A Project Animal Freedom initiative

Midwest Animal Rights Alliance (MARA): Building Shared Infrastructure for Animal Rights

The Midwest is one of the industrial heartlands of American animal agriculture. It contains the country’s largest concentrations of hogs, egg-laying hens, and turkeys, and its confinement facilities, feedlots, and slaughterhouses shape the lives and deaths of hundreds of millions of animals every year. Several Midwest states have also been central to the history of so-called ag-gag laws restricting undercover investigation of agricultural facilities, from the earliest wave in Kansas and North Dakota to later laws in Iowa and Missouri.

The movement working against all of this operates across twelve states without a shared regional map.

We have not found a current, public, region-wide picture of which animal rights and vegan advocacy organizations operate in the Midwest, where they are, what they work on, or where no qualifying organization has yet been identified. Advocates here have excellent national and global research available to them. What they do not have is a shared regional baseline. A funder who wanted to invest in Midwest animal rights advocacy tomorrow could not easily find out what they would be investing in. Neither could an organizer in Wichita or Fort Wayne looking for a group to join.

Project Animal Freedom is building the Midwest Animal Rights Alliance (MARA) to close that gap.

What MARA is

MARA is a free, non-exclusive alliance of animal rights and vegan advocacy organizations across the American Midwest. Membership turns on what an organization does, not what kind of organization it is: any group that treats advocating an end to animal use and exploitation, or promoting veganism toward that end, as a substantive part of its work belongs here. That includes advocacy groups, vegan organizations, student and local collectives, and the sanctuaries and rescues whose work carries an animal rights message rather than a welfare one. It connects organizations, organizers, and funders across twelve states through shared research, shared tools, and shared support.

It exists to build four shared functions no organization should have to create alone.

Measure the movement, so the region can see itself
Equip its organizations, so nobody rebuilds what already exists
Connect its people, so advocates in different states are not strangers
Sustain its capacity, so more organizers have the support to stay involved for the long haul

Members keep everything. MARA has no authority over member organizations. You keep your name, your board, your strategy, your campaigns, and every other affiliation you hold. Every MARA position, sign-on, and joint action is opt-in for each member, individually, every time. Membership never implies endorsement of anything a member did not sign.

There are no dues, and no plans to introduce them.

Three ways in

Organizations

Join MARA as a member and help shape what the alliance becomes.

Join the alliance

Advocates and allies

Subscribe to the Midwest movement update, free, no membership required.

Get the Midwest update

Donors and funders

Fund the shared infrastructure the region has been missing.

Fund MARA

The gaps MARA is built to close

Three infrastructure gaps repeat across the region. They are structural gaps, not indictments of individual organizations, and structural problems need structural answers.

There is no shared picture of the region. Organization websites, national networks, nonprofit databases, and informal relationships all exist. What does not exist is a single current source showing which animal rights and vegan advocacy organizations operate where in the Midwest, what they work on, and where the geographic gaps are. Statewide and subsector networks exist in places, but the cross-state layer is missing.

Operational knowledge keeps getting rebuilt from scratch. Groups planning protests repeatedly create similar outreach materials, run-of-show documents, and volunteer instructions. Groups producing public markets and festivals draft vendor agreements, work through insurance questions, and relearn many of the same lessons about event promotion. Much of that operational work is recreated because there is no shared Midwest repository where the next organizer can find what already exists.

Organizer turnover is a real source of lost capacity. The costs of that turnover can be substantial and easy to underestimate. Faunalytics found that 85% of animal advocates surveyed in the U.S. and Canada had left at least one advocacy role, staying a median of roughly 2.3 years with each organization, with leadership problems named by about 40% and burnout by about 21%. Around 11% had left the animal protection movement altogether. Among unpaid advocates, satisfaction with leadership and identification with fellow advocates stood out as factors linked to staying. When an organization loses an experienced organizer, it can also lose relationships, institutional memory, and hard-won operational knowledge. Retention is measurable, and several of the conditions behind it can be changed.

