Executive summary: The author argues that animal activism needs more systematic experimentation, and proposes the Hatchery Fund as a microgrant program to test and learn from small, novel activist interventions.
Key points:
The author argues that current animal activism has stagnated, with rising meat consumption, few activists, and slow campaigns indicating that existing approaches are insufficient.
They claim that innovation requires dedicated resources and suggest applying R&D-style experimentation, especially using social science methods, to improve tactics like recruitment and community building.
The Hatchery Fund offers microgrants up to $1,000 for small, one-off experiments aimed at testing new strategies in direct animal activism.
Grantees are expected to run experiments and publish write-ups of results so the broader movement can learn from both successes and failures.
The fund differs from existing large-scale grants by prioritizing learning and early-stage idea discovery rather than funding proven, scalable organizations with strong evidence.
The program intentionally tolerates failure as part of experimentation, aiming to create a low-risk environment that can surface promising ideas for future scaling.
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The Hatchery Fund: Microgrants for Experiments in Animal Activism — EA Forum
The Hatchery Fund: Microgrants for Experiments in Animal Activism
Do you have an idea for how the animal advocacy movement could be better - a new recruiting strategy, community building model, or campaign tactic? The Hatchery Fund is for you. We’re giving away microgrants up to $1,000 for advocates to experiment with creative approaches to the ongoing challenges that the animal activism movement faces. If you’re interested in applying, skip to the bottom for an overview of how the fund works or key deadlines.
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 or decades 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.
The Hatchery Fund
Other Funds
Target Audience
A non-paid activist (or a small group)
A nonprofit organization with paid staff
Goal
Try a new tactic or strategy and learn from the results
Win large victories for animals
Commitment
One project that takes between a day and a few months
An ongoing set of projects and campaigns that could run for years
Budget
Hundreds to thousands of dollars
Tens of thousands to millions of dollars
Applicant Requirements
Open to anyone with an idea and the willingness to test it and write up the results
Some degree of specialization in the target field and often the qualifications to run a nonprofit
Expectations
We learn from the outcome, regardless of whether it succeeds or fails at its intended goal
A sound theory of change that leads to real progress - failure will lead to lack of future funding
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.
One of Seattle’s illustrious animal welfare organizations, The Northwest Animal Rights Network, has been campaigning against the University of Washington’s primate lab for at least the six years that I’ve been an activist.
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Executive summary: The author argues that animal activism needs more systematic experimentation, and proposes the Hatchery Fund as a microgrant program to test and learn from small, novel activist interventions.
Key points:
This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, and contact us if you have feedback.