Written by Kyle Luzynski, Founder and Executive Director

Why We Build Chapters: How a Fully Vegan Midwest Gets Built, One City at a Time

Money builds chapters. Organizers run them. Funding comes first.

If you are deciding whether to make a grant, major gift, or other financial commitment to Project Animal Freedom, this is the page we most want you to read. Our mission is regional: build a fully vegan Midwest by 2056. But the work becomes durable city by city. Chapters are the highest-support route we use to build local animal rights capacity where no qualifying organization exists. And the order matters: money builds chapters; organizers run them. Funding comes first. This page explains why, how chapters fit our theory of change, and what a donor is actually buying when they fund one. It also explains what we ask of the people who eventually run them.

The short version

A fully vegan Midwest is not one goal. It is a metro-scale goal repeated across every Midwestern metropolitan area of 100,000 people or more, in a region where by our own count roughly two-thirds of major metro areas still have no local animal rights organization at all.
At the city scale, every stage of our five-stage engine needs somewhere local to land. Reach can happen from anywhere; Try, Belong, Act, and durable Multiply require local people, institutions, and follow-through. Where no qualifying local organization exists, a Project Animal Freedom chapter is our highest-support answer.
A chapter is not a volunteer. It is a package: a trained organizer, a coordinator’s time, a seat in a shared supporter database, a website, insurance, supplies, an event budget, and at least one fundraiser built to pay for the next year.
We have launched nearly a dozen chapters since 2021. Our operating experience is that support capacity has often been the binding constraint: coordinator time, launch money, infrastructure, fundraising help, and the ability to stay with an organizer after the first burst of energy.
So we will say it plainly. Money builds chapters. Organizers run them. Funding comes first, and every dollar raises the ceiling on how many organizers we can responsibly say yes to.
Chapters are necessary to our 2056 strategy, but they are not the whole regional strategy. The alliance, the index and map, the summit, the Lab, the Foundation, and the Vegan Market Alliance deliberately extend beyond our own chapter footprint. Chapters are the part of the city-scale system we run directly, the test bed for what we build in St. Louis, and the way we create durable local capacity where none exists.

The unit of change is the city

Animal advocacy tends to operate at two scales. There is the person: one individual persuaded, one diet changed, one mind opened. And there is the region or the nation: a corporate campaign, a piece of legislation, a documentary that lands everywhere at once. Both matter. Neither is where a movement actually lives.

Between them is the city. A city is where a person eats, shops, works, votes, and finds friends. It is where a restaurant decides what goes on the menu, where a hospital decides what to put on a patient’s tray, where a school district writes a food contract, and where somebody who went vegan in January either finds their people by March or quietly stops. Institutions are local. Culture is local. Loneliness is local.

A chapter is our word for an organization that works at that scale and does not go away.

A fully vegan Midwest is won city by city

We are specific about what a fully vegan Midwest means, because a vague goal cannot be measured or funded. We do not mean that every resident of twelve states will personally identify as vegan. We mean a region whose institutions, food system, economy, and civic culture no longer depend on the exploitation of animals.

Take those four in turn and ask where each one is actually decided.

Institutions. A hospital’s food service contract, a university’s dining program, a city council’s catering policy. Decided locally, over years, by people who have to be asked repeatedly by someone who lives there.
Food system. Which restaurants open, which groceries stock what, which caterers can handle a wedding. Decided by local demand a business owner can see with their own eyes.
Economy. The vegan bakery that survives its second year. The market that gives twenty small businesses a monthly storefront. Local by definition.
Civic culture. Whether veganism reads as normal in a given place. Settled at potlucks, parades, festivals, block parties, and Thanksgiving tables.

Regional and national levers matter, but they cannot substitute for local implementation. A national campaign can create pressure. A regional alliance can share tools, relationships, research, and money. A map can show where capacity is missing. But someone local still has to ask the hospital again, fill the room again, run the market again, and stay long enough for the new norm to become ordinary.

