A Project Animal Freedom campaign

The Vegan Festivals Campaign: Making Every Major Festival a Pro-Animal Festival

Project Animal Freedom is asking the largest festivals in the Midwest to sign the Pro-Animal Festival Pact, a five-tier public commitment that starts with labeling the vegan food and ends with animal freedom integrated across everything a festival runs, sells, books, and sponsors.

100+ events a year · 140,000+ followers · 2,000+ grassroots donors

Every city has one weekend when everyone shows up

Every metro area has a weekend when the whole city shows up. The music festival. The pride parade. The rib cook-off in the park. The neighborhood street fair that has been running since before anyone can remember. Hundreds of thousands of people walk through the gates, and almost none of them came to think about animals.

That is exactly why we go.

Most animal advocacy happens in rooms full of people who already agree. Vegan festivals draw vegans. Vegan restaurants draw vegans. Even our own events, as good as they are, mostly draw people who already found us. The Vegan Festivals Campaign does the opposite. It puts vegan food, vegan businesses, and vegan organizers inside the events our neighbors were already going to attend, on the one weekend a year when the entire city is paying attention to the same thing.

We want three things at those festivals, in every metro where our chapters operate:

Representation. Vegan businesses in the vendor lineup, and a vegan organization with a table, a banner, and a person standing behind it.
Visibility. Vegan food labeled as vegan, on the menu board, on the site map, and on the festival’s own website, before anyone leaves the house.
Accessibility. Vegan food a person can actually get: at every price point, at every hour, in every corner of the grounds, with no surcharge for leaving the animal out.

And then we want more than that. We want the petting zoo gone. We want the pony rides gone. We want the dairy board out of the sponsor row. We want the leather off the merch table. We want the whole festival, eventually, to be a place where animals are not used at all.

You do not get there by asking for it on day one. You get there with a ladder.

What your funding changes. Festival policy does not change because someone posts about it. It changes because a named local organizer finds the right decision-maker months before the event, recruits vegan vendors who can actually fill a slot, pays for the booth and the materials, documents what was promised against what was delivered, measures the result, comes back the following season to ask for the next rung, and hands the whole play to the next city. Funding this campaign buys that capacity, in metros where this work is not yet being done systematically.

Fund this campaign

The Pro-Animal Festival Pact

The Pro-Animal Festival Pact is a public, written commitment a festival signs, choosing a tier and the year it will meet it by. The festival publishes the commitment. We publish it too, in a registry anyone can check.

Why tiers? Because “go vegan” as an opening ask gets a no, and a no ends the conversation for a decade. A tiered pact does the opposite. It hands a festival director something they can say yes to this season, inside a budget they have already closed, without renegotiating a single vendor contract. Then it gives them somewhere to go next season. It turns one uncomfortable phone call into a long relationship with a direction.

Tiers also make progress countable. A festival either labels its vegan food or it does not. It either dropped the petting zoo or it did not. When every chapter in every city uses the same ladder, “how is the Midwest doing?” becomes a question with an actual answer.

There are five tiers. Each one contains every tier below it.

Tier	In one line	The signature commitment
1. Signal	The festival says vegans are welcome, in writing	Vegan items clearly labeled everywhere food is sold, and listed on the festival website
2. Presence	Vegan food and vegan community are on the grounds	At least one fully vegan food vendor, plus a no-cost table for the local vegan organization
3. Parity	Vegan stops being the exception	Half the food options vegan, no vegan surcharge, equal placement on menus and maps
4. Integrity	The festival stops using and promoting animals	No animal exhibits, rides, or acts, no animal agriculture sponsors, no animal-derived official merchandise
5. Liberation	Animal freedom becomes a governing rule	Animals are not used as products, entertainment, property, prizes, or promotion anywhere in the festival’s operations

Tier 1: Signal

What it costs the festival: a signage order and an afternoon of website edits. For a festival that already serves a vegan entrée, Tier 1 can require no vendor or menu changes at all. This is the rung almost every festival can reach before its next gate opens.