What MARA does

Measure

The Midwest Animal Rights Index (MARI) is MARA’s research program, conducted through the Animal Freedom Lab, Project Animal Freedom’s research arm. MARI establishes the baseline before it scores anything. Its first two products are the map and the annual report.

The Midwest Animal Rights Map (MARM) will be a public, searchable directory and coverage map of animal rights and vegan advocacy organizations across the twelve Midwest states. Each entry will show who a group is, where they work, and what they focus on. The map will show where qualifying organizations have been identified and where none has yet been identified. Organizations can add themselves, correct their own records, or ask to be removed. Where no group is identified in a metro, the map will say “no qualifying organization identified as of [date]” rather than asserting that none exists, and the inclusion criteria will be published alongside it.

The State of the Midwest Animal Rights Movement report will be the annual analysis built on top of the map and an organizational survey of the same universe. Good movement-wide research already exists: Stray Dog Institute runs a global State of the Movement survey tracking how the farmed animal movement allocates resources by region, animal, intervention, and outcome, and Faunalytics maintains a research library of thousands of studies. What is missing is a Midwest-specific operational baseline that shows where organizations exist, where capacity is absent, and how regional infrastructure changes year over year. That is the layer MARA is building, and we have not found a public equivalent for this region.

One test, applied everywhere. The functional test that decides membership is the same one that decides what MARI counts: advocating an end to animal use and exploitation, or promoting veganism toward that end, as a substantive organizational function. It is applied identically to every organizational form, with no category included or excluded on the strength of what it calls itself. A sanctuary that does advocacy is in; a care-only sanctuary is not, and the same standard decides both. Inclusion turns on activity, not self-description or self-identification. That one test governs all of MARI too: the map, the baseline survey, the annual report, and any eventual index share a single universe, so the numbers in one product mean the same thing as the numbers in the next. The criteria will be published in full, and any organization can ask to be reviewed or appeal a decision. Organizations the test screens out are still recorded internally, so that MARI can estimate coverage, audit its own decisions, and know what it looked at. That record is never published as a named list; screened-out organizations appear only in aggregate counts.

The index itself is the last thing MARI builds, not the first. A scored index only means anything on top of several years of consistent measurement, so it arrives when the baseline can support it and not before. When it does, it will assess organizations as well as places, because a serious audit of a regional movement has to look at the organizations that make it up. Pretending otherwise would make the research softer, not kinder.

How ranking will and will not be published. The distinction that matters is between assessment and exposure. MARI will maintain an internal assessment of animal rights and vegan advocacy organizations in the region, scored against criteria published in advance and applied the same way to everyone, so that MARA can see where regional capacity actually sits. What gets published from it is deliberately limited. Each year MARA expects to name a Top Ten: the Midwest Animal Rights Groups and Organizations, or MARGOs, recognized for the strength of their work that year, voted on by the alliance against the published criteria. An organization named to that list can decline to be listed. Nothing below it is published. Individual placements, full league tables, and bottom rankings stay internal, and an organization’s own assessment is shared with it rather than with the public. Case studies naming a specific organization are published only with that organization’s consent.

The safeguards around it. Criteria are published before the assessment period they govern, never written after the data arrives. Organizations see their own assessment, can correct factual errors in it, and have a route of appeal. Scoring dimensions and weightings are documented, and the methodology sits with the Animal Freedom Lab under independent review rather than with whoever has an interest in the result. Project Animal Freedom is assessed on the same criteria as every other organization and takes no part in voting on its own placement.

We are being deliberate about scope. The Lab is new and does not yet have the capacity for large-scale original research, and we would rather publish something small and accurate than something ambitious and wrong. Year one will establish the directory, the coverage map, and a baseline organizational survey. The first full State of the Midwest report follows in the next phase. Funding analysis, retention research, and campaign outcome tracking will be added as capacity grows.

The 2027 baseline edition carries three commitments we are making before we know what the data looks like. The study is preregistered publicly before fieldwork begins. No composite score is published in 2027, whatever the response rate turns out to be, because the right to score has to be earned. And the release includes a public-use dataset rather than only a report, so the findings can be checked and reused. To be precise about what that means: the dataset carries public directory fields plus research variables that are publishable, de-identified, or aggregated in line with the consent and data-use policy. It is not confidential raw responses, and no organization’s individual answers are posted.