So the local part of the mission decomposes. A fully vegan Midwest by 2056 requires durable local capacity across every Midwestern metropolitan area of 100,000 people or more, while the regional layer connects those cities and the independent organizations already working in them. That is why we are chapter-based without pretending a chapter network is sufficient on its own.

And this is the gap we work in: by our own count, roughly two-thirds of the major metro areas across the Midwest still lack a local animal rights organization. The movement is thinnest exactly where the industry is strongest. Iowa raises more pigs than any other state, and Illinois, Indiana, and Minnesota are among the largest hog states too. Drive an hour in any direction from our home city and you pass the industry we exist to end. Then look for the organization fighting it, and in most of those metros there isn’t one. See our theory of change for the full argument.

How we count the coverage gap

That two-thirds figure is our own count, not somebody else’s research, so here is exactly how we arrive at it.

Region. The twelve states we define as the Midwest: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, and Wisconsin.
Metro threshold. Census-defined metropolitan statistical areas with a population of 100,000 or more.
Qualifying organization. A functional test rather than a reputational one. An organization counts if advocating an end to animal use and exploitation, or promoting veganism toward that end, is a substantive part of what it does. Applied the same way to every organizational form, so an advocacy-active sanctuary counts and a care-only one does not.
Method and date. Published with the inventory, including how it was compiled and when it was last checked.

We also state the limit of the claim in the words we use. When we say a metro has no qualifying organization, we mean no qualifying organization identified as of a stated date. That is an epistemic standard, not a hedge, and we hold ourselves to it everywhere. Making this check auditable rather than anecdotal is the entire point of the Midwest Animal Rights Index, whose 2027 baseline edition will publish the census, the map, and the gap analysis behind numbers like this one.

Where chapters sit in our theory of change

Our theory of change runs in five stages: Reach, Try, Belong, Act, and Multiply. It is a loop rather than a funnel, because the organizers and institutions produced at the far end generate the events, audiences, revenue, and relationships that start the next cycle. The theory itself operates at three scales: person, city, and region. Chapters are not the whole theory. They are the highest-support route through the city scale, where the five-stage engine has to become durable.

Stage	What it requires locally	What is missing without durable local organizing capacity
1. Reach	Local events people can see, local content, and a local name people recognize.	Reach still happens, and it can be cheap. It has no reliable local handoff: a curious person cannot attend an impression.
2. Try	A restaurant meetup, a local dining guide, a class, and somebody who will answer a question.	A sign-up form and a PDF, unless another local organization is there to provide the next step.
3. Belong	A book club, a potluck, a game night, a room with the same faces in it month after month.	At best, isolated events. Recurring belonging requires hosts, continuity, and the same people returning.
4. Act	Bodies in one place at one time, and somebody whose job it is to get them there.	Petitions and episodic mobilization, not durable local advocacy with a team behind it.
5. Multiply	New organizers, new chapters, and playbooks that survive being handed to a stranger.	The St. Louis model does not become a durable local institution there. Independent groups and public toolkits can still carry pieces of it; a PAF chapter is our highest-support route when no such group exists.

Two things are worth pulling out of that table.

First, reach is the cheapest thing we buy and a local organization is the most expensive. We have seen $200 in paid distribution generate as much as 1.4 million views against a global audience, roughly 7,000 views per dollar. Nobody has ever bought a Tuesday night potluck for $200. Anyone can rent attention. Almost nobody in the Midwest is building the thing attention is supposed to lead to.

Second, we grade the outside evidence behind each stage differently, and we publish those grades. The research is strongest at Belong, where social support keeps turning up as a factor in whether people sustain a change like this. It is thinner at Act and thinnest at Multiply, where our claim that a St. Louis playbook transfers to another Midwestern city is a hypothesis we are testing rather than a finding we can cite. We would rather tell you that than dress it up.

When we launch a chapter, and when we join forces instead

We are not trying to be the only animal rights organization in the Midwest. We are trying to make sure there is one in every city.

So we work two ways. Where a local animal rights or vegan advocacy organization already exists, our answer is the Midwest Animal Rights Alliance: join forces, share what we have built, and count that group as regional capacity rather than competition. Where no such organization exists, and only there, our answer is a chapter.

