Summary
- This post considers the idea of an Animal Advocacy Corps, which would be modeled after the US Peace Corps program and involve recent graduates spending a year working in-person at various pro-animal organizations/companies.
- The main goal of this project, were it to happen, would be to a) increase the number of young people engaged in animal advocacy in some capacity, and b) increase the level of in-person organization in the movement*.
- How you can help: I’m not going to start this idea myself (right now at least). Here, I’m just interested in hearing input on whether this idea warrants proceeding with. If so, I’d also love to hear from people potentially interested in working on it.
*Note that when I refer to the “movement” throughout, I’m talking about the animal advocacy movement. Though perhaps some of these ideas apply to other social change movements as well.
Context
This idea came out of the discussions at the recent Animal Advocacy Strategy Forum, hosted by Rethink Priorities in May. As a side note, I found it pretty useful (and meaningful) to be in-person with so many different advocates. I’d love to see our movement shift back to existing more in-person, which is part of the motivation behind this idea.
The Problem
Amongst the many bottlenecks our movement faces, the following are amongst those I think most significant:
- Lack of people at all engagement levels: If our movement is to fully succeed, I believe we are going to need dramatically more people engaged at every level. This includes more paid professional staffers, even though I imagine we have far more people employed full time in animal advocacy than we’ve ever had before in the history of our species. We will also need more donors, more people changing their diets, more street activists, more pro-animal voters, more researchers and economists, etc. Right now, on some level, our cause does enjoy broad public support (e.g. we tend to win ballot referendums like Prop 12), but I believe we suffer from a) a lack of people willing to take more meaningful actions, and b) not enough “easy” actions like voting that normal people can take to support our cause and build their own pro-animal identity.
- Lack of effective funnels for students to adult life: I have the impression (though would love to see data one way or the other on this!) that there’s probably a steep dropoff, at least in the West, of people willing to take action for animals immediately following their graduation from university. Perhaps this is partly because adults lose some of their youthful radicalism, but I think it’s more because there aren’t as obvious, fun, and accessible advocacy opportunities once people graduate out of their local animal rights student groups. In this way we are currently losing a vast amount of potential staffers, donors, activists, etc.
- Lack of in-person collaboration: The animal movement to me feels extremely online nowadays. For instance, if I had to say one place where the movement is centered today, my first thought is not London or New York, but the Hive Slack group (of course much love to Hive!). This is great for many reasons, but it also has some serious drawbacks: 1) I think online communities lead to fewer breakthroughs or bold approaches, due to less and more formal communication, and 2) online communities lead to less long-term identity formation—it’s hard to feel like you’re truly “in the trenches” with someone if the most you see them is 9-5 on Zoom. Perhaps I’m too much of a romantic about how I imagine past social movements, but it’s hard to imagine them succeeding with the speed or the magnitude that they sometimes did were they so heavily based as we are on remote knowledge workers.
Proposed Solution
One idea that could address these issues is an “Animal Advocacy Corps”. I’m modeling this heavily off of the US Peace Corps, which is a program that facilitates young US people spending 1-2 years working in-person, generally in a lower or middle income country, for a small stipend.
The Peace Corps has a few key features relevant for us here:
- It gets young people to do something useful for the world, with the expectation that they give more than they materially (e.g. salary) get.
- It is in-person, and the cultural and work immersion are an important part of the program.
- Presumably, participants form some kind of identity that makes them more likely to engage in similar work later on.
If we were to run an Animal Advocacy Corps, I’d think to structure it in the following ways:
- A 1-year, stipended, mostly in-person program, targeting recent grads (and recruiting from current student animal advocacy groups)
- During this year, participants would be placed at between 2-4 different pro-animal entities for internships, each for 3-6 month periods. These entities could be NGOs, relevant companies (e.g. alt proteins), pro-animal policymaker offices, etc.
- Note that I think the Reducetarian Fellowship and New Roots Leadership Academy already run similar programs that achieve a lot of the value I’m going for here. I still think it’d be worth having more projects in the space though because a) two orgs does not seem near enough to cover the gaps, and b) these two don’t seem to focus quite as much on in-person work as I’m proposing here.
As an example of what this could look like, take Henry the student. He’s in the AAC 2026 cohort, along with 20 other recent graduates. His year looks like the following:
- An initial 2-week in-person retreat, onboarding, and training for him and the rest of his class.
- A four month internship in farmer advocacy with Fish Welfare Initiative in Eluru, India.
- A four month internship in campaigns with the International Council for Animal Welfare in London.
- A four month internship at an animal sanctuary in Brazil.
- A final 2-week in-person wrapup retreat.
I would see the goals of the Animal Advocacy Corps as the following:
- More young people, when polled, see animal advocacy as an important part of their lives. In practice, this breaks down to more movement staffers, more donors, more volunteers and activists, more pro-animal voters, etc.
- More in-person organizing exists in the movement. Hopefully, this would lead to a better exchange of ideas—and with it, more rapid progress.
Possible Next Steps / A Call to Ownership
I myself am not interested in founding such a project or org right now (I’m quite happy at FWI). However, I’d love to see people engage with this idea further and, if it stands up to scrutiny, take it forward. I think that would look like:
- Research: Conducting further research on whether an Animal Advocacy Corps would actually be worth creating. For instance, if I were to do this research, I’d likely spend some time talking with current movement leaders, as well as leaders from other past successful movements, to gain evidence on this question.
- Founder: Whether this becomes a new org, or just a project at an existing one, the key barrier to actually getting it off the ground is 1-2 individuals who want to own it. If that’s you or someone you know, please do message me!
- Funding and MVP: If the founder(s) and research are in place, the next step would be developing a minimum viable product (MVP), and then applying for funding to run it.
Uncertainties
As always, there’s many uncertainties! Here are my two main ones:
- Enough in-person orgs?: For me, the in-person element is a critical component of this idea. However, most of our organizations nowadays seem to only function remotely (which, as discussed above, I think is a problem for other reasons). How many pro-animal organizations or companies a) have some viable in-person presence, and b) would be keen to take on interns like this? And if not, is there some other meaningful activity we could get large numbers of graduates do which would both be useful as well as identity-forming?
- As a side note, identity-forming may IMO have actually been the greatest impact of all the vegan leafleting many activists did in the 2010’s: We may not have turned the world vegan, but we did seem to solidify the pro-animal identity of many important movement staffers today.
- Counterfactual impact on students: Would we actually be able to recruit sufficient number of students over the years who wouldn’t have otherwise found their way into some form of animal advocacy? Or would such an Animal Advocacy Corps only be a leg up for those already likely headed towards a career or some other useful role in the movement?
A call for more data: As another side note, it’d be very helpful to have polling data on the number of people currently engaged in various pro-animal actions or beliefs (e.g. movement staffers, donors, voters, volunteers, etc.). Such data would directly inform the need for programs like this one. I’m not aware of any existing datasets like this, but there was a project introduced at the recent AVA Conference to start collecting such data.
That’s all. Just wanted to throw this idea out there to see what people think of it—would love to hear any feedback!
My immediate hesitation is whether fresh college graduates would be useful enough to hosting organizations to make this program sustainable.
Last I checked, Peace Corps invests 3 months of formal training into each applicant and requires a minimum 2-year commitment in a role (to allow people to grow into competency). But this version of Animal Advocacy Corps has college undergraduates rotate thru multiple organizations for much shorter periods without any training. And I’m not sure how much demand there is for that kind of worker in animal advocacy even if it’s provided for free.