The commitments:

Publish a one-paragraph pro-animal commitment on the festival website, naming the tier and the year.
Label every vegan item as vegan at the point of sale, using the word “vegan.” Not “veggie.” Not a leaf icon on its own.
List vegan options by vendor on the festival website, app, or map, so people can plan before they arrive.
Guarantee at least one vegan entrée available during all operating hours, not one that sells out by four o’clock.
Name one staff member as the point of contact for the Pact.

Tier 2: Presence

What it costs the festival: one vendor slot, one community booth, and a conversation with the coffee cart. Everything in Tier 1, plus:

At least one fully vegan food vendor in the lineup, recruited before the general vendor deadline so it is not filling a leftover slot at the back fence.
A no-cost or fee-waived community booth for a local vegan or animal rights organization, sited where there is real foot traffic.
Plant milk available at every coffee and drink outlet, at no upcharge.
Vegan options in staff, volunteer, and crew catering, because the people building the festival are people too.

Tier 3: Parity

What it costs the festival: a real look at the vendor mix. This is the rung most directly supported by evidence that increasing availability changes food choice. Everything above, plus:

Vegan items make up at least half the items offered at every food outlet, or fully vegan vendors make up at least half the food vendors. The festival picks the path that fits its operation.
Price parity: no vegan surcharge anywhere on site, and at least one vegan option in the lowest price band on the grounds.
Placement parity: vegan items listed first or at eye level on menu boards, and vegan vendors distributed across the footprint instead of clustered in one corner.
Ingredient and allergen transparency on every vegan item, so the people who need to know can know.
Vendor briefing on honest labeling and cross-contact, delivered before gates open.

Tier 4: Integrity

What it costs the festival: a sponsor conversation and a line in the vendor contract. Tier 4 is where the Pact stops being about food and starts being about animals. Everything above, plus:

No animals used as entertainment, exhibits, or attractions. No petting zoos, no pony or camel rides, no racing, no rodeo, no exotic animal photo ops, no performing animal acts.
No animal agriculture sponsors, exhibitors, or branded activations, including commodity checkoff boards and dairy, egg, beef, or pork councils.
No animal products as prizes, giveaways, or contest awards, and no live animals given away under any circumstance.
Official merchandise, meaning anything the festival produces, licenses, or sells itself, free of leather, fur, wool, down, and exotic skins. Merchandise sold by independent vendors is not covered until Tier 5, and that gap is deliberate rather than an oversight.
All of the above written into vendor, sponsor, and exhibitor contracts, not just into a blog post.

Tier 5: Liberation

The principle: animals are no longer treated as products, entertainment, property, prizes, or promotional objects anywhere in the festival’s own operations. Animal freedom is integrated into food, purchasing, sponsorship, entertainment, merchandise, programming, contracts, and stated values.

What it asks of the festival: a whole-event commitment. By this rung, animal freedom is not an accommodation inside the food program. It is part of how the festival operates. Tier 4 removes the major forms of animal exploitation from a festival. Tier 5 makes their absence a governing rule instead of a series of individual decisions made again every year. Everything above, plus:

100% vegan food and drink across the entire site, including staff, artist, sponsor, and VIP hospitality.
Everything sold under festival control is free of animal-derived materials, not just official merchandise. That covers anything the festival produces, licenses, or sells, and anything sold by a vendor operating under a festival vendor agreement.
Animal-free purchasing across the whole operation rather than only concessions: hospitality, gifts, décor, giveaways, and production supplies.
A written non-exploitation principle adopted into the festival’s own governing documents or standard vendor and sponsor terms, so the commitment survives a change of staff.
The commitment stated in the festival’s own voice, on its own channels, as a value it holds rather than an accommodation it makes.
At least one programmed element about animals each year: a talk, a screening, an installation, a sanctuary partner, or a moment from the stage.
A published annual note on the commitment: what was served, what it displaced, what it cost, and what the audience said.
Renewal by default rather than by petition, with any proposed rollback put to the audience first.

What “under festival control” means. A festival controls what it produces, what it licenses, and what it sells, and it controls the terms it sets for the vendors it admits. It does not control what an attendee wears through the gate, and the Pact never asks it to. We define the boundary in writing because a vague promise in a public pledge is exactly the kind of thing that becomes an argument three years later.