That boundary needs a published standard, because “nobody is doing this here” is exactly the kind of claim organizations make carelessly and in their own favor. Ours is the functional test above, applied on a stated date, with the method written down. If we are wrong about a city, we want to be correctable, and we would rather find a group to work with than launch on top of one.

What a chapter actually is

“Launching a chapter” sounds like recruiting a volunteer. It is not. A chapter is a package, and most of the package costs money.

The organizer brings the things money cannot buy: local knowledge, local credibility, and the willingness to spend their evenings on this. We bring the rest.

A chapter coordinator. Through our Compassionate Cities Campaign, every organizer is paired with a coordinator who meets them for 30 to 60 minutes every week or every other week on growing the chapter, building a team, running events, and raising money, with text, email, and phone access in between. This is the single most valuable thing we give an organizer, and it is a staffing cost.
A seat in one shared database. We run the entire organization, and every chapter in it, on one centralized supporter database rather than a patchwork of personal spreadsheets and free mailing-list accounts. Supporters are tied to their chapter, so a new organizer can email, text, and fundraise to the people in their own metro from day one instead of starting at zero.
A citywide website. We are turning VeganSTL.com into a replicable citywide vegan hub template, so an organizer starts with a dining guide, an events calendar, and a Start Here page for newcomers rather than a blank domain and a year of unpaid web work.
Playbooks. Guides for event pages, social media, campaigns, seasonal challenges, promotion, and run of show, built and tested in St. Louis first.
Event supplies, catering budget, and insurance coverage under our organizational policy.
Investment from our global funds while the chapter builds revenue of its own, so nobody starts from nothing.
Ticketed event packages: fundraisers we have already built, priced, staffed, and tested in St. Louis, handed over whole so an organizer does not have to invent a fundraiser.
Permission to innovate, and permission to collaborate. Chapters develop their own specialties: plant-based health advocacy in one city, catered community experiences in another, frequent street activism in a third. And our organizer policy is deliberately open. Organizers may volunteer and collaborate with essentially any group in their area, with a strong preference for animal freedom organizations. We would rather an organizer be an asset to their whole city’s movement than an exclusive asset to ours.

Chapters operate under the banner Project Animal Freedom – City, State. We do not hand organizers a script. We hand them a floor to stand on.

We count chapters on a ladder, not a switch

A city goes from nothing to a durable local organization in steps, and we publish those steps under four labels: Local Contact (a committed local person and the beginnings of a list), Chapter in Formation (recurring public activity and an organization taking shape), Chapter (a functioning local organization with a team), and Established Chapter (a durable organization with its own revenue and its own bench of volunteers).

We report those rungs separately, because collapsing them flatters the numbers. For any stated total of “chapters,” only cities at Chapter or Established Chapter count. A Chapter in Formation does not count toward the chapter total merely because its label contains the word “chapter,” and a Local Contact does not count either. The locations block below still displays every city and its rung. We also hold ourselves to the broader anti-inflation rule: no initiative gets described publicly at a stage above the one it has evidence for.

Money builds chapters. Organizers run them.

This is the part we most want funders to hear, and it is the same sentence we want prospective organizers to hear.

We have launched nearly a dozen chapters since 2021. We could present that as growth, and the growth is real. The more useful lesson is that willingness to organize is not enough. A chapter needs coordinator attention, venue and event money, a website and database, fundraising tools, and the confidence that a real institution is behind the organizer after the launch-day excitement is gone.

A chapter we launch without enough support is a chapter we put at risk. An organizer we under-support may leave not only our network but animal advocacy altogether. That is the leaky-bucket problem applied to organizers rather than new vegans, and it is one reason our theory now treats retention and infrastructure as movement problems rather than personal shortcomings.

Which is why we deliberately slowed down. Rather than launching chapters as fast as people asked for them, we concentrated on St. Louis as a super-chapter: the place where we build and test the playbooks before loaning them out to the network and to the wider movement.

St. Louis develops. Project Animal Freedom documents. The Alliance distributes. Chapters adapt.

