My ‘Grassroots’ Identity Crisis

After 10 years in animal advocacy, I realized my attachment to being 'grassroots' was holding me back from thinking clearly about what actually enables movements to mobilize activists.

The Pressure to Professionalize

“The transition from movement to institution is the moment ideals meet payroll.” – Robert L. Allen

Imagine that you are leading a young, fast-growing grassroots activist organization. Your org is built around a community of activists, and mobilizing more activists is an important part of your strategy. After starting as an all-volunteer project, you got your first grant, which was enough to bring three co-founders (yourself included) on full time, each at $32k/year– barely over one half of the median full-time salary in the U.S. With your full attention, the organization has been thriving, attracting larger grants from new donors. The size of the paid team has tripled, and you’ve increased the salary to a sustainable living wage of $55k. Between salaries and other expenses, you’re hoping to raise a $1 million budget next year, a significant scale up. Historically, applying for philanthropic grants has been one of your many responsibilities, and up until now you’ve raised almost all your money that way aside from a trickle that has come in organically through your website’s “donate” button. But to scale up to $1 million, you’re going to need to diversify.

One of your colleagues comes to you with an idea: hire your first development officer. Based on standard numbers from across the charity sector, a full-time fundraising role making personal asks to existing small donors could raise $80,000 to $100,000 in the first year. Subtracting the salary itself, that’s a $25,000 to $45,000 net gain in year 1. You’d need to test it out with one hire, then expand the program to three or more hires in order for this to really help your bottom line. And that troubles you: how would the organization’s culture change if a quarter or a third of paid roles were entirely focused on fundraising? That’s the sort of thing you never would have dreamed of doing when you first started out as an activist. You imagine trying to explain that balance to the activists whose volunteer time is crucial to your campaign work. The simulated activist in your mind isn’t offended, exactly, but their passion and motivation for the org does seem to take a hit.

This dilemma has a familiar feeling to it. When you first started out with basically no money, your culture and principles were so clear. The organization was totally horizontal; you and your co-founders could always reach an agreement. Once money started coming in, things got harder. One protracted disagreement devolved into a bitter argument leading one founder to quit in a huff. Your other cofounder suggested afterwards that you should be officially designated as the primary leader, to prevent similar disputes going forward. You were uncomfortable with it, but you knew they were right to point out that you were the one with the vision of what the group could become. Now, that vision is the very thing being challenged by the org’s growth. Each new hire, lacking the shared experience the three of you originally had, pulls the culture further and further away from what you once were so sure was necessary.

You feel anxious about all these changes. You’d been an activist before, but never in a leadership position like this. You feel imposter syndrome, and at the same time you feel peerless– nobody around you understands the challenges you face. Sometimes people are happy with your decisions, and sometimes they are upset. As you get busier, it’s becoming harder to explain the full reasoning behind every decision someone doesn’t like. Yet it’s clearer than ever that you’re the only one paying attention to the whole picture.

Step by step, you can see you are becoming more and more like the big, corporate welfarist groups you used to despise. Yes, you’re still a far cry from being one of these big groups, but you’ve moved far enough in their direction that it’s starting to feel like a betrayal of your younger self. And there’s one ultimate betrayal lurking deep in your heart that you haven’t even acknowledged to yourself yet, though part of you knows it’s there. Admit it, reader: you’ve been thinking of running a cage-free campaign.¹

You have a sinking feeling that you’re approaching some kind of breaking point. No, scratch that: you hope you are.

Seed of the Crisis

“Every act of creation is first an act of destruction.” – Pablo Picasso

The scenario above is not a hypothetical; down to the details, it’s a mix of experiences from several founders I’ve talked to, including my own. After 10 years immersed in the world of animal and climate advocacy, my own version of that story triggered a minor identity crisis, ultimately liberating me from several dogmatic views about the ‘right’ way to do activism while helping me focus more than ever on the things that really matter to build mass-based movement organizations. If you care about mobilizing unpaid activists into effective campaigns and/or scaling up advocacy organizations without sacrificing agility and cultural integrity, this post is for you.

When this started for me, I was leading a small startup advocacy organization. We were coming up on 2 years old and I was feeling pressure to diversify our funding sources– like many orgs, we had been relying on philanthropic grants from foundations sympathetic to farmed animals for close to 90% of our revenue, with most of that coming from a single donor. So I signed up for a fundraising course from an experienced ‘development’ professional.