The badge. A festival at any rung may display its standing on its website, its map, and its gate signage: “Pro-Animal Festival Pact · Tier 3: Parity · 2027.” The tier and the year are always shown together. A festival is never allowed to display a rung it has not met, and it is never allowed to display a year that has passed without renewal.

The rules that keep the Pact honest

A pledge nobody checks is marketing. Six rules make this one mean something.

Criteria first. The full criteria for a tier are published before the season they govern, so no festival is ever graded against a moving target.
Self-certification, then a walkthrough. A festival self-certifies in writing, and a chapter organizer walks the grounds during the event with a standard checklist. Both records are kept.
No pay to play. Signing costs a festival nothing. We do not sell tiers, we do not sell badges, and we do not accept payment from a festival we assess.
Downgrades are real. A festival that misses its commitment drops to the tier it actually met. We tell them privately first and give them the season to fix it. Repeat failures lose active Pact standing and badge eligibility, and the registry retains the historical record.
We publish the whole funnel. The registry lists festivals that signed, the tier they pledged, the tier we verified, and every renewal, upgrade, downgrade, and withdrawal. The annual campaign report publishes the rest of the funnel by metro, in aggregate. A campaign that only reports its wins is a campaign nobody should fund.
The Pact covers what it covers. The Pact covers animals. It is not a certification of a festival’s labor practices, environmental footprint, accessibility, or politics, and we will not let it be read as one.

Two records, kept separate on purpose

The registry is a record of promises made. A festival that signs a tier has accepted public accountability, so naming it when it renews, climbs, slips, or withdraws is fair, and is the entire point of signing in public. A festival that never signed anything has agreed to nothing. Putting it on the same list would turn a declined invitation into a public listing, and turn a partnership campaign into something else. So we keep two records instead of one.

The Pro-Animal Festival Pact Registry carries signatories only: the tier pledged, the year, the tier we verified, renewals, upgrades, downgrades, withdrawals, and the documentation behind each determination.

The annual campaign report carries the funnel, by metro and in aggregate: festivals mapped, festivals on the scorecard, festivals approached, festivals that responded, festivals that declined, and festivals that never answered. Funders get the failure data they are owed. Nobody gets named for saying no to a phone call.

Project Animal Freedom publishes the registry and owns every determination in it. Chapter organizers are the local assessors. The Midwest Animal Rights Alliance distributes the model and may link to the data, but the accountability record stays with the organization making the promises.

Why this works: the evidence

This campaign rests on a claim that can be tested: when vegan food is available, visible, and easy to reach, people who did not plan to eat it eat it anyway. That claim has support.

Availability moves behavior, and it moves the least likely people most

In a year-long study of 94,644 meals across three Cambridge University cafeterias, doubling the share of vegetarian options from a quarter of the menu to half raised vegetarian sales by between 41% and 79%, with no drop in total sales and no rebound at other meals. The largest effect was among the diners who had been least likely to choose vegetarian beforehand. That is the entire theory of Tier 3 in one experiment: you do not need to persuade a crowd, you need to change what is in front of it.

Placement matters as much as presence

A follow-up study from the same research group found that the order options appear in and the distance between them affect how much vegetarian food a cafeteria sells. This is why Tier 3 requires placement parity rather than just a count. A vegan vendor parked behind the porta-potties at the far end of the field is technically present and functionally invisible.

Festivals that make the commitment do not lose their audience, and they change it

Shambala Festival in the UK removed meat and fish from its entire site in 2016. After the first year, 77% of surveyed attendees voted to keep it that way. In the survey taken right after the event, 52% of festival-goers who ate meat and fish said the experience had changed their diet, and in a follow-up months later, 76% of those who had made a change were still going, with about 40% of them reporting a sustained sharp reduction. The festival cut food-related emissions to 6% of its carbon footprint, against a 21% average for UK music festivals, and ticket sales did not suffer.

Then something more interesting happened. In early 2026, after ten years meat-free, Shambala asked its audience whether to add a single wild venison trader. More than 5,600 people voted. Fifty-nine percent said no, thirty-seven percent said yes, and the festival announced it would not serve deer. The audience defended the commitment on its own.

That is the real prize of this campaign: a public commitment builds a constituency that outlives the person who signed it.

