For example, in September 2010 (a year ago) I did a survey of Vegan Soapbox readers to determine how effective this website was, if it was effective at all.

I was surprised to find that:

• Some survey respondents claimed they “eat less meat” or that they “eat fewer animal products.”
• A larger group said they “donate more money to animal organizations.”
• Many claimed that they “bought more vegan cookbooks.”
• The answer that received the most votes was: “I do more animal advocacy.”

At last month’s Vida Vegan Con there was a panel about vegan activism as it relates to blogging. Of course I was excited about this panel! And as usual, I took notes, which are below saved especially just for you…

Vida Vegan Con 2011 – Activism Panel
Moderator: Jasmin Singer – Our Hen House
Speakers:

• Leigh-Chantelle Koch – Viva La Vegan
  blog, cookbook, podcasts, videos, mentor
  also runs a nonprofit group that puts on a enviro fest
  “everyone has the skills and talents to promote veganism”
• Chelsea  Lincoln - The Mill Room
  began as “serious activist” by organizing protests/demos
  was part of a successful campaign that included both “angry” activism and civil dialog
  currently blogging and volunteering with animal rescue, likes hands-on
  “activism is not just one thing” find your own niche
• Isa Chandra Moskowitz – The Post Punk Kitchen
  fundraising – bake sales that also encourage veganism
  “4 courses 4 causes”
  chose to live currently in Omaha because they need more vegans and more vegan food
  interested in local activism
• Ryan Patey
  editor and founder of TOFU magazine
  started by doing a couple vegan cookbooks
  aim is to provide any vegan with a soapbox
• Sunny Subramanian
  peta2 - youth, music, provides lots of liturature etc
  veganizing cafeterias
  fun to write wiith a young voice for a young audience
  “it’s amazing to work for such a powerful organization”

Merging environmental issues and animal issues?
Leigh-Chantelle: didn’t use “v” word, didn’t market  as enviro festival, invited veg food carts

How to “fix” vegan movement?
Ryan: try not to step on each other’s toes, try to find ways to work with other people from other issues

How to incorporate more activism into foodie blogs?
Chelsea: be true to who you are, daily life is blogable

Does fostering activism in kids/young people stick? and what can people do?
Sunny: tshirts and totes that encourage veganism, online petitions, replacing home products with vegan options, encouraging parents to eat veg, kids will stick with it if they have a community

How to make local events bigger?
Isa: media attention, taking part in campaigns that are already national/international, staying part of activism community

Does your previous experience come in handy in activism?
Leigh-Chantelle: music background has helped feel comfortable to speaking and interact with media
Ryan: music scene made it easier to travel for activism
Sunny: journalism background has helped

For anyone who has never considered themselves an activist, how to get involved?
Chelsea: ignore the word activist and just follow your heart to do the things you feel need to get done in order to make change

How do you avoid burnout?
Sunny: step back and take a little vacation when things feel overwhelming
Ryan: go outside and experience nature
Jasmin: find community and safe spaces
Isa: stuff like this conference
Leigh-Chantelle: community and football

Questions from audience:

• Inspired by Chelsea’s post about being ourselves and finding our ownbeauty – how does it relate to activism?
  response: it helps you spread your message because people can feel your comfort with yourself, everyone can help themselves become better activists by accepting themselves
• How do you find that fine line between wanting to be approachable vs diluting the message; how to be honest without alientating people or seeming strident?
  response: ask someone to read post before publishing, leave room to change and modify. you’re not speaking for everyone, you’re speaking for yourself. You can unpublish if you need to. Let the food do the talking
• How do we change vegan food into activism?
  response: write letters to the editor about food, bake once a week for office and give recipes, organizing holiday event and invite nonvegans
  restaurant outreach
• How to not be divisive?
  response: it’s your blog and say what you want to say, just accept that vegans fight. Ask questions, engage the conversation. “the world of infightinng is the world of wasting time”
• How do you market events to attract the “inactivists”?
  response: bake sales, meetups with activism component, build community and trust
• How to get media attention?
  response: professional press release, find the vegans in the media, use CNN ireport, link your event to something else newsworthy
  maintain media connections, celebrity, use your own story
  ourhenhouse guide for getting media attention
• How to fuse our identities? (vegan feminist, for example)
  response: consider people as people, complex beings

To read notes from other panels at Vida Vegan Con, the conference for vegan bloggers, please go here: http://www.vegansoapbox.com/topics/vvc2011/

UPDATE: The video from the Vida Vegan Con panel on activism. Here it is:

Today there are lots of new vegan foods available at groceries and plenty of great new cookbooks. But in my opinion, the web is the biggest and best thing that’s happened to veganism in the last 30 years.

