Vegan Outreach: A Foray Into Activism

We had the opportunity to chat with Jack Norris, an American animal activist and president of Vegan Outreach, which he co-founded in 1993 with Matt Ball. Jack was at Sanctuary for our non-profit dinner to benefit their organization. Here is what he had to say.

Vegan Outreach (VO) was founded in 1993 to move society away from eating animals and their products. Our army of outreach coordinators and volunteers personally hand our hard-hitting informational booklets to millions of people each year on college campuses and other venues.When I found out about how animals were raised on modern farms, I could hardly believe how cruel it is. I decided I needed to do all I could to try to get them out of these atrocious situations.

Donating to Vegan Outreach

As a not-for-profit organization, Vegan Outreach relies on donations from individuals like your readers, who care about farmed animals and want to prevent their suffering by spreading veganism.Donations to Vegan Outreach enable us to:

• Hand out booklets about factory farming and vegan living to individuals all over the U.S. and beyond.
• Provide free guides and nutrition information
• Provide one-on-one vegan mentoring programs
• Conduct extensive online outreach through social media, our daily blog, and our weekly e-news.

Volunteering and donating are the two best ways to support our mission. For those who have the time, leafleting is an incredibly easy, effective, and fun way to spread the message of what happens in animal agriculture and how each of us has the power to make a difference by moving toward veganism. Contributing financially to VO is so important, and every little bit counts. A lot of people choose to give automatically online every month or quarter, so they can give generously over time in smaller increments. Others choose to give once or twice per year to specific campaigns.Between now and December 31st, all donations will be matched dollar-for-dollar, so the impact for animals is doubled.A few stories:One day in about 2007 I was handing out booklets at Sacramento State University and a young man got one. He read it, became vegan, and went on to work for us and out over 400,000 booklets. It's amazing what just one booklet can do!Another powerful experience was seeing Jon Camp, our Executive Vice President, hand out his 1 millionth booklet last spring (on video -- I wasn't actually there) and then be inducted into the Animal Rights Hall of Fame this past summer (I was there :). It was great to see his incredible work acknowledged.It's already been 20 years since we printed our first booklet! Since then, we've distributed over 24 million of them throughout the world.In the beginning period of VO, all booklets were collated, stapled, and folded by hand to save money. I'm getting exhausted just thinking of that!It took us almost a year to hand out our first 10,000 booklets. We now do that many on most school days during the spring and fall.The mission of sanctuary bistro is to help generate compassion and community. We want this to ripple out into the world.  How does Vegan Outreach bring community and compassion to the forefront?Leafleting for Vegan Outreach is a great foray into activism. So one thing that VO does is welcome anyone interested in getting involved to help animals to join us for some leafleting. As a result, these individuals often meet like-minded folks. So by creating these networks of animal advocates, we create pockets of compassionate and engaged individuals throughout the world.Also, each dollar between now and December 31st will be matched up to $155,000, doubling the impact to help save animals! If anyone is interested in contributing, please contribute here.

You can stay in touch with Vegan Outreach by signing up for our Vegan Food and Lifestyle blog and/or weekly enewsletter at any page on VeganOutreach.org.

Photo Credit: theonlymagicleftisart via Compfight cc