The sector is already moving, and the policy slot already exists

In A Greener Future’s assessment of 40 festivals across 16 countries in 2024, 20% were entirely vegetarian or vegan, up from 8% the year before, and 82% already had a formal food and drink sustainability policy. In the 2025 cohort, vegan and vegetarian dishes averaged 53% of all food served. Festivals are not being asked to invent a policy category. The document exists. We are asking to be in it, and we are asking it to be about animals rather than only about carbon.

What the evidence does not show

We hold ourselves to this in every campaign, so we will say it here. The cafeteria research measures meal selection, not whether anyone became vegan. Shambala is one festival with a self-selecting audience, and its own surveys are self-reported. A Greener Future assesses festivals that sought out a sustainability certification, which is not a random sample of the festival industry. None of this proves that a festival booth produces vegans. It shows that availability and placement move what people eat, that audiences accept the change and often keep it, and that the ask is realistic. Whether it produces lasting change in the Midwest is a question we intend to answer with our own data, which is why measurement is built into this campaign from the first season.

How the campaign fits our theory of change

Project Animal Freedom builds a vegan Midwest through five stages: Reach, Try, Belong, Act, and Multiply. Most programs serve one or two stages well. The Vegan Festivals Campaign is unusual because it touches all five, which is why it earns a place in a small portfolio.

Reach. A single major metro festival can put us in front of more non-vegans in one weekend than a month of our own programming. These are people who did not opt in, did not follow us, and did not come to hear about animals. Few opportunities give a grassroots chapter comparable access to people outside the movement at a price it can afford.

Try. A festival is the lowest-stakes first vegan meal a person will ever eat. Nobody is watching, nobody is judging, there is no commitment attached, and it is the good stuff: barbecue, tacos, ice cream, doughnuts. Tier 3 exists because increasing availability is the intervention with the most direct evidence behind it, at least in the settings where it has been studied.

Belong. This is the part other groups leave on the table. The person who liked the vegan burger walks fifty feet and meets a chapter organizer who invites them to a potluck on Tuesday. Retention is the movement’s largest leak, and community is our answer to it. The festival booth is where the invitation gets handed to someone who would never have looked us up.

Act. Booth conversations become mailing list sign-ups, sign-ups become event attendance, attendance becomes volunteering, and a small share of volunteers become the organizers who run the next city. The campaign itself is a training ground. Talking to strangers at a festival table is some of the most approachable entry-level activism we have found, and it is where a good number of our organizers started.

Multiply. The Pact is designed to travel. It is a document, a checklist, and a registry, none of which are St. Louis-specific. A chapter organizer in another metro does not need our staff to run it, and neither does an organization that has nothing to do with us. That is the point.

Read the full framework in our theory of change.

Where it sits in the four-year plan

Our 2027 to 2030 arc, the Animal Freedom Renaissance, moves the organization through four stages: institution, infrastructure, inspiration, and ideology. Each year asks a different question of every program. Here is what it asks of this one.

Year and stage	The question	What the Vegan Festivals Campaign does
2027 Institution	Does it exist, and is it real?	Publish the Pact and its criteria. Map the largest festivals in every chapter metro. Run the first full season in St. Louis. Sign a founding cohort of festivals and stand up the public registry.
2028 Infrastructure	Can somebody else run it?	Ship the organizer toolkit: outreach scripts, the tier checklist, the walkthrough form, vendor recruitment through the Vegan Market Alliance, and press templates. Every chapter runs the play. First Tier 4 signing.
2029 Inspiration	Does it travel beyond us?	Organizations outside the Midwest adopt the Pact in their own cities. Case studies, a session at the Midwest Animal Rights Summit, and a national registry of signed festivals.
2030 Ideology	Has the burden of explanation flipped?	The question is no longer “why should this festival accommodate vegans?” but “why would a major civic festival still exclude vegan attendees or use animals at all?” A vegan standard becomes a normal question in festival production, the way a plastics policy became one. The first fully vegan major metro festival in the Midwest.

Where the campaign actually stands today. We publish nothing at a stage above the one it has evidence for. As of September 2026, the Vegan Festivals Campaign is at the establish stage. The Pact text is written. The tiers are defined. No festival has signed it yet. The first cohort is the work of 2027, and this page will be updated the day that changes.

