Our Midwest Mandate
Since our inception, we have dedicated ourselves to fulfilling the following core promise: launching a Midwestern revolution for animal rights in just three years. This World Vegan Day, we would like to discuss our progress toward this goal, as well as outline our plans for taking this revolution to the next level.
Over the past two years, we have fought tirelessly to strengthen our local movement for animal rights starting in our hometown of St. Louis. While the first year leading this organization proved tumultuous, we have now settled into a new groove, recruiting leaders with ease, organizing events at ferocious speed, and running our most successful fundraising campaign yet. Our work is not only as crucial as ever, but as personally rewarding and gratifying as ever; we receive praise from fellow community members on a near daily basis, and this support helps catapult us onward in our mission of building a united front for nonhuman and human animal liberation across the Midwest.
One particular snapshot of our growth concerns our March to Close All Slaughterhouses. The first year we launched this event as part of an international day of action, just four people attended; this year, 21 people attended. The turnout was so disappointing the first time we organized this event, we elected to march silently without chanting, allowing us to hear hecklers unabated by the collective temerity of our voices. We marched in shame, lonely and isolated. This year, however, we marched boldly, chanting up and down the Delmar loop for over an hour.
Now that we have finally found success in the St. Louis region, it is time to expand our outreach outward. Unlike many organizations, we do not intend to allow ourselves to be constrained to just one citywide region; we want to expand ever outward until we build a unified coalition for nonhuman and human animal liberation the world round. This underlying imperative of outward expansion undergirds our desire to become hyper-relevant in the Midwest, targeting cities with populations in excess of 100,000 individuals yet featuring no unified animal rights presence. But with dozens of cities that meet these criteria, where ought we to expand first?
We have chosen Springfield, MO as the site of our second-ever chapter as it fulfills a variety of unique criteria. Not only does Springfield, MO boast a population in excess of 168,000 individuals, roughly 1-2/3x as many residents as we are looking for, but it features an online community of nearly 2,000 individuals yet no unifying animal rights organization in the area. Springfield, MO is also just a few hours from St. Louis, making activist crossover and collaboration easier than were our second-ever chapter located somewhere more distant like Toledo, Ohio. Springfield, MO therefore provides the perfect springboard for launching a second chapter; it is relatively close to St. Louis, features more than enough residents for successful community organizing, and already possesses a large pool of individuals from whom to recruit volunteers, leaders, and donors to sustain the chapter.
As we look to expand our horizons across the Midwest, we will create a desirability score upon which to rate cities. Criteria will include population size, with larger populations scoring progressively more points; presence of an online community; size of the online community; distance from St. Louis; and absence of an animal rights organization in the area to ensure we are targeting high-potential communities where our activism is needed the most. Early on, we do not plan to expand to major metropolitan areas like Kansas City and Chicago; we see little point to duplicating services other area nonprofits are likely already providing or could easily supply with the right guidance.
Our policy of branching out only to those communities where we are needed most represents a philosophy that extends throughout our organization: alleviating the greatest amount of suffering to the greatest extent possible given the limited resources we possess. Not every city will be an ideal match, but we will always remain committed to providing community outreach where it is likely to generate the largest impact for animals.