If you haven’t heard of development officers before, or don’t understand what they do or why it works, you’re in good company. It’s a fundraising strategy that is rare among grassroots organizations and nearly ubiquitous among large professional nonprofits. Why it works will have to be the subject of a future post; what matters for now is that up to a point, you can reliably hire people to carry out this strategy and they’ll raise more for the organization than their salary costs.

People had tried to demystify development for me before, but I must have been missing some key context to make sense of it. This time, it clicked, and I was excited. I told my best friend John, who also happened to work for our largest funder. (Yes, philanthropy is highly relationship-driven.)

To my surprise, John didn’t like the idea. An argument ensued. (Fortunately, at least in the farmed animal space, philanthropy is driven by the kind of relationships where you can argue fiercely over strategy questions.) I insisted that since we were currently highly reliant on his foundation for funding, he should be enthusiastic about any idea we had to diversify. He, in turn, argued that there was a good reason you could only find development officers at stuffy professionalized nonprofits that had long since lost the ability to mobilize unpaid activists. More importantly, he didn’t like how quick I was to resort to hiring someone rather than trying to find a more creative, resourceful approach, such as recruiting some of our unpaid activists to do the same work.

Gradually, he came around to support the idea. But then he spoke the fateful words: “I’ll look back on this as the moment I stopped thinking of you as part of the grassroots.”

Reader, he might as well have driven a sword through my belly. I was speechless. The two of us had met 10 years earlier as activists in Direct Action Everywhere (DxE for short). DxE had been both our first experience of social movements, and at first we had largely absorbed the values and assumptions of the group. One of those was seeing the movement as divided into two camps. Ours was the grassroots wing. We variably called the other camp institutional, corporate, and other slanderous names, but for the rest of this post, we’ll stick to calling them the professional wing.

A lot had changed in those 10 years, and I had stopped seeing those shills and sellouts in the professional wing of the movement as my enemies. In fact, I’d befriended many of them and had fully come to appreciate their work. But John’s comment revealed just how much I still thought of myself as part of the grassroots, and how important that was to my identity.

It took me a few weeks and a conversation with a leadership coach² to see why the comment hit me so hard. But once it clicked, I knew that identifying with the grassroots for its own sake was something I needed to let go of. I’m not here to be part of a club; I’m here to make as much change for animals as possible. I desire to do whatever is most effective, not whatever is most grassroots.

From there, it got more complicated. DxE and other grassroots groups believe their approach is more effective. There is at least one thing for which it certainly seems more effective: mobilizing unpaid activists. When I first got active, volunteer-based groups like DxE, Anonymous for the Voiceless, and the Save Movement were seeing exponential growth, mobilizing thousands of activists worldwide. At the same time, professional orgs like The Humane League could barely get three volunteers to show up to a protest in a major city, despite having more paid employees working on volunteer recruitment than DxE, AV, and Save had all added up.

Mobilizing wasn’t just about getting free labor for an underfunded movement that badly needed it. According to DxE’s theory of change, mobilization was the goal. We were pointing to historical evidence, such as that from political scientist Erica Chenoweth suggesting movements that could mobilize 3.5% of the population would always win.

By the time I had my argument with John, I had already grown disillusioned about DxE’s theory of mobilization-for-its-own-sake, but I certainly still believed that large numbers of unpaid activists have an important role to play in our movement. The total budget of the farmed animal movement is on the order of $300 million each year, less than the revenue of a single large slaughterhouse. We will never be able to compete with our adversaries by relying on money, and we could never afford to pay employees to do all the work that needs to be done. Our advantage is all the people around the world who are so horrified by what is happening to animals that they are willing to give up their nights and weekends to try to stop it.

I don’t want my identity as an animal advocate to be tied up in arbitrary distinctions that limit my freedom of action to pursue the most effective strategy available. At the same time, I don’t want the movement to lose its ability to mobilize all those unpaid activists. From my early years in the movement, I learned that there are two common patterns of animal advocacy organizations, each defined by a bundle of attributes. One type of org is able to mobilize large numbers of activists, and one is not. And John was right: having full-time development officers raising money is clearly associated with the second pattern, not the first.