The money layer: every vegan meal is a purchase order

There is a second thing happening at a festival, and funders tend to see it faster than activists do. A festival is a market. Every meal sold there is a purchase order, and every purchase order goes either to animal agriculture or away from it.

When we get a fully vegan vendor into a lineup, that vendor takes home a weekend of revenue from a crowd they could never have afforded to reach on their own. When we get to Tier 3, we are moving a meaningful share of a festival’s food spend to plant-based suppliers, in public, in a way other vendors notice. This is how a humane economy gets built in practice: not by asking businesses to be brave, but by handing them customers.

Two of our other initiatives plug directly into this. The Vegan Market Alliance gives us a pipeline of vetted vegan food vendors ready to fill a festival slot on short notice. Our chapter model means a chapter organizer running a festival booth is also building a supporter base and a revenue base in their own city, using the same weekend.

How a chapter runs it: the seven-step play

This is the whole operation. It is deliberately simple, because it has to work for a volunteer organizer in a metro where we have no staff.

Map. The chapter lists the twenty largest festivals in its metro: attendance, dates, ownership, and who runs food operations. We map twenty and score ourselves against the ten largest, on purpose. The outreach list should always be wider than the scorecard.
Ask. A named organizer, not a form letter, contacts the festival with a one-page version of the Pact, four to six months before gates. The opening ask is Tier 1.
Sign. The festival picks a tier and a year, and publishes it. We publish it too.
Equip. We supply what makes yes easy: vegan vendor leads, menu labeling templates, staff briefing language, and press support the festival can use in its own announcements.
Show up. The chapter staffs a booth at the event, talks to everyone, collects sign-ups, and completes the walkthrough checklist.
Report. We publish what happened, including what did not happen.
Climb. The following season, the same organizer goes back and asks for the next rung. The relationship is the asset.

St. Louis develops it. Project Animal Freedom documents it. The Midwest Animal Rights Alliance distributes it. Chapters adapt it to their own city.

What we will measure

Every figure we publish is labeled by scale: St. Louis, Midwest, or global. We never quote a number at one scale as if it belonged to another. These are the campaign’s numbers, tracked from the first season.

Metric	What it tells a funder
Outreach funnel by metro	Mapped, scorecard, approached, responded, declined, no answer. Published in aggregate, never as a public list of names
Pacts signed, by tier and by metro	The core output, and the one that is hardest to fake
Tier upgrades year over year	Whether the ladder actually functions as a ladder
Metro coverage rate	Share of a metro’s ten largest festivals under a signed Pact
Booth conversations and mailing list sign-ups	Reach converted into a relationship we can act on
Vegan meals sold at signed festivals	Vendor-reported where available, always labeled as such
Revenue moved to vegan businesses	The humane economy, in dollars
Chapters running the play	Whether the campaign is portable or just ours
Downgrades and withdrawals	Published in the registry alongside the wins, every year

What your gift builds

This campaign is designed to turn relatively modest local capacity into repeated access to large existing audiences. It is also exactly the kind of work that is hard to fund: unglamorous outreach, done early, before there are wins to photograph or metrics to headline. That is the case for funding it now rather than after it works.

What funding buys	What it does
A chapter booth kit	Outfits one chapter for a festival season: booth kit, banners, tier signage, and literature
A vendor slot	Underwrites the vendor fee that puts a fully vegan business into a lineup that could not otherwise afford the slot
A metro season	Runs the campaign in one metro for a full year: mapping, outreach, booths, materials, and reporting
The registry	Builds and maintains the public registry of signed festivals, the piece that makes the Pact verifiable
The toolkit	Funds the package that makes the whole campaign portable to any city and any organization
A founding naming gift	Names you as the founding funder of the first Tier 4 festival in the Midwest

Project Animal Freedom is an IRS-recognized 501(c)(3) nonprofit, EIN 83-3007847. Gifts of stock, donor-advised fund grants, IRA qualified charitable distributions, and multi-year commitments are all welcome. To discuss a major gift or to underwrite a specific metro, write to kyle.luzynski@projectanimalfreedom.org.