Here is a list of some of the changes I’ve noticed:

• Back in the day, to find veg-friendly restaurants we had to rely on word of mouth or outdated tourist guide books. Today, we can use happycow or veg guide.
• 20 to 30 years ago, if someone said “vegetarians don’t get enough protein” we could suggest that they read Diet for a New America (aka Food Revolution) and we could ask them if they’ve ever known a vegetarian who died from protein deficiency, but today we can point them to mainstream resources that prove that there are plenty of veg protein sources. And we can do it in an instant using our smart phones or netbooks!
• When I was a kid and I talked about factory farming, people simply dismissed me. Now, I can show them Meet Your Meat right on my iphone! I can tell them to watch Earthlings or send them to the Mercy For Animals investigations webpage. There’s NO denying factory farming these days.
• If someone wants to find out about veggie meats, they can go to meatalternatives.org to see a long list of various veggie meats. They don’t have to think that what they see at the grocery store is all that exists. Now they know specific brand names to ask their grocer to carry.
• 20 years ago, all the vegan magazines, journals, and newsletters were relatively underground and unheard of. Today, VegNews is available at groceries, book stores, and online.
• Even just 10 years ago, meetup didn’t exist. It started in 2001. Now, people can use meetup to find local vegetarians and vegans to share and learn.
• YouTube has allowed us to share our stories, undercover videos, cooking instruction vids, etc.

What changes have you noticed in the last 20 to 30 years?

Care about animals?

Want to help stop animal suffering?

Want to prevent cruelty?

Want to cease the killing?

Here are some EASY ways to help animals RIGHT NOW:

• Take 5, Save 5: a campaign to distribute vegan starter kits online. Learn more at take5save5.com
• Spend half an hour leafleting in a busy place. Learn more at Vegan Outreach >>
• Browse vegan and vegetarian forums and help out newbies by giving them helpful advice about saying veg. Here’s one such forum: Veggie “Newbie” Boards.
• Write a blog post or update your Facebook status with a short write-up  about your favorite vegan food.
• Ask a friend to take the PB&J pledge or the 21 Day Vegan Kickstart.
• Sponsor a rescued farmed animal. Here are three sanctuaries where you can do that:
  • Animal Acres
  • Peaceful Prairie
  • Ching Sanctuary
• Buy a bumper sticker to fund vegan billboards. Details here >>
• Ask Subway to offer vegan “meats” at WeLoveSubway.com

Got more ideas? Leave a comment below!

Petfinder.com is asking you to do something very, very simple: Post to Facebook telling the world about a great shelter pet who shares, or has shared, your life.

They say:

* Post the pet’s name and story.
* Share your favorite memories.
* Tell everyone the best story of all: How you met and fell in love.

You can post any way you like:
* Make a status update.
* Share a photo.
* Link to a blog post or website about the pet.
* Send a Tweet to your followers (suggested Tweet below!) – Just be sure to tag The Shelter Pet Project in your post, or come over and post it to our wall, or both.

Such a simple act, yet it could encourage countless people to adopt rather than shop. So please take a minute and post a shelter animal story on your Facebook account.
If you don’t think you will remember to do it on November 30th, just do it now before you forget! You can also re-post it on November 30th!

(The word “pet” is used here to refer to the animals others might call companion animals, animal companions, furry family members, cats and dogs, etc. The word is NOT intended to support or condone the pet trade, including but not limited to puppy mills, breeders, breed registries, etc.)