Slowing down is a funding statement, not a loss of ambition. We would launch faster if we could support what we launched. The binding constraint is how many organizers we can responsibly back with coordinator capacity, seed funding, systems, and fundraising support. Money does not replace organizers; it determines how many organizers we can set up to succeed.

So the sequence is funding, then supported organizers, then durable chapters. The regional initiatives around them make those chapters smarter, more connected, more measurable, and less isolated; they do not eliminate the need to fund the local institution itself. A gift to Project Animal Freedom does not magically buy a chapter. It raises the ceiling on how many cities we can responsibly build in.

What a chapter costs

We use two different chapter-cost figures because donors deserve to know the difference between direct seed money and the full cost of support.

$5,000 is the direct seed funding we currently budget for one chapter for a year. It covers the local investment but not the central staff time, technology, website infrastructure, and mentorship around the organizer. Our forward-looking 2029 financial model uses approximately $18,000 per chapter-year as a fully allocated cost at that staffing level. That $18,000 is a modeled planning allocation, not a 2025 historical cost and not yet an audited unit cost. It is higher than the per-chapter cost our current structure produces because the 2029 model assumes a properly staffed network, while today we still rely heavily on unpaid founder labor; it describes the support standard we are building toward, not a current funding deficit. We will update it as actual chapter-network staffing and books make the allocation more precise.

That distinction matters. A donor can fund the visible local work, or fund the infrastructure that lets several local organizers succeed at once. The second is often the higher-leverage gift: coordinator capacity, reusable technology, a citywide hub template, or a fundraiser package that every later chapter inherits.

Chapters that pay for themselves

Funding first does not mean funding forever. The goal of every dollar we put into a chapter is a chapter that eventually covers its own recurring program costs from locally raised revenue.

Many local animal rights groups run on one or two institutional funders. When priorities shift, programs disappear overnight. We have watched it happen to good organizations doing good work. So we build the other thing.

Every ticketed event we run in St. Louis is designed from the start to be run by any chapter. A vegan Thanksgiving feast. A trivia night with tiered tickets and a silent auction of donated goods from local businesses. A holiday dinner, an awards night, a chili cook-off. We build each one once, then package the whole thing: format, pricing tiers, venue checklist, sponsor and in-kind donation letters, ticketing setup, promotion pipeline, and run of show. An organizer in another city does not have to invent a fundraiser. They take one off the shelf, host it, promote it to their own segment of our shared database, and keep what it raises.

The compounding effect is the point. An organizer who has run one ticketed event has done real fundraising: set a price, asked local businesses for donations, filled a room, thanked the donors, and closed the books. Those skills go a long way toward deciding whether a local group still exists in five years. Fundraising is a capacity the movement should teach far more deliberately than it does, and our chapter mentorship works on money directly rather than treating it as somebody else’s department.

The Animal Freedom Foundation grows out of this same logic, but it is broader than our chapter network. It is being formalized in 2027, with structured grantmaking planned for 2028, and it grows from two practices that already exist: central investment in PAF chapters and modest outward giving to other organizations. Its role is runway: helping promising local capacity survive long enough to build earned revenue and durable fundraising habits.

For funders and major donors: what your money builds

Most animal advocacy funding buys programming. Programming is good, and it stops the day the grant does. We are asking you to buy something with a longer half-life: local organizations in a region that has almost none, run by people who live there.

A few things make that unusually efficient here.

The region is under-invested to a degree that would be surprising anywhere else. Two-thirds of major Midwestern metros have no local animal rights organization at all, in the region where animal agriculture is strongest. Marginal dollars go further where nothing has been built.
Our cost base is lean to a fault. In 2025 we delivered our entire program on $112,597 in total expenses, funded largely by more than 2,000 grassroots donors, with an unpaid founder. That is a point of pride and a limit we are actively working to fix.
The assets compound. A packaged fundraiser, a coordinator, or a website template is used by every chapter that comes after, including the ones that do not exist yet.

Which is why we will tell you plainly which kind of gift you are making.