The methodology will be published, including definitions, eligibility criteria, sampling, limitations, and version history, so that advocates in other regions can replicate it. A Great Plains version, a Southern version, or an Appalachian version would be a success of this project, not competition with it.

Data governance. MARI’s public-facing research and reports, and MARA’s public-facing toolkits and templates, will be free to access. Information about staffing, funding, organizer experiences, and contacts will be handled under a published consent and data-use policy: what is reported at organization level, what is only ever aggregated, what requires opt-in, how small samples are handled to reduce the risk that organizations can be identified indirectly, how long data is kept, and how any organization can correct or withdraw its record. The survey does not field before those rules are public. Research questions will be developed in consultation with member organizations and pilot-tested, while methodological decisions remain with the Lab, subject to independent methodological review, so that the research is informed by the movement without being negotiated by the organizations it measures.

Equip

A common library, so organizations spend their time on advocacy instead of paperwork someone else already finished. This is next-phase work: the library opens once the founding cohort is in place. As it develops, it will include:

A toolkit repository: protest and march planning, event playbooks, tabling kits, chant sheets, vendor agreements, volunteer onboarding, and a social media guide distilled from eight years of Project Animal Freedom’s operational experience, including the parts that did not work
A citywide vegan hub website template any member organization can deploy for its own city
A shared regional media and press contact resource, available to members
General operational guidance on questions like event insurance, clearly marked as a starting point rather than legal or insurance advice
Open documentation of campaign results, including the failures, which are usually more instructive

Connect

Relationships lower the friction of collaboration. It is easier to ask for advice, share a contact, lend equipment, or coordinate an action when the person on the other end is someone you know.

The Midwest Movement Memo. A monthly email to member organizations and anyone else who subscribes, with a second issue in a month when events warrant one. It will carry what member organizations accomplished since the last issue, legislative and regulatory developments across the twelve states, new tools added to the library, upcoming regional events worth traveling for, funding opportunities, and deadlines, and an organizer spotlight recognizing people doing work that usually goes unseen. It will be free, and open to funders, journalists, researchers, and unaffiliated advocates. It is designed to become a reliable regional source for what is actually happening across the Midwest.

One list, not many. Subscribing to the Memo adds you to Project Animal Freedom’s mailing list, and, depending on where you are, to the list for the nearest metro area we operate in. That is how our database works: a single list with geographic filtering rather than separate silos, so we are telling you up front rather than in a footnote. It also means unsubscribing is all or nothing. There is no way to leave one list and stay on another, so unsubscribing from the Memo unsubscribes you from everything Project Animal Freedom sends. You can do that at any time, and we would rather you knew before you signed up than after.

The Midwest Animal Rights Summit (MARS Summit). MARS is planned as MARA’s annual in-person gathering, and it is where the alliance stops being a mailing list and becomes a room full of people. Organizers who have only ever emailed each other meet. The inaugural Summit will present the first findings from the map and the baseline survey; once the annual State of the Midwest report launches, MARS will serve as its yearly release point. The inaugural Summit is planned for late September or early October 2027, venue to be confirmed. Details and registration: projectanimalfreedom.org/mars.

Quarterly organizer calls. Next phase. Open to every member organization, online, no travel required.

A regional campaign calendar. Next phase. So two organizations three hours apart stop scheduling competing actions on the same Saturday, and so groups can amplify each other instead of colliding.

Sustain

Project Animal Freedom has always held that recruiting, training, and above all sustaining activists is foundational work benefiting the entire movement, not just the organization doing it. MARA extends that commitment across the region.

Some of this begins at the first Summit. The rest is deliberately downstream.

A retention and burnout track at the Summit, grounded in the existing research rather than in anecdote
Curated, clearly sourced mental health and burnout resources for people doing this specific kind of work
Funder education, using the research as the evidence base, aimed at growing the total resources available to the region rather than redividing them
Next phase: a shared grants calendar and deadline tracker, which can be especially useful to small organizations without staff dedicated to fundraising
Longer term: structured peer mentorship pairings that cross organizational lines, so a new organizer in Omaha can learn from an experienced one in Cincinnati. Pairings will be available remotely, not only to people who can travel to the Summit.