But does it need to be that way? Or is that just a legacy of people like John³ and I clinging to familiar ways of doing things because that’s how our tribe does it? There’s no question that humans like to cling to group norms; it was key to helping cultures in the past hold on to effective survival strategies over centuries even when they didn’t understand enough about the world’s underlying laws to know why those strategies worked. But when the environment changes, it can lead those with a small-c conservative disposition to cling to old ways long past the point they are serving any purpose. This pattern has given popularity to the principle known as Chesterton’s Fence: if you come across a fence obstructing you, you shouldn’t take it down until you have a good idea of why someone built it there in the first place. It might still be essential to keeping wolves out of the village, or it might not.

That’s the spirit with which we want to approach the development officer question and other restrictive components of the grassroots organization pattern. Our puzzle is:

What qualities of an organization are important to enabling mobilization of unpaid activists, and which are not?

This is not a moral question. Lots of organizations are pursuing strategies that don’t rely on unpaid activists. The Good Food Institute, for instance, conducts market-shaping economic and bioindustrial research in partnership with alternative protein companies. Perhaps they could make use of some pro-bono work from expert scientists and economists, but it wouldn’t be possible to do this work by mobilizing ordinary people. On the other hand, anyone can collect signatures for a ballot measure with Pro-Animal Future or protest a luxury fashion chain with Coalition to Abolish the Fur Trade, and these groups don’t have the budget to scale up their work without volunteers. Mobilizing is central to their strategy– which means that, as they seek to increase their capacity and come under greater pressure from both inside and out to professionalize, the question above becomes existential.

I want groups to structure themselves in the way that makes them most likely to succeed at their strategy. Many of the attributes historically associated with grassroots organizations come with a cost. If those attributes turn out not to be necessary, groups could let go of them and become even more effective. But if they drift too far towards the professional pattern, they might lose the ability to mobilize– and once lost, it is much harder to get it back. The Humane League is a cautionary tale. THL started out as a raucous grassroots volunteer organization operating in just one city, Philadelphia. By the time I was aware of them, they’d grown into one of the largest U.S. farmed animal nonprofits, and went international soon after. They drank deeply the nectar of professionalization, and at some point along the way they largely lost the ability to mobilize. This is to say nothing of THL’s overall impact; it could be that these were the right choices for them to make, despite the tradeoffs. But the fact that they’ve always had a team of staff dedicated to mobilizing tells me they would love to mobilize more people if they could. This post is just as much for the big professional orgs as for the scrappy grassroots groups taking their first sips of that nectar.

So what are the differences between grassroots and professional animal advocacy organizations that determine whether your org will be able to mobilize? This is the list I first wrote out when I started grappling with the question, along with the untested stories I had in my head for why each might be important to an organization’s ability to mobilize activists.

Attributes of grassroots vs. professional organizations - TAKE ONE 🎬

• Abolitionist (radical) demands: During my time in the animal movement, this has seemed so self-evident that the grassroots vs. professional distinction is much more often referred to as the abolitionist vs. welfarist camps. Most passionate vegan activists are at best uninspired by cage-free campaigns, and often are downright hostile towards them. To organize in the grassroots, you’ve got to have abolitionist asks. Professional groups, on the other hand, are pressed by their wealthy philanthropists to pursue incremental asks with measurable results. (The same radical vs. incrementalist friction plays out in every other social movement I’m aware of.)

• Flatter hierarchies: This one, too, is almost definitional. Grassroots organizations belong to their members. People say we when referring to the group. Even the word volunteer doesn’t seem right; it connotes volunteering for an organization rather than being part of the organization. Grassroots groups tend to describe members as activists rather than volunteers. And while groups can have leaders, members across the group expect to have more autonomy over their participation. After all, most of them aren’t being paid to be there– if participation isn’t rewarding, they’ll just go home. Professional groups don’t have this problem, so they adopt traditional corporate pyramid structures.

