A Project Animal Freedom initiative in development
The Vegan Market Alliance
Building the vegan economy, one vegan market at a time.
What the Alliance is
Project Animal Freedom is building the Vegan Market Alliance: an initiative designed to become a network for the people who organize recurring, fully vegan markets, and a deliberate effort to help more of those markets start, improve, and last.
Its purpose, stated plainly, is to build the humane economy where animals no longer suffer and die for profit by connecting, growing, and maximizing the impact of vegan markets. Measuring the field is the fourth thing it has to do, because none of the other three can be done honestly without knowing how many markets there are and which of them last.
A vegan market is an unusual piece of movement infrastructure. It is a public event, a concentrated sales opportunity for vegan businesses, and a visible demonstration that vegan food and products can occupy ordinary civic and commercial space. Public event directories already list many vegan markets and festivals around the world, and that is useful. The narrower gap we have not found filled is a stable, longitudinal census of recurring fully vegan markets: where they operate, who runs them, how often they happen, how long they last, and what organizers learn along the way.
That is the problem this project is meant to solve. Project Animal Freedom has spent years turning local operating experience into repeatable systems. The Alliance applies that same infrastructure logic to one format: stop making every organizer rebuild the same market from scratch.
Why markets
We are not neutral about this. STL Vegan Market, which Project Animal Freedom has run since 2024, is our largest recurring public asset. It is free to attend, hosts 20+ vendors, drew more than 5,000 aggregate attendees across the 2025 season, and, by our attendance records, is the most attended recurring vegan event we know of in St. Louis. The market’s own channels accounted for an estimated 730,000 in local reach in 2025.
That reach matters because community events can function as outreach without requiring someone to walk into an advocacy meeting first. The economic claim needs equal care. We do not yet publish standardized vendor-sales data, so we should not pretend to know what one market day does to a business’s annual survival. What we can say is that markets create concentrated sales opportunities for vegan vendors, while Project Animal Freedom already keeps more than $10,000 a year in catering spending inside the vegan economy, deliberately with small vegan businesses and, in recent years, at least half with small Black-owned vegan businesses.
So markets can do three jobs at once. They can put veganism in front of people who were not looking for an argument. They can direct consumer spending toward vegan businesses. And they are unusually documentable: site, vendors, permits, layout, promotion, accessibility, weather plan, sponsorship, and a date that repeats. We think that makes the format promising to replicate. The Alliance exists to test that proposition rather than assume it.
What the Alliance is being built to do
The 2027 assignment is to build the base, not to describe all four functions as though they already exist.
Connect. Build relationships among recurring vegan market organizers so someone planning a first season can learn from someone who has already survived the permit problem, the storm, the vendor cancellation, and the quiet month. The eventual form may include introductions, a shared channel, and a recurring organizer call.
Grow. Turn operating experience into a practical market playbook: vendor applications and agreements, insurance questions, permits and site selection, layout, weather contingencies, promotion, sponsorship, pricing, accessibility, and the day-of run of show. The first version should draw on STL Vegan Market and be explicit about what failed as well as what worked.
Measure. Build a vegan market census with a published definition and a correction process. Nobody should make claims about how large or durable this field is before there is a method behind the number.
Maximize. Once the base exists, test ways to make existing markets stronger: shared promotion, vendor pipelines across cities, sponsor and supplier relationships, reusable templates, and honest reporting on what appears to raise attendance, repeat participation, and organizer durability.
The current design is that shared Alliance publications remain free to members and non-members alike. That follows Project Animal Freedom’s broader approach to movement infrastructure, but it should be treated as a design commitment to formalize rather than as evidence that a membership system already exists.
The vegan market census
The planned census is for recurring, fully vegan, multi-vendor markets open to the public. It is intended to track who runs them, where they operate, how often they recur, their scale, and how long they have lasted.
Recurring is the defining distinction from an annual festival, not the only inclusion rule. A one-day annual VegFest may be excellent and still be a different format. If the census is going to become useful over time, its definition has to stay stable enough that one year can be compared with the next.
Two commitments follow from the epistemic standard already adopted elsewhere in Project Animal Freedom’s research. Where the census has not identified a qualifying market in a place, it should say “no qualifying market identified as of [date],” not “there is no vegan market.” Absence from a list is a limit of the search, not proof of absence. And the inclusion criteria should publish before the census does, with a route to add a market, correct an entry, contest a decision, or request removal.