What we are committing to, and when

An alliance that promises everything at launch is promising nothing. Here is the honest sequence.

Phase	Deliverables
Year one	Founding cohort and steering committee. The Midwest movement update. MARI opens with MARM, the Midwest Animal Rights Map, directory and coverage layer, and a baseline organizational survey. The first MARS Summit.
Next phase	The shared toolkit library and website template. Quarterly organizer calls. The regional campaign calendar. First full State of the Midwest report. Grants calendar.
Long term	Structured mentorship program. The scored MARI index, once the baseline supports it. Retention and funding analysis in the report. Coordinated multi-state campaigns and legislative work, subject to compliance review. An emergency assistance fund for organizers, subject to legal and program-policy design. Regranting, subject to independent governance.

The long-term column is genuine ambition, not a commitment with a date on it. Three items there in particular, the assistance fund, regranting, and any coordinated legislative work, carry legal and governance requirements that have to be designed properly before they exist. We would rather name them honestly as future work than list them as features.

Governance and integrity

We would rather be plain about this than let anyone discover it later: MARA is a project of Project Animal Freedom. It is not an independent organization, and it is not on a path to becoming one. PAF founded it, funds it, staffs it, and stewards it, and MARA remains PAF’s to steward for as long as PAF operates.

That is a deliberate choice rather than an accident of who happened to start it. Networks that are structurally independent are also structurally capturable. A movement infrastructure project that can be voted in a different direction by whoever turns up in sufficient numbers is one bad year away from becoming something its founders would not recognize, and the organizations that invested in it have no recourse. Keeping stewardship in one accountable place is what lets MARA hold a direction over a decade rather than a season.

So the safeguards below are not there to make MARA independent. They are there to make it trustworthy. Independence and integrity get treated as the same thing, and they are not: an alliance can be structurally independent and still measure badly, play favorites, or drift. What members should hold us to is whether the criteria are published in advance, whether the same test is applied to everyone including Project Animal Freedom, whether organizations can see and contest what is said about them, and whether an outside reviewer can check the work. Those are the promises we can keep, so those are the ones we make.

What that means concretely, said plainly, so that nobody joins on a misunderstanding.

MARA will be governed day to day by a steering committee drawn from member organizations, with seats rotating on fixed terms. The committee sets MARA’s charter, its code of conduct, and what the alliance says in its own name
Project Animal Freedom chairs that committee permanently, or for as long as PAF operates. Chairing means convening the committee, setting its agenda, and holding MARA to its purpose. It does not mean extra votes: PAF casts one vote, the same as every other member
MARA cannot be separated from Project Animal Freedom by any vote of its members. If MARA is ever spun out as an independent body, that decision is PAF’s alone, and we think it is unlikely
The committee will require representation from multiple states, so that it never quietly becomes a single-city or single-organization body
Every voting seat is held by an organization that meets the functional test, which follows automatically from how membership is defined. There is no proportion to negotiate: an alliance about animal rights is governed entirely by organizations doing animal rights work
Beyond the chair’s role, PAF asks for no special weight. We do most of the staff work in the early years and expect no additional votes for it
The steering committee will own MARA’s own charter: membership, the code of conduct, and what the alliance says in its own name
MARI is different by design. Its research and data governance are held by Project Animal Freedom and the Animal Freedom Lab rather than by the alliance, so that the organizations being measured are consulted on the research without being able to negotiate it. The protections that make that safe are structural: the methodology and survey instrument are published, the study is preregistered before fieldwork, and an independent methodological review sits over the Lab’s decisions
The methodology and the survey instrument will be published, so anyone can check the work
If MARA ever distributes funds, those decisions will sit with a multi-organization committee under conflict-of-interest rules, not with Project Animal Freedom staff
If Project Animal Freedom ever dissolves, stewardship passes to another organization or body, so that MARA outlives us rather than ending with us

None of that touches your organization. You keep your name, your board, your strategy, your campaigns, your funding, and every other affiliation you hold. Every MARA position is opt-in, individually, every time. What PAF stewards is the alliance, not its members, and we would rather hold that line honestly than promise an independence we do not intend to give.

