2025 was ICARE’s first full year of operations after our official launch in October 2024. It was a year of building foundations, testing pilot programmes, and (in a few places) reaching scale earlier than we expected.

ICARE exists to strengthen the animal rights movement’s ability to secure durable legal change for animals by widening access to rights-based animal law education, producing open-access tools, and supporting advocacy and research that can travel across jurisdictions.

Below is a short overview of what we delivered in 2025, what we think it means for impact, and what we’re scaling next. Our full annual report is available here.

1) Education (courses)

In 2025, we enrolled 149 course participants from 62 countries across 6 continents, with ~50% supported through scholarships. We already met (and exceeded) our 2026 objective of training 120 students per year in 2025.

Highlights include:

• CIARL Live (1st edition, Jan–Mar 2025): 30 students enrolled (21 countries), 18 scholarships awarded (60%), 18 completions (60%), with participants reporting substantial gains in advocacy-relevant legal competencies and a strong satisfaction signal (course rating 4.5/5; likelihood to recommend 4.86/5).
• CIARL On-Demand (launched end of Apr 2025): early feedback 5/5, and 8 participants completed in 2025. We also received early “real-world use” feedback: participants applying the course to ongoing advocacy work.
• Summer Course (Bridging Animal Rights Theory & Practice): 33 students (26 countries, 5 continents), 22 scholarships, 26 completions (79%), and an average course rating of 4.81/5 (lecturer rating 4.9/5).

Across programmes, we also began early downstream tracking to better understand how alums use what they learned in their advocacy, research, and professional pathways, because capacity-building is only “impact” if it shows up later in real decisions, interventions, and careers.

2) Education (seminar series & public lectures)

We launched the Litigating & Legislating for Animal Rights Seminar Series in April 2025 as a pilot (with a summer break to assess and adapt). By year-end, we delivered 4 seminars and 2 public online lectures—6 live convenings in total, all free and open to the public.

The numbers here were stronger than we expected for year one: 968 registrants, 659 live attendees (68% conversion rate), and 1,953 views of published recordings/takeaways across YouTube and Substack. We also saw rapid growth in uptake: 5.69k Substack views in 2025 (+826.2%). Satisfaction averaged 4.85/5 for the seminar series and 5/5 for public lectures. 

We did not always meet our internal goal of publishing every recording and takeaway within two weeks, mainly because we are volunteer-led and legal technical content takes time to edit and subtitle properly. We’ve already identified workflow changes to improve this in 2026 without compromising accessibility.

3) Education: Open-access resources (Resource Library + weekly series)

In 2025, we treated open access as infrastructure rather than “content”: as a way to reduce the global access gap in animal rights law by sharing free, high-quality and usable resources to a wide and engaged online community. We published ~100 open-access resources across four weekly educational series, which were later organised in ICARE’s Resource Library.

In early 2026, we published our first free e-book, Key Concepts for Animal Rights Law: A Guide to Critical Terms for Animal Rights Advocates (Vol. 1), which was already downloaded 550+ times in its first two weeks, with strong early feedback from users.

4) Research & advocacy (publications + dissemination)

In 2025, we initiated three long-term comparative research projects (all volunteer-led): a global survey of direct democracy pathways for animal rights, a comparative project on wildlife trafficking, and a global comparative legal research on the protection of animals in disasters.

We also produced advocacy-facing interventions and public legal analysis: 10 legal analyses & op-eds (EU Law Live), 26 blog posts, 1 public consultation submission, and 1 legal brief (on C-218/24 before the CJEU (Iberia Lineas Aereas de España) with contributions from the Nonhuman Rights Project), and 1 video explainer (collaboration with Animal Rights Explained). This work was also widely shared and disseminated through commentaries, articles, and blogs, and cited (e.g., Verfassungsblog, UK A-Law, L'Amorce).

A key part of our strategy is dissemination: presenting early findings and legal analysis in places where they can shape debate and be reused. In 2025, we delivered 3 major conference presentations and attended 7 in-person conferences, using those spaces to share work and expand the reach of our programmes and resources, test ideas, and build partnerships and collaborations.

5) Community-building & movement support

We launched and grew ARVAN (ICARE's alums network: Animal Rights and Vegan Advocacy Network): 58 alums joined as mentees, and we hosted 2 mentee calls facilitated by Dr Olga Kikou (Animal Advocacy & Food Transition), alongside broader engagement across platforms (e.g., 4,800+ LinkedIn followers, plus Instagram and Bluesky growth). The through-line here is simple: legal capacity does not scale through knowledge, skills and information alone; it scales through people, relationships, collaboration, connections, and sustained support, especially in a field that asks advocates to persist through long timelines and institutional resistance, and for advocates who can be isolated and lack access to a variety of resources.

Why we think this matters (and how we think about “impact”)

A lot of what ICARE does is not easily reducible to short-term “wins”. Training, open-access infrastructure, and comparative legal research often lead to change through longer pathways: better legal arguments, stronger advocacy strategies, more credible institutional engagement, and more people able to do rights-based work and effective animal advocacy in more places.

That doesn’t mean measurement is optional. It means measurement needs to be honest about time horizons and proxies. In 2025, we leaned on participant outcomes (learning gains, satisfaction, early use cases), open-access uptake, and early downstream tracking, while building systems to rigorously measure longer-term effects.

What we’re scaling in 2026

Our 2026 priorities follow directly from what worked in year one:

• scale education (including regional CIARL live offerings and broader skills/topic coverage);
• strengthen the open-access ecosystem (more weekly resources, future e-book volumes, better dissemination (SEO/AIO) and translation/accessibility work);
• deepen research and advocacy interventions (more consultations/submissions and, where appropriate, amicus interventions; conference presentations);
• expand community-building through ARVAN, including a 1:1 mentoring pilot.
• offer legal support and consultation work to organisations and animal advocates who can benefit from our global and comparative animal rights law expertise in their legal reform, strategic litigation, and animal law education projects.

A question for the EA community

For work like legal capacity-building and movement infrastructure—where change is often long-horizon—what indicators do you find most meaningful? If you’ve worked on evaluating education, field-building, or legal/policy capacity projects, I would value your thoughts!