“Right now, a whole lot of dynamite is—through non-violent and entirely legal means—being laid out by weak tie animal advocates. My guess is that we’ve still got another ten to fifty years before society’s ready and the plunger can be pushed, but make no mistake that animal agribusiness’ position is quickly eroding. One day a handful of people will take enormous risks, and large scale animal agribusiness will succumb within a decade.”

“I’d wager that anti-meat sentiment is currently spreading far more rapidly than anti-segregation sentiment did at any time between 1870 and 1960. Why is this happening so quickly? In large part it’s because social networking tools like Facebook and Twitter are perhaps the two most potent tools for weak tie activism that the world has ever seen. In essence, online communication is allowing animal advocates to lay their metaphorical dynamite at speeds impossible just a decade ago.”

I agree. I think social networking websites like Facebook and Twitter as well as other online communication forms like blogs and web forums are extremely powerful animal advocacy tools. Here are some reasons why I think this:

• The web is the best library ever created. Years ago (when I was a teen) if you wanted to go vegan and didn’t know any other vegans you had to hunt down vegan cookbooks from obscure publishers or special order magazines. Now, anyone curious about vegan nutrition, vegan recipes, or factory farming can learn about it in just a few keystrokes.
• Young people are online more than ever and they are the ones whose beliefs and behaviors have the most potential to change the world. We can leaflet on college campuses in person (and that’s absolutely an excellent thing to do) but we can reach those same college students and even high school students through online advocacy.
• The barriers to online advocacy are few. Setting up a vegan website can be purely a matter of time and knowledge without any financial cost or physical tools. Using social networking websites is even easier. Heck, I maintain this vegan website while my baby crawls around at my feet. There are few other animal advocacy methods I could be seriously involved in while caring for a small child. The web makes it possible for millions of people who are trapped at home or in offices to get active for animals on a regular basis. With so few people interested in actually standing up for animals’ rights and doing something, the easier it becomes, the more people will get involved. And the more people involved, the more quickly the movement grows.
• The web makes some forms of advocacy more effective. Online, people have to choose to pay attention to us in order for our messages to have any power. Offline we can force the issue a bit more. A large banner on the sidewalk is hard to ignore. Megaphones are hard to ignore. But avoiding clicking on a link from Facebook, that’s easy. This sounds like it means online advocacy is less effective, but in some situations this is actually a positive thing. It helps filter out the uncaring, heartless people who think animal suffering doesn’t matter and creates a safe space where compassionate people can grow an learn from each other. Vegan websites and messageboards that are intended to provide support for vegans can counteract much of the anti-vegan sentiment newbies encounter offline, helping these new vegans stay vegan.

What do you think? Do you think online animal advocacy is important because it builds the foundation for radical change or do you think spending advocacy time on the web is mostly a waste of time?

Michelle found this fun tool online that turns photos into Shepard Fairey “OBEY”/Obama style graphics. It’s called “obamiconme” and it’s super easy and fun.

Just look what I did:

Awesome, right?

Of course, it should be noted that the images I altered were borrowed (aka stolen). But it’s also worth noting that my obomiconifying them significantly changed them, thus it’s likely fair use. But I’m not a lawyer so if you “steal” images, don’t say I told you to do it. I don’t like getting nasty take-down notices even if they haven’t got merit. It cramps my style. Thanks in advance.

Michelle warns us:

Obamiconifying pictures is known to be highly addictive. Use with caution.

She’s right.

PS – She’s holding a contest related to this images. So if you make cool, vegan ones, enter her contest!

I went veg in 1982, toward the end of the year. Initially I joined my older daughter’s decision to move to vegetarianism because I had been having difficulties digesting meat, primarily beef. She said she did not want to eat animals any more because she did not want to be responsible for their deaths.

I was 36 (she was six). There was no Internet, no web.

Yet over the coming months I learned a lot about vegetarianism and animal rights, and it wasn’t long before my focus shifted from health to animal rights. I learned about factory farms, about experiments on animals, about fur, seal killing, whale hunting. I learned of all the animal issues that still exist.

When I look back I am not sure how I got started. I started subscribing to Vegetarian Times and I think this magazine had a large influence on me.  Through editorials and ad pages I found out about People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and other animal organizations. I found books to read, most notably John Robbins’ Diet for a New America.