Fund a chapter launch. $5,000 in direct seed funding supports one chapter for a year. For full-cost planning, our forward-looking 2029 model uses approximately $18,000 per chapter-year once central staff time, technology, and mentorship are included; that is not a 2025 historical per-chapter expense. The difference is not an unfunded gap inside the chapter: it is largely the central coordinator, technology, and mentorship capacity described next, which is why a donor who wants to unlock multiple cities should fund chapter-network capacity.

Fund chapter-network capacity. Coordinator time is the literal ceiling on how many organizers we can responsibly support. A gift to this layer does not belong to one city; it increases the number of cities the network can back at once.

Fund the citywide hub template. Built once, inherited by every future chapter and offered to other groups and other cities.

Fund local runway through the Animal Freedom Foundation model. Central investment already helps PAF chapters while they build local fundraising capacity; structured external grantmaking is planned for 2028.

Fund a ticketed event package. We build and test a fundraiser in St. Louis once, then every chapter that adopts it can raise money from it every year. This is the closest thing we have to a self-replicating asset.

A grant that funds one year of one chapter’s programming buys one year of programming. A grant that funds a coordinator, a reusable template, a supporter system, or a packaged fundraiser buys capacity that later chapters inherit. The strongest portfolio does both: enough direct money to make the next city real, and enough shared infrastructure to make the city after that cheaper and stronger. Write to info@projectanimalfreedom.org or call 314-740-0436, and we will walk you through the model, the budget, and the parts we are still testing.

Fund a chapter

That is the investment case. The next question is how those funded local institutions fit the rest of the regional system.

Why the mission cannot be realized without chapters

There is an important distinction here. Project Animal Freedom’s chapter network is necessary to our mission, but it is not sufficient, and not every regional initiative literally depends on PAF chapters. Our current theory of change says the opposite of that kind of organizational self-importance: the Midwest will always be larger than our chapter footprint. The regional layer exists so independent organizations can use shared tools, relationships, research, capital, and convening without becoming us.

The stronger claim is also the more defensible one: our 2056 mission cannot be realized without durable local institutions, and chapters are the highest-support route we use to create them where none exist. The table below shows what chapters make possible inside the larger system, and what the larger system gives back to chapters.