Membership is open rather than competitive: there is no application to be judged on the merits of your work. There is a short eligibility screen and a code of conduct, because an alliance with no ability to decline a bad actor is not being generous, it is being negligent. Organizations we disagree with on strategy are welcome. Organizations that endanger people are not.

What MARA is not

Not an independent organization. MARA is a project of Project Animal Freedom, permanently. We say so on this page rather than in the fine print.
Not a governing body over its members. MARA sets no policy for member organizations and speaks for none of them without consent.
Not exclusive. Membership does not conflict with any other network or coalition.
Not a purity test, but not unbounded either. MARA has a scope, and it is animal rights rather than animal welfare. That scope is defined by function, not by belief or alliance: the question is whether advocacy is a substantive part of what an organization does, never whether it agrees with us on strategy, tactics, or theory. Organizations we disagree with are welcome if they meet the test. Organizations that do excellent work outside it are not members, and everything MARA publishes is still free to them.
Not a merger. No organization is absorbed into Project Animal Freedom, asked to rebrand, or asked to give up autonomy of any kind.
Not the chapter network. Project Animal Freedom chapters are part of PAF and operate under our name. MARA members are independent organizations that owe us nothing.
Not a recruitment funnel. MARA exists to strengthen every organization in it. If a member group grows and Project Animal Freedom does not, MARA has still succeeded.

Why Project Animal Freedom is doing this

Project Animal Freedom exists to build a fully vegan Midwest by 2056. That is a regional goal, and no single organization in a single city will reach it, however well that organization performs.

Our strategy has been to concentrate rather than scatter: build St. Louis into the strongest possible vegan hub, then move what we learn outward. We run a chapter network across the Midwest through the Compassionate Cities Campaign, where a coordinator meets each organizer every week or two on growing the chapter, building a team, and raising money. We capped our own expansion deliberately so we could invest in depth instead of headcount, and we treat the capacity that frees up as belonging to the movement rather than to us.

Since our founding in 2018 we have organized more than 380 events. Since 2021 we have launched nearly a dozen chapters. Since 2020 our social media work has generated more than 16.2 million in reported reach. We say that not as a boast but as the answer to the fair question of why we should be the ones building this: we have run many of the frontline operations we are proposing to document and share. You can see the detail on our impact page and in our theory of change.

MARA is what our commitment looks like when it is aimed at organizations we do not run. Our chapters already get mentorship, tools, funding, and the freedom to innovate. There is no principled reason the group across the state should get less just because their logo is different.

Beyond the Midwest

MARA’s focus area is the Midwest. Its output is not restricted to it.

The toolkits, templates, playbooks, and published research will be free to any organization anywhere. An organizer in Tucson can use the protest planning guide. A group in Halifax can adapt the website template. A researcher in Berlin can replicate the survey methodology. We ask only that people tell us what worked, so the next version is better. A movement that hoards its infrastructure grows slower than one that gives it away.

Join, subscribe, or fund

If your organization advocates for animal rights or veganism anywhere in the Midwest, whether you have a staff of twelve or a mailing list of thirty, MARA was built for you. Founding organizations shape what the alliance becomes.

Join the alliance

If you are not with an organization, subscribe to the Midwest update anyway. It is an easy way to stay connected to the work happening near you and across the region.

Get the Midwest update

And if you want to fund shared infrastructure designed to help Midwest animal organizations learn faster, collaborate more easily, and stop rebuilding the same systems from scratch, this is it. Infrastructure is unglamorous, often underfunded, and can compound over time.

Fund MARA

Frequently asked questions

What does MARA cost to join?

Nothing. There are no dues and no plans to introduce them.

Who can join?

