating 50,000 new vegetarians.3 50,000 new vegetarians would represent a 14% increase in the vegetarian population of NYC.4 Instead of having the hundreds of thousands or millions of conversations needed to convince 50,000 people to go vegetarian, animal advocates were able to pull off this seismic shift with a few dozen conversations with city officials and a little policy work.

Meatless Monday in NYC schools represents an ideal kind of environmental change: a moderate policy shift in a large institution that moves us towards a more plant-based world. Institutions set standards and standards promote a specific default option. Most people will end up choosing the default, whatever it is. The nice thing about working with institutions is that usually there are only a handful of people in charge of something like what food the cafeteria serves. If you can find the right combination of benefits and pressures to influence those people, you can get the weight of the organization behind your cause.

If you can’t go directly after an organization, you can often create a subgroup within an organization to promote a certain set of values, like an Effective Altruist group at Microsoft. It’s a much lower lift to start a new group than to alter a large organization, and something magical happens when people come together. People who were previously isolated now know they’re connected to a larger group and that group can begin acting together. It can be a proving ground for ideas, generate its own culture, and recruit new members. Once a subgroup has established itself, the members can start working towards changing their larger organization from the inside out.

Once a new norm is in place, whether through an institution changing its policy or a subgroup forming around a set of ideals, the norm gains a life of its own. People get used to it and will start defending it as the status quo. Unlike people going vegetarian or vegan, which has an 84% recidivism rate, policies and norms are much harder to repeal once in place. Many policies are never challenged and the ones that are challenged stay in place more often than not: 60% of reform campaigns for public policies failed. A good norm is a gift that keeps on giving, rooted in institutional inertia rather than individual whims.

When Persuading People, Mind the Environment

Unfortunately, it is not always possible to find an environmental fix. Sometimes we have to persuade individual people. When we try to persuade people, we usually resort to rhetoric centered around the trifecta of ethics, environment, and health. We dangle these carrots to motivate people. What’s missing from the narrative are the sticks and barriers that come into play when making a change. Even if someone wants to change, if there are more powerful forces pushing against them, they won’t follow through.

One question to ask is “How difficult is it to go vegan or become an activist?” A single mother living in a food desert is going to have a much harder time going vegan than a software engineer who lives next to a Whole Foods.5 Since the shape of the environment is what’s preventing the change, the emotional arguments will only outweigh the difficulty for the most receptive and well-off people. Another question is “What are the social or economic consequences for going vegan or becoming an activist?” A restaurant owner will never make their restaurant vegan if they’re convinced it will put the restaurant out of business. This kind of social punishment is less visible, but no less potent than the more physical barriers.

Instead of piling on guilt or exhorting people to overcome these hurdles, it’s often more effective to make the right choice easy. Or if we can’t make it easy, at least altering the cost-benefit ratio enough to favor change. This usually looks like providing them with viable, positive alternatives to the status quo.6 The Transfarmation Project is a great example of this. They help provide industrial animal farmers, who are often trapped in debt to large corporations, with the resources and support to transition to plant-based operations. They’re not shaming farmers or just telling them to stop, they’re providing the scaffolding needed to move to a better world.

If we can’t make the right choice easier, we can often harness external pressures for our own ends. The Humane League used cage-free commitments from companies to pressure other companies that hadn’t committed. It’s a bad look for a company to have less follow-through on their animal welfare commitments than McDonald’s. Often, among the different pressures that an individual is facing, there will be some that are more aligned with our causes. We just have to take the time to do our homework and find an angle that works for us.

Working at an environmental or institutional level takes more effort than replaying our iconic arguments. The solutions have to be tailored to the target individual’s context and the forces that are most influential to them. Everyone sits at a nexus of competing demands from their friends, their family, their community, their work, and their own personal needs. It takes research and planning to figure out what those demands are. It’s not cheap and sometimes we will lose the campaign along with all of the effort that went into it. But when it works, we can reach people we never would otherwise.

Change the Current

It’s much easier to work with an environment than against it. Defying a social environment or institution is a costly endeavor that requires particular dedication and fortitude. I think vegans and animal activists are exceptional in our ability to swim against the current. But expecting everyone to do what we do is like expecting everyone to be a marathoner. While most people could go vegan or run a marathon in theory, how far removed being vegan or marathoning is from our regular environment makes them prohibitive. Better instead to change the current so that it flows in the direction we want.