Initiative	What chapters make possible inside the system	What chapters get back
Midwest Animal Rights Alliance (MARA) A free, non-exclusive alliance for the region’s animal rights and vegan advocacy organizations, stewarded by us.	Chapters fill some of the metros where the Alliance finds no qualifying organization, and they give us an internal place to test tools before offering them outward. But MARA is deliberately larger than PAF: its purpose is to equip and connect independent organizations without absorbing them.	Peers, shared tools, cross-state relationships, and a regional movement that does not force a local organizer to work alone.
Midwest Animal Rights Index and Map (MARI, MARM) The regional census, map, and coverage analysis run through the Lab.	Chapters are one response to gaps the map identifies and one set of local institutions whose durability can be tracked. They are not the only thing MARI measures; the whole point is to see the movement beyond us as well.	A public, checkable account of where capacity exists, where it is thin, and a defensible answer to “why this city next?”
Midwest Animal Rights Summit (MARS) MARA’s planned recurring in-person gathering.	Chapter organizers add local experience and help turn shared learning back into city-level work. MARS still has a purpose without PAF chapters because it convenes the wider alliance; chapters make sure our own local network is fully inside that regional conversation.	The rare chance for an organizer in a small metro to learn with peers from across the region instead of carrying the work alone.
Animal Freedom Lab Our research and measurement arm, planned to launch in January 2027.	Chapters are essential test sites for one specific hypothesis: whether St. Louis playbooks transfer to other Midwestern cities. The Lab also has jobs that do not depend on chapters: running MARI, curating outside research, and holding the standards behind our public claims.	Evidence about whether the model actually transfers, which parts need adaptation, and where our assumptions are wrong.
Animal Freedom Foundation Our grantmaking program, being formalized in 2027 with structured grantmaking planned for 2028.	PAF chapters are one place seed capital can create new local capacity. The Foundation is broader by design: it grows from both central investment in chapters and outward giving to other organizations, and over time is meant to move money beyond PAF.	Runway before local fundraising is mature, without pretending a new organizer should arrive as a professional fundraiser.
Vegan Market Alliance An initiative in design to build shared infrastructure for recurring vegan markets.	Chapters can operate markets as powerful local reach, community, commerce, and revenue institutions. But the Alliance is intended to reach recurring markets beyond our chapter footprint and, over time, beyond the Midwest.	A tested market format, shared infrastructure, and one of the strongest local reach-and-revenue assets in the portfolio.
Midwest Animal Rights Center (MARC) A planned physical center and future headquarters for regional work in 2028.	Chapters give the Center one constituency and one use case: training, convening, and supporting local organizers. The Center is for the regional movement more broadly, including independent organizations and alliance work.	A home base, training venue, and place where local organizers can build relationships with the wider region.
Gateway to Compassion Challenge Our year-round pathway for helping people try vegan through Veganuary, VegWeek, and VegMonth.	A challenge is most valuable when a sign-up has somewhere local to go next. In a chapter city, the handoff can become a meetup, class, circle, volunteer role, or campaign. Independent local organizations can provide that handoff too; where none exists, the pathway is dramatically thinner.	A complete annual campaign with classes, materials, sign-up flows, and follow-up systems already built and tested.
Community circles Recurring small-group series: a book club, monthly potluck, game night, and other repeat formats.	Belonging is inherently local. Chapters supply the hosts, continuity, calendar, and organizer attention that turn one-off gatherings into a social institution.	Low-cost recurring programming that strengthens the Belong stage of the model.
Vegan festivals campaign Vegan visibility at the largest non-vegan festivals in our cities.	This campaign is intentionally local. A chapter or comparable local organization recruits the volunteers, builds the relationship, and shows up year after year.	Access to one of the largest audiences their city assembles all year.
Plant Based Patients and other institutional food campaigns	Procurement changes building by building and board by board. A regional toolkit can help, but a local organization has to sustain the relationship, recruit constituents, and keep asking after the first meeting.	A ready-to-adapt campaign with regional significance that they can run at home.
Street outreach, campus leafleting, marches, vigils, and public actions	Bodies in one place at one time require local recruitment, local logistics, and local follow-through. Chapters are one durable way to produce that capacity where no other group exists.	A simple entry point for volunteers and a way to make animal freedom publicly visible in their own city.
Our expos and summits Including the Gay Vegan Expo, Disabled Vegan Expo, and Vegan Climate Summit.	These ideas can reach people nationally without chapters. Chapters give them a local landing place: a way to turn a webinar, expo, or summit into recurring programming, relationships, and new organizers in a city.	Programming a young local organization could not easily build alone, plus a pipeline from ideas into local action.
Succession and a paid team	A network that can run through coordinators, local organizers, shared systems, and repeatable programs is one of the strongest tests that PAF is becoming an institution rather than a founder-dependent project. Chapters are evidence of that institutionalization, not the whole of it.	Staff support, continuity, and systems that do not depend on a founder’s spare hours.

Read the middle column top to bottom and the relationship becomes clearer: chapters do not justify the rest of the portfolio by making everything else dependent on us. They justify themselves by doing something the regional layer cannot do for us: turning strategy into a durable local institution in a city where none exists.

Remove chapters from our strategy and we lose our highest-support mechanism for creating local animal rights capacity in uncovered metros, the main test bed for whether St. Louis systems transfer, and a major route by which Reach, Try, Belong, Act, and Multiply become a self-renewing local loop. The regional layer can still map, convene, fund, equip, and learn, but it cannot itself become the vegan hub in dozens of different cities.

Reverse it and the limitation is equally important. Keep only chapters and remove the regional layer, and we can build local institutions but cannot see the whole Midwest, serve independent groups well, test our assumptions rigorously, convene the region, or move tools and capital beyond our own name. The theory therefore requires both: chapters for the part of the city scale we build directly, and regional infrastructure for a movement that is larger than Project Animal Freedom.