Fund the Vegan Festivals Campaign

Three ways in

If you run a festival

Start at Tier 1. It costs you a signage order and an afternoon, and it makes your event better for a growing share of your audience who currently plan their day around whether they can eat. We will help with vendor leads, labeling, and the announcement.

Sign the Pact

If you want to organize

This can be an unusually approachable first campaign in animal advocacy. You are not confronting anyone. You are asking a local institution to be a little kinder, and then a little kinder again. Chapter organizers get mentorship every other week, a budget, and the freedom to run it their own way.

Start or join a chapter

If you want to give

Your gift helps us reach people outside the audiences that already follow animal advocacy, in cities where sustained local capacity for this work is limited.

Give

Frequently asked questions

Is this a boycott or protest campaign?

No. Project Animal Freedom runs protests and marches, and we are proud of them. This is not one. The Vegan Festivals Campaign is a partnership campaign, and the Pact is written to be signed, not to be fought over. A festival that says no this year is a festival we ask again next year.

What if a festival ignores us?

Then we keep organizing. We can apply as vendors or exhibitors, attend as members of the public where that is appropriate, recruit local businesses, build community support, and ask again the following season. The Pact makes cooperation far more powerful, but a first no does not end the campaign.

Why not just run more vegan festivals?

We do. We run STL Vegan Market, Vegan BBQ Fest, and dozens of other events every year, and we are building a network of vegan markets. But a vegan festival disproportionately reaches people who are already interested in veganism. Both are worth doing. This campaign is deliberately designed to meet people who would never have chosen a vegan event in the first place.

Is Tier 1 too easy to be worth anything?

Tier 1 is easy on purpose. It is a door, not a destination. The value of an easy first rung is that it creates a signed relationship, a named contact, and a public commitment we can build on, all of which are worth more than a righteous no. A festival that never signs anything never climbs anything.

Does a festival pay to participate?

Never. Signing is free, the badge is free, and we do not accept money from a festival we assess. If we ever did, this page would say so.

Who checks that a festival actually did it?

The festival certifies in writing, and one of our organizers walks the grounds during the event with a standard checklist. When a festival falls short, it drops to the tier it actually met, and we say so publicly.

Why “pro-animal” instead of “plant-based”?

Because plant-based is about a menu and pro-animal is about a position. Plenty of festivals will happily add a plant-based option while a pony walks in circles a hundred feet away. The Pact is built to keep climbing past the food.

Can a group outside the Midwest use the Pact?

Yes, and we hope you will. The Pact, the tier criteria, and the walkthrough checklist will be published free for anyone to use, including organizations that compete with us for the same funding. Our theory of change treats sustaining other people’s organizers as part of our job, not a favor.

How is this different from a sustainability certification?

Sustainability programs assess a festival’s carbon, waste, water, and power. Some of them count plant-based food as one input among many. The Pro-Animal Festival Pact is about animals, it names animal use directly, and it does not let a festival offset its way past a petting zoo.

Sources

Garnett, E. E., Balmford, A., Sandbrook, C., Pilling, M. A., and Marteau, T. M. (2019). “Impact of increasing vegetarian availability on meal selection and sales in cafeterias.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(42). pnas.org
Garnett, E. E., Marteau, T. M., Sandbrook, C., Pilling, M. A., and Balmford, A. (2020). “Order of meals at the counter and distance between options affect student cafeteria vegetarian sales.” Nature Food, 1(8).
Shambala Festival, “Meat & Fish Free.” shambalafestival.org
Kambe Events, “Shambala goes meat and fish free” (survey and follow-up survey results). kambe-events.co.uk
Plant Based News, “Shambala Music Festival Is Considering Serving Deer,” updated with the March 10, 2026 vote result.
A Greener Future, “Annual Festival Sustainability Insights 2024” (40 festivals, 16 countries). agreenerfuture.com
A Greener Future, 2025 assessed festival insights (24 festivals, 12 countries), reported June 2026.

The Vegan Festivals Campaign is a campaign of Project Animal Freedom, an IRS-recognized 501(c)(3) nonprofit, EIN 83-3007847.
Last updated September 2026. Spot something wrong on this page? Email info@projectanimalfreedom.org and we will correct it.