If you’re feeling punchy about changing an environment, the best place to start is close to home, with institutions you’re already woven into. Think of the schools your kids go to, your place of worship, or your neighborhood potlucks. You won’t be an outsider in these institutions, coming in and trying to impose something new; you’ll be a member of the community taking an interest in making them a better place. One small concrete action would be to call your favorite restaurant, tell them how much you love their food, and ask them if they’d be willing to put a vegan item on their menu (or if they already have one, maybe they could have two). You can show them Happy Cow and explain how it could help bring vegans to their business. Make life a little smoother for the next person who wants to be a vegan.

Three Things to Try

1. Call a restaurant. Tell them you love their food and ask if they’d add a vegan option — show them Happy Cow as a business case.

2. Diagnose before persuading. Before your next one-on-one conversation, ask “What’s the biggest environmental barrier this person faces?” Address that instead of leading with ethics.

3. Help Reduce Friction: When someone expresses interest in going vegan, don’t just cheer them on, help reduce friction: Share a recipe, offer to cook together, or identify restaurants near them with good vegan options.

Informed By

• Thinking in Systems by Donna Meadows

• How to Create a Vegan World by Tobias Leenaert

Thanks to beta readers: Kim Evans, Maddi Laffitte, Nimisha Mehta, and Brian de Silva

When I joined The Humane League (THL) back in 2019, I expected them to have thousands of volunteers. After all, THL managed to strong-arm hundreds of major US corporations into adopting cage-free egg policies, creating an industry-level shift.1 The reality I found was much different. Most of the events I attended had half a dozen protestors, a dozen at most. These numbers were reflected in the protest photos I saw from other cities. Multiplying the number of volunteers at an individual protest by the number of cities with active chapters, you get a figure that comes out to around 100 to 200 active volunteers nationwide.2 That’s fewer people than my high school graduating class.

And it’s not like these volunteers are spending significant amounts of time on activism, either. When I started attending THL’s protests and participating in their digital campaigns, I quickly found that I could run through all the available actions for the month in a couple of hours. Over the course of a year, these time commitments add up to somewhere between 10 and 20 total hours. To put it in another light, I spent more time last year rewatching The Good Place than I did on THL direct actions.

With so few volunteers and so little engagement, is it really the volunteers that make the difference or could these victories be achieved with THL’s paid staff alone? The staff runs a large portion of the campaigns: They pick targets, do research, create marketing materials, and meet with corporate executives to negotiate about our demands. THL relies on volunteers for the one thing that the staff can’t do - create a sense of public outrage. But what is public outrage worth? To understand that, we need to look at the mechanism driving THL’s success.

The Anatomy of Pressure Activism

The secret sauce that The Humane League relies on is pressure activism. Pressure activism has its roots in the abolition, temperance, and labor movements of the late 1700s to early 1900s. Pressure activism is about using collective, coordinated power to fight for specific concessions from key decision makers by taking away something they value. Let’s break it down. We’ll go through the components and look at how they apply in three different movements: labor unions as a historical example of the power of pressure activism; Occupy Wall Street as an example of a modern protest movement that failed to produce any lasting policy change3; and The Humane League as an animal activism organization that manages to successfully apply these principles.

The heart of pressure activism is collective, coordinated power, when a group of people act together to withdraw or apply their labor, time, attention, and money towards a particular goal. If one worker goes on strike, they get fired. If everyone in the factory goes on strike at the same time, management is straight out of luck. Their power is created through their coordination and solidarity. The same collective strength is on display when people turn up at THL and Occupy protests. The challenge is getting everyone coordinated and building the trust to take risks together. Other modern activist movements have been much better at meeting this challenge than the animal activism movement. We’re lucky to get a couple dozen people at a protest, while other movements regularly get hundreds or thousands of attendees. These are no small feats of coordination and we should be learning everything we can from other movements.