What eight years has taught us

Small cities work. Our Decatur, Illinois chapter was named Chapter of the Year in 2024, in a city of about 68,000 people. That matters far beyond Decatur, because most of the Midwest is not Chicago. If the model only worked in large metros, a fully vegan Midwest would be arithmetically out of reach.

Specialty beats uniformity. The chapters that thrive are the ones that found something their city wanted, whether that is plant-based health advocacy, catered community experiences, or regular street activism. Standardizing the tools and leaving the strategy local has worked better than the reverse.

Under-support is a recurring failure mode. Our experience is that chapter durability depends not only on organizer commitment but on coordinator capacity, money, systems, and fundraising support. We should continue tracking organizer exits rather than turning that operating lesson into a stronger causal claim than our records can support.

Fundraising is teachable, and teaching it is one of the most durable things we do for an organizer. An organizer who can raise money locally still has a chapter after our grant cycle ends.

Consolidation is not retreat. Concentrating on St. Louis long enough to build playbooks worth copying was the most useful thing we did for the other chapters, and it is the reason the next city will start where we are now rather than where we started.

What we are committing to, and how you can check

Two to three new chapters by the end of 2026. We made that commitment to funders and we intend to keep it.
Ten Established Chapters by October 19, 2028, our tenth anniversary. That is one rung of our Tenth Anniversary Plan, a goal ladder with a published definition of the threshold, a published audit date, and results we will report whether or not we hit it.
Longer term: coverage in every Midwestern metro of 100,000 people or more. We are not publishing a 2030 chapter number until our board settles one, because we would rather publish nothing than publish a figure we are still arguing about internally.
No stage inflation. A Local Contact is not a Chapter in Formation, a Chapter in Formation is not a Chapter, and a Chapter is not an Established Chapter. We report the rungs separately.
No unearned coverage claims. When we say a metro has no qualifying organization, we mean none identified as of a stated date, by a stated test.

What we do not yet claim

A theory of change is a set of expectations about cause and effect, and it is worth being clear about which of ours are established and which are still wagers. Three of the wagers are specific to chapters.

Transfer. That playbooks developed in St. Louis work in other Midwestern cities with local adaptation. Testable by comparing outcomes in chapters that adopt our packaged programs against those that improvise locally.
Durability. That chapter infrastructure, meaning a coordinator, a database, a website, and a fundraising asset, makes a local group more likely to survive. Testable through organizer retention, recurring-event frequency, and supporter growth.
Saturation. That a chapter in every major metro actually changes a region, rather than producing many small scenes that never add up. This is the biggest bet on this page, it runs on a thirty-year clock, and we do not have evidence for it. We have a plan for measuring it, which is what the Index is for.

We will report associations as associations. If the evidence turns against any of these, we would rather revise the model than defend it.

For prospective organizers: what we ask, and what you get

You do not need to be an expert. Nearly every organizer we have was once a stranger at one of our events.

What we ask of you: a few hours a week you can actually spare, a willingness to be the local face of this in your city, a commitment to recurring events rather than one-off bursts, working with your coordinator, and eventually helping raise money locally so your chapter outlives any single grant.

What we will never ask: that you invent it all yourself, that you pay for it out of pocket, that you work alone, or that you stay quiet about other groups. Our organizer policy is deliberately open, because your city’s movement matters more to us than our logo on it.

What you get is everything in the package above: a coordinator every week or two, a shared database with your city’s supporters already in it, a website, playbooks, supplies, funding, insurance, ready-made fundraisers, and a network of people doing the same work in other cities.

And one honest thing, because you will hear it from us before you hear it from anyone else: we will only say yes when we can support you properly. If we tell you not yet, that is a funding answer and not a judgment about you. It is also the reason the donate button on this page matters to your city as much as it matters to ours.

Tell us about your city Fund the next chapter

Our chapter network

Every city in our network is listed below with its current rung, so you can see the difference between a Local Contact, a Chapter in Formation, a Chapter, and an Established Chapter rather than having them collapsed into one number.

Money builds chapters. Organizers run them. Until every animal is free.

Frequently asked questions

What is a Project Animal Freedom chapter?