The census is not MARI, and the distinction matters. MARI’s research universe is qualifying animal rights and vegan advocacy organizations across the twelve Midwestern states, using the same functional test that governs MARA membership. The Vegan Market Alliance census has a different unit of analysis: recurring markets. A market run by a qualifying advocacy organization may touch both data systems in different ways, while a market run by a business, collective, or individual may belong only in the market census. Shared epistemic discipline; different questions, criteria, geography, and names.
How the Alliance fits our theory of change
Project Animal Freedom’s Theory of Change argues that thriving local vegan communities can function as outreach, as support for retention, and as capacity for activism, then connects that community to a five-stage system: Reach, Try, Belong, Act, and Multiply. The Vegan Market Alliance is not a separate theory. It is a way of scaling one piece of the theory we already use.
Start with the destination. In our Theory of Change, a fully vegan Midwest by 2056 does not mean that every resident personally identifies as vegan. It means a region whose institutions, food system, economy, and civic culture no longer depend on animal exploitation. Markets are aimed directly at the economic and food-system parts of that definition: they create places where vegan businesses can sell, where vegan products become ordinary public commerce, and where organizers can test whether that local economic infrastructure lasts.
A market can also touch all five stages of the system, but the strength of the evidence differs by stage.
Reach. This is the clearest fit. A public, free market is mass-market veganism in literal form, and STL Vegan Market already gives us an observable reach and attendance record. The 2025 figures above are evidence of exposure, not evidence of conversion.
Try. Food is one of the lowest-friction ways to try vegan living. A market can put dozens of vegan options in one place and can serve as an on-ramp to the Gateway to Compassion Challenge when sign-up and follow-up are deliberately built into the event.
Belong. A market that repeats on a schedule can become a standing appointment where people return, recognize one another, and bring friends. Our broader theory says social support is associated with sustaining change; it does not say market attendance causes retention. That relationship is something to measure, not something to declare.
Act. Project Animal Freedom has repeatedly found organizers among people who first encountered us through public events. Markets can widen that top of the volunteer funnel because they attract large, mixed crowds. We should track how many market attendees later volunteer or organize before calling the market itself an activist-recruitment mechanism.
Multiply. This is the Alliance’s most distinctive role. The Theory of Change treats chapters, toolkits, and models that other cities can copy as the Multiply stage. A market can be replicated without becoming a Project Animal Freedom chapter. If the Alliance can document the format well enough for independent organizers to use it, Multiply can travel farther than our chapter footprint.
The Alliance also fits the money layer, but in two different ways that should not be blurred. Project Animal Freedom’s financial plan already treats the market as one of several earned-revenue sources. Separately, the Theory of Change describes ticketed events as the main packaged fundraising mechanism that teaches chapters to raise local revenue. The Alliance does not replace that chapter model. Its contribution is to help markets become financially durable in their own right and to move more consumer spending toward vegan businesses; any organizer revenue from vendor fees, sponsorships, or other market income should be measured rather than assumed.
And it extends our movement-first logic beyond activists. We already treat recruiting and sustaining organizers as capacity that benefits the whole movement, even when those people later work somewhere else. A stronger vegan business ecosystem can create a similar spillover: more vendors, more places to eat and shop, more partners for events, and more economic evidence that vegan life is locally possible. The Alliance is the attempt to build shared infrastructure around that ecosystem rather than capture it for Project Animal Freedom.
What we are not claiming. We have not shown that attending a market makes anyone vegan, that markets improve vegan retention, or that one market season determines whether a vendor survives. We can observe attendance, reach, vendor participation, repeat participation, organizer revenue where it is available, and whether a market returns the next season. The defensible claim today is narrower: markets can be high-reach, low-friction public vegan events and direct sites of vegan commerce. The Alliance is how we intend to learn more about what makes that format last and travel.
How the Alliance relates to our other work
MARA organizes the movement. MARI measures it. MARM maps it. MARS brings it together.
That one sentence holds the regional architecture together. The Vegan Market Alliance sits beside that architecture rather than inside it. MARA is regional movement infrastructure. The Vegan Market Alliance is market-specific economic infrastructure.