Any Midwest organization for which advocating an end to animal use and exploitation, or promoting veganism toward that end, is a substantive organizational function. That is a functional test, not a category list: an advocacy-active sanctuary or rescue qualifies, a care-only one does not, and a student group with no staff qualifies on exactly the same terms as a funded organization. The eligibility screen and code of conduct additionally address bad actors and organizational legitimacy. There is no competitive application process, and you can appeal a decision.

Do we have to agree with MARA’s positions?

No. MARA is liberation-oriented, and every sign-on, statement and joint action is opt-in for each member organization individually. Membership never implies endorsement of anything you did not sign.

We are a sanctuary. Can we join?

If advocacy is a substantive part of what you do, yes, on exactly the same terms as any advocacy organization. If your work is animal care without an animal rights or vegan message, MARA is not the right fit, and that is a statement about scope rather than about the value of your work. Everything MARA publishes stays free to you regardless: the toolkits, the templates, the research, the Midwest update, and the Summit.

Why not include welfare organizations too?

Because an alliance that includes everyone working for animals in any way is not an alliance, it is a mailing list. MARA is built around a specific kind of capacity, and measuring, equipping and sustaining that capacity is only coherent if the alliance and the research mean the same thing by it. We would rather have a clear scope and generous public sharing than a broad membership and a muddled purpose.

Will MARI rank our organization?

Internally, in time, yes. A serious audit of the movement means assessing the organizations in it, against criteria published in advance and applied identically to everyone. What is published is narrow: an annual Top Ten, the MARGOs, voted on by the alliance, which an organization can decline to be named in. Your own assessment goes to you, not to the public. No full ranking, individual placement, or bottom table is published, and case studies naming an organization require that organization’s consent. You can correct factual errors in your assessment and appeal it. PAF is assessed on the same criteria and does not vote on its own placement. None of this exists yet; the scored index is years out.

What is expected of members?

Complete the annual MARI survey. Once the shared library launches, we also ask members to contribute reusable tools or lessons when they have something appropriate to share. Everything else is optional.

Does joining mean giving up autonomy?

No. MARA has no authority over member organizations. You keep your name, your board, your strategy, your campaigns, and your other affiliations.

What counts as the Midwest?

The standard twelve states: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, and Wisconsin. If you are just over that line and want in, ask. We are not turning away an organization over a border.

We are outside the Midwest. Can we use MARA’s materials?

Yes. The published research, toolkits, and templates will be free to anyone. Use them, adapt them, and tell us how it went.

How is the research handled? Will our financial information be public?

By default, no. Sensitive organizational information will be reported in aggregate unless an organization explicitly opts in to publication of a particular field, all under a published consent and data-use policy. You can correct or remove your directory listing at any time. Survey data can be withdrawn up to the deadline stated in the consent policy; once results have been aggregated and published, individual responses cannot be pulled back out of them.

Is MARA the same as a Project Animal Freedom chapter?

No. Chapters are part of Project Animal Freedom and operate under our name. MARA members are independent organizations.

Who will run MARA?

A steering committee drawn from member organizations across the region, permanently chaired by Project Animal Freedom. MARA is a PAF project rather than an independent body: we founded it, fund it, staff it, and steward it, and we chair the committee for as long as we operate. PAF casts one vote like every other member, and the committee sets MARA’s charter and code of conduct. If PAF ever dissolves, stewardship passes to another organization or body so that MARA outlives us.

How is MARA funded?

Project Animal Freedom is underwriting the first year. We are seeking grant and donor support for the research program, currently expected to be the most resource-intensive component.

Sources

Faunalytics, The State of Animal Advocacy in the U.S. & Canada: Experiences & Turnover (2020). faunalytics.org/advocate-retention
Stray Dog Institute, State of the Movement. straydoginstitute.org
USDA NASS, Census of Agriculture and livestock and poultry production summaries, for hog, egg-layer, and turkey concentration by state.
Ceryes, C. A. & Heaney, C. D. (2019), “Ag-Gag” Laws: Evolution, Resurgence, and Public Health Implications, New Solutions: A Journal of Environmental and Occupational Health Policy.
Project Animal Freedom, impact page, for events, chapters, and reported social media reach.

A Project Animal Freedom initiative. Founded 2026. Last updated September 2026.
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