A local animal rights organization operating under the banner Project Animal Freedom – City, State, run by a local organizer, supported by a chapter coordinator, and built to become the vegan hub for its community. Chapters organize community-building and outreach events year-round, from potlucks and markets to leafleting, vigils, and marches.

How many chapters do you have?

The current network is listed above, city by city, with each city’s rung shown. For any stated total, “chapters” means cities at either Chapter or Established Chapter; Chapter in Formation and Local Contact are shown but not counted in that number. Separately, we have launched nearly a dozen chapters since 2021. We keep the current-rung total and the historical launch count separate so neither can inflate the other.

Are chapters separate organizations?

No. Chapters are part of Project Animal Freedom, a single 501(c)(3) nonprofit (EIN 83-3007847). They operate under our name, our insurance, and our shared database, and donations to a chapter are donations to Project Animal Freedom, designated to that chapter’s work.

Why not just fund the local groups that already exist?

Where they exist, we do work with them, and the Midwest Animal Rights Alliance is built for exactly that. But you cannot grant money to an organization that does not exist, and by our count most major Midwestern metros do not have one. Chapters are for the gap.

Do chapters raise their own money?

Yes, and we treat that as core to the model rather than a nice-to-have. Every ticketed event we run in St. Louis is packaged so a chapter can host its own version, promote it to its own segment of our shared supporter database, and keep what it raises. Coordinators work with organizers on fundraising directly, and we invest from our global funds while that capacity is being built.

Do I need experience to start one?

No. We recruit for commitment and local knowledge, and we train for the rest. Nearly every organizer we have started as somebody who came to an event.

Can a chapter work in a smaller city?

Yes, and the evidence is one of the reasons we believe in the model. Our Decatur, Illinois chapter was named Chapter of the Year in 2024 in a city of about 68,000.

What does a chapter cost to run?

$5,000 is our current direct seed funding figure for supporting one chapter for a year. Our forward-looking 2029 model uses approximately $18,000 per chapter-year as a fully allocated cost once central staff time, technology, website infrastructure, and mentorship are included. The $18,000 figure is a planning allocation, not a 2025 historical unit cost, and we will update it as actual chapter-network costs mature.

Will you launch chapters outside the Midwest?

Not for now. We narrowed our mission from the world to the Midwest in 2021 on purpose, and our working goal is coverage across the region rather than expansion beyond it. Whether we go further is a decision for later, not a commitment we are making today.

How do I support this without starting a chapter?

Give, join the mailing list, or volunteer with a chapter near you. Chapter capacity is funded before it is staffed, so a gift is the most direct way to increase the number of cities we can say yes to.

Sources and notes

The chapter gap. “Roughly two-thirds of the major metro areas across the Midwest lack a local animal rights organization” is Project Animal Freedom’s own count. The definitions, the qualifying-organization test, the method, and the date last checked are published above under “How we count the coverage gap.”
Retention and social support. Faunalytics, Study of Current and Former Vegetarians and Vegans (2014), which found former vegetarians and vegans substantially outnumbered current ones, and reported 49% of former versus 25% of current respondents citing insufficient interaction with other vegetarians and vegans. These are associations, not proof of cause. Faunalytics’ later longitudinal work informs how we describe the problem.
Midwest animal agriculture. USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service, Quarterly Hogs and Pigs, state inventory rankings.
Reach and engagement. Figures come from Meta Business Suite and Squarespace analytics. Views and impressions are gross exposures; platform reach is each platform’s own unique-account count; estimated local reach is our cross-channel estimate and may contain duplication. We reserve “people reached” for deduplicated counts we can document. Every figure is labeled St. Louis, Midwest, or global, and we never quote a figure at one scope as if it belonged to another.
Financial scale and status. Project Animal Freedom is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, EIN 83-3007847. In 2025 we reported $113,875 in revenue and $112,597 in expenses. Our most recent filing is available through ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer.

Written by Kyle Luzynski, Founder and Executive Director. Last updated September 2026.
Project Animal Freedom is an IRS-recognized 501(c)(3) nonprofit, EIN 83-3007847.
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