In addition to people, every successful movement needs specific concessions. Think SMART goals. Specific goals are important for negotiating with adversaries, knowing when to switch gears, and can be a powerful draw for getting people into the movement. Labor unions bring a variety of demands that improve their members’ lives: higher wages, shorter working hours, more safety protections, etc. THL has similarly concrete demands: First, we campaigned for a commitment to cage-free eggs. Now, we campaign for companies to follow through on their commitments. Conversely, Occupy’s goals are broader and more abstract: more balanced distribution of income, bank reform, forgiveness of student loan debt, and more. All excellent goals, but there are a myriad of different interpretations for how they could each be implemented. And that’s just the problem - Occupy had a lot of good ideas, but few demands concrete enough to bring to the negotiating table. If you aren’t clear on what you want, you’ll never know when you’ve won.

Speaking of the negotiating table, your movement has to identify key decision makers so you know who’s sitting on the other side of the table, fulfilling your demands. Union strikes go after management, the people who are setting wages and working hours. THL follows a similar pattern, targeting the C-Suite executives who call the shots about supply chains and company policies. In contrast, Occupy had a number of possible targets: banks, bankers, government regulators, and congress, to name a few. Unfortunately, you can’t just campaign against an institution. You have to pick people out of the organization and work with them as individuals. That requires researching the organization and finding out who has the power to influence policy. At the end of the day, every organization is made up of individuals and those individuals are the people we have to influence.

When we’re negotiating with decision makers, we have to create a reason for them to come to the table. Usually, that’s by taking away something they value. In the case of unions, the workers withdraw their labor. Without labor, the factories shut down. Without the factories, the owners and management stop making money, which is the raison d’être for the capitalist system. THL also goes after one of corporations’ most valued resources: their reputations. By hammering social media and protesting, we make companies look terrible just by telling the world what they do. One corporate executive even called our campaigns “a PR nightmare”.4 Occupy Wall Street, on the other hand, involved occupying space and speaking out against banks and financial institutions. These activities did not particularly affect banks or legislators, two potential key stakeholders. An alternative strategy could have been for everyone to withdraw money from banks, which would at least have been felt by the banks. The point is to make the pain of the protest worse than the pain of going along with our demands. As long as we can do that, we can get companies to change.

There you have it. Four steps for changing the world; four steps that have changed the world already. Among other victories, pressure campaigns by labor unions are the reason we have a 40-hour workweek rather than a 70-hour workweek.5 They were so effective that corporations, with the help of the government, have spent much of the past hundred years crushing unions and running smear campaigns. These measures worked, causing major strikes to drop from over 250 a year in the 1970s to 11 in 2010. In that time, a new generation of activists has grown up largely without reference to pressure activism techniques. It’s time to pick up the mantle. The heads of corporations are just as human as they were a hundred years ago and they still need our labor, attention, and money. We have the power to change the system. We just have to apply it skillfully.

Implications for the Movement and You

As a movement, we’re limited by two factors: how much power we can generate and how well we can apply it. Since the power behind pressure activism comes from people, more people equals more power. With more people, our old tactics become more effective - a 100-person protest looks a lot better than a 10-person protest. We also gain access to entirely new classes of tactics - you can’t physically block a store entrance with 10 people, but you can with 100. There may never be an easy answer for exactly how many people we need to accomplish our goals, but the positive relationship between people and power suggests a clear direction for our efforts. We need to figure out how to scale our communities and increase the number of people we can mobilize.

The more important half of the equation is how we apply our power. Application of power covers the other three parts of pressure activism: selecting specific goals, identifying decision makers, and applying pressure. Within these steps, there are countless ways to approach the problem. A good strategy is the difference between changing multinational corporations with a few hundred activists and having thousands of activists protest with few concrete results. The development of such strategies is a subject that fills books, but the immediate takeaway for organizers is that we should be spending a little less time putting boots on the ground for another protest and a little more time picking targets and strategizing.

For the individual, what this all means is that you can make a very real difference. If you could get ten friends to regularly volunteer with the Humane League, you could increase the national volunteer base by 5-10%. If you do a little research and get creative with your strategy, even a small group can make a huge difference. If you’re not already regularly engaged with the movement, what are you waiting for? Hop on over to the Fast Action Network and take action. Or better yet, get in touch with a regional organizer and find (or organize!) some in-person meetups. Go be a nuisance and change the world.

Informed By: Ethics Into Action by Peter Singer

Special thanks to beta readers: Kim Evans, Aditya Nair, Maddi Laffitte, Stefanie Shank