Initially our little family still ate chicken and fish. I remember the trips to Colonel Sanders and I wonder now, did I buy chicken at the store or reserve it for take-out only? Either way, we soon stopped eating the chickens. We learned about debeaking and crowded conditions and the horrors of life as a factory-farmed chicken. It took a little longer for us to stop eating fish.

I remember carrying around all this knowledge and realizing that I was one of the few. I knew few people who were aware of the deplorable factory farms, the seal hunts, the whaling, the eating of dogs in Korea. When I mentioned any of these issues to friends they didn’t want to hear it. Or worse, they simply refused to believe any of it.

But they can’t hide any more. The information is out there and I rarely come across a person who does not know about it.  The web, with youtube and similar services, has brought the story home to millions. It is a lot easier now to get the word out. Now if we can only get folks to listen.

I think you’ll find there are many wonderful reasons to Go Vegan.

I started it because I think it’s a good way to let others know “what vegans eat” – including the wide variety one can find by just looking at different vegans’ months – as well as to take a closer look at what I eat myself (and try to improve it).

If you’d like to participate in the wiki go to:

http://veganmonth.wetpaint.com

But let’s say, for whatever reason, that you don’t want to leaflet. You have another option: virtual leafletting. Whenever you visit a blog or forum you have an opportunity to promote veganism. You can leave a link to a vegan starter kit or you can post a video. You can recite some facts or you can leave a recipe. This is real activism.

Make no doubt about it, the comments you leave here and there across the world wide web have an impact. People read them and react to them. You have the power to influence others and convert people to veganism.

So the next time you’re surfing the web and you think you’re just wasting time, think again. You can be productive with that time. You can leave pro-vegan comments and links all over the web.

Need some ideas of the kind of comments to leave? Here are a few ideas:

Topic: Environmentalism/ going green/ recycling/ climate change…
Your possible comment:

“Did you know going vegan helps slow climate change? Did you see this article: http://vegetarian.about.com/b/2008/09/10/in-the-news-eat-less-meat-to-combat-climate-change.htm“

Topic: Food/ sustainability/ local food/ food safety/ nutrition.
You could comment:

“A plant-based diet is safe, healthy, and sustainable. See this for more: http://www.thegoodhuman.com/2007/03/02/going-vegetarian-and-vegan-sustainable/“

Topic: Politics/ law/ elections…
You might sayt:

“Have you heard about Prop 2 in California? It would ban gestation crates, veal crates, and battery cages. You could vote yes or your could just go vegan.”

Topic: Money/ economy/ taxes…
Your comment:

“Going vegan is good for your pocketbook. Here’s a story about that: http://vegetarian.about.com/b/2007/09/18/in-the-news-go-vegetarian-to-save-money.htm“

Occasionally something might just drop into your lap. Someone brings up the topic of veganism directly. Regardless of what they say, this is a great opportunity to drop a few links to vegan starter kits or prominent vegan resources. Here are some links to bookmark for such occasions:

Compelling Videos:

• Live Your Values
• Meet Your Meat
• Hormel Pig Slaughterhouse
• Dairy Cow Slaughter
• Earthlings
• More videos >>

Veg Starter Kits: recipes, nutritional info, reasons to go veg, and more:

• Vegan Outreach Vegan Starter Kit
  
• PCRM Vegetarian Starter Kit
• PETA Veg Starter Kit
• Compassion Over Killing Vegan Starter Kit
• Action For Animals Vegetarian Starter Kit

Veg Recipe Indexes: places to search and find vegan recipes:

• The Post Punk Kitchen Recipes
  
• Veg Web Recipes Index
  
• Vegan Food (dot net) Search
  
• Choose Veg Starter Recipes
  
• All Creatures Veg Recipes
  
• Recipe Zaar – the vegan section
• Veg Cooking Search
  
• Vegan Mania List
  
• Veg Family Index
  
• Vegan Soapbox Recipe Search

So don’t ever think you can’t be an activist just because you don’t want to do protests, demonstrations, or leafletting. Every person you speak to about veganism and every web interaction you have about veganism is a form of activism. You can make a difference for animals with only a few minutes each day. Leave your vegan mark whenever you go!