The universes are different, but they can intersect. MARA membership is for Midwestern organizations that meet the shared animal-rights and vegan-advocacy functional test. A vegan business or market organizer does not qualify merely by being vegan, though an advocacy organization that runs a market may qualify for MARA and also participate in the market project. MARI measures qualifying organizations; the market census measures recurring markets. Neither participation status implies the other. The alliance’s annual gathering, MARS, sits on the MARA side of that line.
Where this is now, and what happens when
As of September 2026, the Vegan Market Alliance is in design and incubation, not an operating alliance. The name and purpose exist, STL Vegan Market provides real operating experience, and the Animal Freedom Renaissance gives the initiative a four-year development path. There is not yet a member network, a published playbook, a market census, or a governing body. That is the level the public copy should hold until the evidence changes.
The Renaissance sequence is:
| Stage | What it means |
|---|---|
| 2027 | Build the base. Settle the purpose and governance home, form the founding organizer cohort, draft the playbook from actual operating experience, and publish the census criteria before collection. |
| 2028 | Formalize the network and resource system. Publish the first usable playbook and census, establish an organizer cadence, and document outside use. |
| 2029 | Break out nationally and internationally. The test is real participation and use beyond the original base, not a global label on the website. |
| 2030 | Operate as durable international infrastructure for the vegan economy, meeting the Renaissance hard test for an Institution: governance and funding that survive particular originators. |
The 2030 line is deliberately a hard bar. Because the Renaissance types the Alliance as an Institution, “international infrastructure” has to mean durable governance and funding that survive particular originators, not merely a website that still exists. The exact stewardship model is still a governance decision.
Get involved
If you run a recurring vegan market anywhere, tell us about it. At this stage that means helping us find the field and shape the founding work, not joining a network we are pretending already exists.
If you want to start one, tell us where. The playbook will draw first from STL Vegan Market, which Project Animal Freedom has run since 2024, and from the broader event systems we have developed since 2018. Early organizers can help us identify what a useful playbook actually needs.
If you want to fund the work, support builds the shared infrastructure: organizer outreach, documentation, forms, research, promotion systems, and the staff time required to turn one market’s experience into something other cities can use. A donation does not automatically become vendor revenue, and we will not imply that it does.
Frequently asked questions
What counts as a vegan market?
For this project, the working definition is a recurring, fully vegan market with multiple vendors that is open to the public. Recurrence distinguishes it from an annual festival; full criteria will publish before the census does and may become more precise before fieldwork begins.
Does it cost anything to participate?
The current design is no dues, and shared publications remain free to participants and non-participants alike. Formal membership terms should not be described as settled until the Alliance’s governance is settled.
Do we have to be a nonprofit?
No. The market project is designed for organizers across nonprofits, businesses, collectives, and individuals. That is one of its clearest differences from MARA, whose membership is tied to an organizational animal-rights or vegan-advocacy function rather than to market operation.
Do we have to be in the Midwest?
Not to tell us about your market or use future public materials. The Alliance is intended to become international infrastructure, but Project Animal Freedom’s Renaissance deliberately sequences that growth: build the base in 2027, formalize the network and resource system in 2028, and pursue national and international breakout in 2029. We will not call it a global network before it is one.
Does participating mean giving up anything?
No version of the project we are considering requires a market to surrender its name, organizers, rules, vendors, dates, or other affiliations. Any formal authority or representation rules should be published before participation opens.
Is this the same as STL Vegan Market?
No. STL Vegan Market is one recurring market run by Project Animal Freedom in St. Louis. The Vegan Market Alliance is the broader initiative being built from lessons there and, eventually, from organizers elsewhere.
Is the Alliance the same as MARA?
No. MARA is a Midwest alliance of qualifying animal rights and vegan advocacy organizations. The Vegan Market Alliance is a separate initiative for recurring vegan markets and their organizers, with international reach as a later-stage goal. An advocacy organization that runs a market could participate in both, but neither implies the other.
Who runs it?
Project Animal Freedom is incubating it. The governance model is not yet settled. Because the Renaissance classifies the Alliance as an Institution, the eventual test is not simply whether PAF can keep operating it; it is whether the Alliance develops durable governance and funding that can outlast the particular people who originated it.
A Project Animal Freedom initiative in development. Last updated September 2026.
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