How to Mobilize the Midwestern Animal Rights Movement: A Manifesto
As we enter the second quarter of the year this Vegster, our team at Project Animal Freedom would like to announce that we have developed a more effective campaign structure that no longer revolves around monthly educational campaigns, but rather larger, more substantive quarterly campaigns that directly reflect our core strategic goals as an organization.
Our core strategic goals are as follows:
increase the number of vegans across the Midwest,
create and mobilize activists across the Midwest,
champion intersectionality within the vegan movement and beyond,
inspire large-scale generosity to benefit animals, and
transform institutions through successful pressure campaigns.
Our first four core strategic goals correspond directly to our quarterly campaigns, in order, while our fifth core strategic goal is a perennial, year-long affair.
As we embark upon our most auspicious April yet, we will fully embrace our second quarterly campaign: creating and mobilizing activists across the Midwest. To this end, we have already underscored the profound, inescapable, yet deeply invigorating challenge before us: mobilizing not just a core group of 20 or so team leaders, but, much more importantly, thousands of activists across the Midwest. The task before us—building a fully vegan Midwest by 2056—is as daunting as it is inspiring. But to realize this goal, we must build a mass movement (and, soon enough, a movement of movements) to carry our collective struggle for human and more-than-human animal liberation to victory.
To build as resilient, unstoppable, and unbeatable a movement as possible, we will continue advertising our many leadership opportunities, particularly through our #TeamBuildingThursday series. Steady, sustained leadership recruitment is one of our core competencies that has built us, within the past six months alone, into the fastest-growing animal rights organization in the entire Midwest, and we have no intention of stopping until we achieve complete and total animal liberation.
As part of our current quarterly campaign, we will place especial emphasis on creating, empowering, and recruiting as many activists as possible. We firmly believe that everyone has something valuable to contribute to this movement, no matter how seemingly trivial; after all, small actions, when multiplied by millions of people, can change the world. We also recognize that while as few as 1 in 1,000 vegans are hardcore activists, millions of vegans have the potential to accomplish extraordinary feats for the animals if only given the proper opportunities, guidance, and support.
In recognition of the vast, largely untapped potential of our movement, we will not only encourage current and aspiring activists to join our team, but also disseminate resources that will facilitate activist networking across the Midwest while giving these selfsame activists the tools they need to engage in everyday activism as we fight, in unvanquished unison, to end the senseless mass slaughter of the most innocent, vulnerable, and defenseless among us. Thanks to our highly productive interns, we are now on the verge of releasing our Midwest Animal Rights Directory, a resource that lists all the animal rights organizations, animal sanctuaries, food justice organizations, environmental advocacy groups, and over a dozen other social justice advocacy organizations across the Midwest.
But we will not stop there. We are now working on an even more ambitious project: our comprehensive Midwest Activist Directory. This directory will tabulate every social justice organization in existence across the entire entire Midwest. But why? Because veganism is not merely a diet, nor is it just a lifestyle choice; veganism is, first and foremost, an ethical philosophy rooted in justice for all, no matter one’s sex, sexuality, skin color, site of origin, socioeconomic status, disability status, senescence, and yes, even species. The collective power of a unified social justice movement would also not only be immense; it would be the single deadliest threat to oppressive ideologies and institutions the world has ever seen.
The history of the abolitionist movement in the US also teaches us the vital importance of mass movement-building to achieve transformative social change. Firm denunciations of slavery, particularly among Quakers in the Northeast, began as early as 1688, but the first abolitionist organization in the US—the Pennsylvania Abolition Society—did not materialize until 1785. It was not until ten years later the New York Manumission Society formed. Roughly 40 years later, the abolitionist movement in the US remained largely unorganized, stagnant, and marginal despite rising abolitionist sentiments across the country, particularly in the North. In 1833, however, sixty prominent abolitionists from across the country assembled in Philadelphia to establish a new, nationwide organization—the American Anti-Slavery Society—that would fight for the immediate emancipation of all slaves. Five years later, this organization had amassed 1,350 local chapters. By 1840, they had amassed over 2,000 local chapters.
While it would take decades of struggle thereafter to finally abolish slavery in the US, with the bloody, profoundly oppressive legacy of slavery continuing to this day, it seems the animal rights movement, which seeks the abolition of all animal exploitation, has reached a tipping point at which our movement can mobilize activists in hundreds, if not thousands, of cities across the country. Despite the dramatic upsurge in veganism over the past few years in particular, however, this potential remains largely unrealized across the Midwest; of the 58 metropolitan areas across the Midwest with a population in excess of 100,000 human animals, just 15 feature a local animal rights organization. That’s just 1 in 4! If we graded our Midwestern animal rights movement by this metric, we would receive a mega-“F,” falling 34 points short of even a “D” rating.
At Project Animal Freedom, we are committed to bringing the animal rights revolution to every corner of the Midwest, starting in metropolitan areas with a population in excess of 100,000 human animals and expanding ever outward until we build a vast activist network that spans from Toledo, Ohio to Lincoln, Nebraska. The ground is fertile, the weather is pleasant, and water is plentiful; all we need to do is plant the seeds, tend the ground, and watch our garden flourish. In fact, our team finds it remarkable that organizations with budgets tens of millions of dollars larger than our own have yet to harness the power of highly distributed leadership working in tandem for the realization of shared strategic priorities. We have the potential, however, to expand exponentially across the Midwest, just like the abolitionist movement exploded from a handful of isolated organizations to a thriving network over 2,000 chapters strong in the span of just seven years.
Over the next few months, we will continue not only building the infrastructure necessary to launch at least three new chapters in 2022, but also growing our online communities. These branded communities range from St. Louis Vegans and Vegan Activists of Springfield, MO to Badass Vegan Feminists and Garden of Vegan, and they are assets that will continue to grow in size, value, and vitality over time. By banding together various tribes within the vegan movement, we will assemble the forces necessary to ultimately topple the trillion-dollar animal abuse industry from its crushing pedestal of unconscionable tyranny.
On this the fourth day of April, dear friends, we pledge to you a rededication to the core elements with which we will forge a mighty sword of justice to rend asunder the many iniquities of this increasingly embattled, moribund planet. We are indeed, as one must drearily contemplate each and every Earth Month, on the verge of cementing catastrophic climate change, reaching tipping points that will transform the once vibrant Amazon rainforest into sparse savanna, and killing half of all species on Earth as part of the sixth mass extinction event since life began on this pale blue dot. We must avert ecological catastrophe or face certain doom. Only one question remains: will we build a movement robust enough to succeed? For the sake of all animalkind on Earth, let us hope our collective might shall prevail over the violent forces of destruction that so imperial this planet—and our survival upon it.
