2021 Speakers
It is our enormous privilege to collaborate with several exceptionally talented, insightful activists from across the movement who have offered to speak at this event. You can learn more about each of our accomplished speakers below.
Ray Ippolito
Ray Ippolito has worked in the animal liberation movement since 2004 and has organized and participated in countless demonstrations, fighting everything from slaughterhouses to circuses. He also organized dozens of events that led his county and state, Bergen County, NJ, to become the first county and state in the US to outlaw circuses. Ray has lobbied on Capitol Hill, spoken at many schools/universities/colleges, and has been invited to speak with the Peoples Climate March, Ethical Culture Society, Omega Institute, Yoga is Vegan podcast, Jane Unchained, National Animal Rights Day, many VegFests, and other notable institutions. He has also served on the board of directors as the Director of Strategic Partnerships and Advocacy for Catskill Animal Sanctuary and is currently on the board of directors for Animal Connection. At the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, Ray served as the Director of Strategic Partnerships for Big Love!, a vegan food first responder program that fed 4,000 meals to frontline nurses and doctors at seven hospitals in NYC. His latest initiative, with an incredible international team, International Pandemic Outreach Day: One World, One Day, One Action, is committed to educating our world about the relationship between our global animal-based food system and the emergence of deadly pathogens that could cause a never-ending series of global pandemics just as devastating as COVID-19 (and potentially much, much worse). To learn more about this latest initiative please visit www.EatingAnimalsCausesPandemics.com and follow their work on social media.
Hope Bohanec
Hope Bohanec has been active in animal protection and environmental activism for 30 years and has published the book The Ultimate Betrayal: Is There Happy Meat? She is the Projects Manager for the national non-profit United Poultry Concerns, the host of the Hope for the Animals Podcast, and the Executive Director of Compassionate Living, a California based vegan advocacy organization. Over the last three decades, Hope has given countless presentations, written innumerable articles, and contributed chapters to two anthologies. She has organized hundreds of events including UPC’s annual Conscious Eating Conference and the Sonoma County VegFest.
Lee Hall
Lee Hall, an author who has taken on subjects from anti-terrorism law to vegan cooking, wrote the Vegetarianism entry in the Encyclopedia of Activism and Social Justice. Lee has taught Animal Law and Immigration and Refugee Law and in 2014 earned a second law degree: a legal masters in Environmental Law with a focus on climate change from Vermont Law School. Lee's work is a bridge between environmentalism and our personal relationships with agriculture, confronting the way animal farming usurps habitat. For years, animal-rights advocates have operated under the belief that at least pasture-based or organic ranching represents a step in the humane direction—but only looking at how domesticated animals seem to be affected. Lee champions the animal communities displaced by farm sprawl, and explains how our chosen cookbooks can offer a genuine humane response for all animals, reduce greenhouse emissions, and even stop extinctions.
Dr. Sailesh Rao
Dr. Sailesh Rao has over three decades of professional experience and is the Founder and Executive Director of Climate Healers, a nonprofit dedicated to healing the Earth’s climate. A systems specialist with a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, Dr. Rao worked on the internet communications infrastructure for twenty years after graduation. During this period, he led the transformation of early analog internet connections to more robust digital connections that also ran ten times faster at 1Gb/s. In 2006, he switched careers and became deeply immersed, full time, in solving the environmental crises affecting animalkind. Dr. Rao is the author of two books, Carbon Dharma: The Occupation of Butterflies and Carbon Yoga: The Vegan Metamorphosis, and an Executive Producer of four documentaries, The Human Experiment (2013), Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret (2014), What The Health (2017), and A Prayer for Compassion (2019).
Maneesha Deckha
Maneesha Deckha is Professor and Lansdowne Chair in Law at the University of Victoria. Her research interests include animal law and animal studies, feminist and other critical theories, and health and reproductive law and policy. She is widely published in law reviews and interdisciplinary venues and has received multiple grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and other funding bodies, including holding the Fulbright Visiting Chair in Law and Society at New York University. Maneesha is an inaugural fellow of the Brooks Animal Studies Academic Network and author of Animals as Legal Beings: Contesting Anthropocentric Legal Orders (University of Toronto Press, 2021). She currently serves as the Director of the Animal & Society Research Initiative at the University of Victoria, and she has elected to share the resource linked below with you as well, a resource that will be especially relevant if you intend to study the interspecies relationship in an academic capacity or are already doing so.
Genelle Palacio-Butler
Genelle Palacio-Butler is the mother of four children. Genelle went vegan after her daughter, Genesis, told her she no longer wanted to consume animal products after finding out milk from cows is given to humans instead of their calves. Shortly after, Genelle and her family became animal activists to help support Genesis and her mission to end animal cruelty. Genelle is a part-time educator, stay-at-home mother who is never home, and she also helps operate Genesis for Animals, a nonprofit organization founded by Genesis. Genelle and her family have been vegan for over 5 years and she enjoys living a vegan lifestyle with her family. Learn more about Genelle below.
Ellen Dent
Ellen is the co-founder of the 501(c)(3) nonprofit Animal Alliance Network activist group as part of the Animal Save Movement. She helps organize weekly pig vigils outside of a slaughterhouse near downtown Los Angeles. She hopes to help raise awareness in her community and around the world about the victims of animal agriculture.
Kyle Luzynski
Kyle is the founder, Executive Director, and Chairperson of Project Animal Freedom. Kyle earned his undergraduate degree in philosophy from St. Louis University in May 2020 with plans to complete a Master’s Degree in nonprofit management. His major areas of focus include environmental, business, and animal ethics, and he spends most of his spare time fighting to abolish factory farms, slaughterhouses, and other animal-abusing institutions. In 2016, he had the honor of being named the highest-scoring member of the All-Missouri Academic Team from a potential pool of 100,000 applicants. He was also one of just 40 incoming students at SLU to be named an MLK Scholar. Recognizing funding as the greatest limiting factor to our continued rapid growth, he strongly encourages you to become an official Project Animal Freedom Movement Builder today. What are you waiting for? Invest in the future of the Midwestern animal rights movement and discover all of the perks to doing so today!
Register today!
There is still time to prevent the worst impacts of climate change, save the Amazon Rainforest from complete ecosystem collapse, and preserve trillions of more-than-human animal lives in the process. But we must act now. We must educate ourselves to educate the world, and we must discover the passion to forever guide a purpose-driven life. What are you waiting for?