By Kyle Luzynski, Founder and Executive Director

Why Fund Animal Rights in the Midwest?

The case for building durable local animal-advocacy infrastructure in one of the centers of American animal agriculture.

We are not telling you that to be admired for it. We are telling you because of what it implies. If a volunteer-led organization can do that on a $112,597 expense base, the question worth asking is what becomes possible when the work is funded at institutional scale.

1. Why this region

The Midwest is one of the industrial heartlands of American animal agriculture. Midwest states hold the country’s largest concentrations of hogs, egg-laying hens, and turkeys, and their 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 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. This is where an enormous share of the industry lives, and where the political culture that makes it feel normal and permanent is strongest.

It is also, by our own inventory, a region where roughly two thirds of the major metro areas have no local animal rights organization that we have been able to identify. Not an underfunded one. None that we can find. Our methodology, including how we define the Midwest, a major metro, and a qualifying organization, is published separately.

We are deliberate about that phrasing, and it is worth explaining why. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, and a region-wide claim about who does not exist is exactly the kind of claim that should be made carefully. That is one of the reasons MARI, the Midwest Animal Rights Index, exists: to replace our internal inventory with a published, correctable, methodologically documented census, where an empty metro on the map reads “no qualifying organization identified as of [date]” rather than a confident assertion that none exists.

That is the opportunity in one sentence. Not everywhere, and not in the literal sense that no organizations exist; the paragraph above is exactly why we refuse that claim. The point is that too much of the region’s animal-rights capacity is thin, fragmented, or disconnected from durable local infrastructure. Those are different problems, and organization is one we can build against directly.

2. Why this organization

What a $112,597 organization already built:

• More than 100 events a year across the organization, over 70 of them in St. Louis in 2026.
• Over two million digital views and website visits in 2026 so far, reaching an estimated 400,000 or more people across the St. Louis area.
• More than 23,000 followers across our St. Louis-focused social platforms, and more than 140,000 across all of the organization’s assets.
• 768 people signed up for the first St. Louis Veganuary Challenge.
• The STL Vegan Market, our largest public asset, with an estimated 730,000 in local reach in 2025 on its own.
• More than 2,000 grassroots donors since 2018, most of them giving small amounts, most of them local.
• Since our founding in 2018, more than 380 events organized, nearly a dozen chapters launched since 2021, and more than 16.2 million in reported social media reach since 2020. Our impact page carries the detail.

3. Why now

We have run out of room. Not out of ideas. Out of hours.

This is not a blank-sheet proposal. The core portfolio already exists as live programs, pilots, drafted assets, or written plans: a regional alliance with a decided membership and governance model, an annual summit with a target window and a venue shortlist, a research program with a frozen first-year scope, three seasonal campaigns, a replicable citywide website, and two declarations. The pieces that are still conceptual are labeled as such in our strategy document and gated behind the capacity to build them well.

What almost none of it has is a paid person whose job is to do it.

That is what a gift buys here. Not a new idea. Hours against work that has already been designed.

4. What community building has to do with any of this

Most people who attempt a vegetarian or vegan diet do not sustain it. The movement has largely responded by pouring more water into a leaking bucket: more outreach, more conversions, more first contacts at the top of a funnel that drains out the bottom.

The research does not tell us exactly why people lapse, and we are careful not to claim it does. What it repeatedly associates with sustaining the change is social connection. In the largest study of its kind, former vegetarians and vegans were roughly twice as likely as current ones to report insufficient interaction with other vegetarians and vegans. Food dissatisfaction, health concerns, and inconvenience show up too. Lapsing rarely has a single cause.

So we build the thing that the evidence keeps pointing at: a book club, a potluck, a game night, an ice cream social, a Halloween party, a Thanksgiving dinner, and a market where nobody is arguing with anyone. It looks soft. We think it is one of the highest-conviction bets available in this movement, and it is chronically underfunded, because a potluck does not photograph like a rescue.

We would rather be right than photogenic. And rather than simply assume we are right, we intend to measure it. That is why the research arm is in the plan. Our full argument is on our Theory of Change page.

5. We build for people who are not us

There is a part of this work that never shows up in our numbers.

This movement burns through people. Faunalytics found that 85% of animal advocates surveyed in the US 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. Activists arrive furious and committed and leave a few years later exhausted and quiet, and the organizations they worked for move on to the next cohort. Somebody has to do the unglamorous work of recruiting, training, and sustaining activists for the whole movement rather than for one organization’s roster.

That is a role we have taken on deliberately. Our organizers are free to volunteer and collaborate with almost any group in their area. Our toolkits are built to be given away. Our website template is designed so a vegan community in a city we will never operate in can have in an afternoon what took us eight years. A fair share of what we build is meant to be used by people who will never write us a thank-you note.

MARA is what that commitment looks like when it is aimed at organizations we do not run. It is free to join, it has no dues, everything it publishes stays free to non-members, and it has no authority over any member organization. Member organizations keep their name, their board, their strategy, their campaigns, and every other affiliation they hold. MARA is a project of Project Animal Freedom rather than an independent body, permanently, and we say so on its own page rather than in the fine print.

6. What money changes

The Animal Freedom Renaissance is our four-year strategic framework for 2027 through 2030, and the Midwestern Moonshot is the campaign that pays for it. The four-year operating plan costs $4.387 million. Add a $409,000 operating reserve and roughly $30,000 in Phase Zero spending outside the four-year window, and the total resource requirement is $4.826 million. About $795,000 is expected earned revenue. Philanthropy therefore supplies $4.031 million, of which our existing grassroots base carries about $632,000; the remaining major-donor and institutional need is about $3.399 million. At full scale the plan reaches a $1.64 million annual run rate and a staff of fourteen.

In plainer terms, and stated honestly as direct or fully allocated cost:

• $5,000 is direct seed funding for one chapter for a year. It does not cover the central staff time, technology, and mentorship around the organizer; the fully allocated figure is closer to $18,000.
• $14,000 funds one month-long seasonal campaign, paid media included.
• $25,000 funds roughly five months of an organizer role, all-in.
• $56,250 funds one full year of a frontline staff position, including employer taxes and benefits.
• $75,000 funds a year of contracted research leadership and our first original study.
• $96,000 funds first-year facility costs for the Midwest Animal Rights Center, excluding its director.
• $491,000 completes the entire first phase and substantially reduces this organization’s dependence on one person’s unpaid nights and weekends.

7. What could go wrong

You should know the risks before you write anything, because you will find them anyway.

We would rather hand you the problems than have you discover them.

8. What we are asking for

There are places where a large gift buys a marginal improvement to something that already works. This is not one of those places.

Here it buys the difference between a thin regional movement and one with durable local infrastructure. Paid organizing capacity in cities where no qualifying local organization or paid organizer has yet been identified. The building. A Midwest-specific operational baseline that we have not found publicly available elsewhere, built to complement rather than duplicate national and global research. Eight years of tested method finally getting the hours it needs.

We are now seeking lead commitments for the 2027 Institution phase.

Before you decide, you are welcome to review any of it: the four-year budget and staffing model, our phase gates, our tax filings, the methodology behind every figure on this page, and our board. We will also sit down with you and go through it line by line.

We have shown what this model does with very little.

Email us about a major gift See our impact

Sources and methodology

Every claim on this page traces to something.

Project Animal Freedom is an IRS-recognized 501(c)(3) nonprofit, EIN 83-3007847.
By Kyle Luzynski, Founder and Executive Director. Last updated September 2026.
Spot something wrong on this page? Email info@projectanimalfreedom.org and we will correct it.