• Low salaries: Grassroots groups don’t like having staff, because the movement is supposed to belong to the activists, and there’s an inherent hierarchy between full-time staff and volunteers. Some groups get away without hiring, but scaling up with zero staff is wicked hard. Grassroots orgs solve this by paying vanishingly low salaries, on the theory that 1) low salaries will attract fanatics and repel people who aren’t sufficiently motivated, and 2) working in the movement is a privilege in itself, and if the staff is making less than the poorest volunteer who works in food service part-time, then getting hired will be seen as a sacrifice, and volunteers won’t ask “Why am I showing up here for free when someone else is being paid to do the same work?” Salaries are typically flat across grassroots organizations, or needs-based. By contrast, professional groups hope to pay top-of-market salaries for each role to attract top talent, and are only restricted by budget realities.

• Frugality: the same ethos behind low salaries is applied to many spending decisions. E.g. when a grassroots group travels, everyone piles into a shared Airbnb, filling up every couch. I was dumbstruck the first time I heard of professional groups buying separate hotel rooms for each employee, at hundreds of dollars a night. There’s two friggin’ beds per room! We would put at least four people in there.

• Risk tolerance: Grassroots groups are nonchalant about legal and reputational risks– think naked protests and mass arrests. When we hear someone from a professional group say they’ll need to get approval from their organization’s General Counsel to do a protest that isn’t even arrestable, we feel a mix of pity and disdain, thinking “Thank goodness I don’t work for that org.” It helps that nobody would bother to sue you when you don’t have any money.

• Ad hoc governance: In professional organizations, the Executive Director reports to a Board of Directors, a group of people removed from the org’s day-to-day work who often need to give approval for important changes. Grassroots folk are aghast at the idea of people from outside the organization exercising this kind of veto power. We construct minimal, ad hoc governance structures and even eschew the words Executive Director for titles like Lead Organizer or Mission Lead. Some groups might implement a form of democracy, but more common is a self-selecting leadership team and the democracy of the market, i.e. activists empower one group over another by voting with their feet.

• No professional fundraisers: last but not least, grassroots orgs don’t have full-time roles for fundraising. Money is dirty, and we shouldn’t spend a lot of time and energy getting more of it lest it corrupt us. If anyone is focused full-time on fundraising, they’ll start pressuring the organization to do things that would make donors happy, rather than what would be most effective. Meanwhile, big professional groups have entire departments dedicated to fundraising.

Here’s a table summarizing that:

Evidence Against

These were the assumptions that had defined my first decade in the movement: if you strayed too far from the grassroots column of this table, you’d turn into an astroturfed homunculus and lose your ability to mobilize activists. Once I wrote it down, it became much easier to start poking holes in it. I did the first thing one should always do when evaluating a hypothesis: look for counter examples. And it didn’t take me long to come up with one that seemed to blow the entire framing out of the water: the Democratic Party.

The Democrats are basically the antithesis of grassroots. Dominated by the centrist, corporatist wing, the party doesn’t just stick to moderate demands– it has shown it would sooner lose an election than empower its radical flank. It employs a vast, complex structural hierarchy with most power held at the top. It has gained notoriety for enriching political consultants with jaw-dropping compensation packages (the losing Harris campaign outspent Trump 3:2 in 2024.) And it may well be that a majority of those consultants are primarily in the business of fundraising.

Yet despite all of this, the Democratic Party every four years mobilizes one of the largest sustained volunteer operations in human history. Even between presidential elections, the party’s permanent volunteer apparatus, in its size and discipline, is the envy of any civic organization.

It’s tempting to hand-wave the example set by the Democrats. We can generate a quick list of reasons that organizing in electoral politics will be on a larger scale than other issues:

1. Enormous power is at stake in the U.S. presidential election.

2. Because of 1, electoral politics is culturally salient, with corporate media focusing constantly on the president.

3. Presidential campaigns focus on issues that people feel are highly relevant to their lives.

4. The major parties field candidates in nearly every jurisdiction nationwide, creating hyperlocal communities of party activists subdivided all the way down to city council districts.

What if instead of a list of reasons to dismiss the Democrats’ example, this is a list of lessons to be learned from them?

#1. Enormous power is at stake in presidential elections. But if power is the ability to alter the world, effective campaigns for animals can affect more lives than all the issues in mainstream U.S. politics added together. Choosing effective campaigns and communicating the stakes effectively to our activists could accomplish this. That last sentence might be key: currently, in my view, most professional groups are better at choosing effective campaigns, while most grassroots groups are better at communicating their campaigns in a way that inspires activists. I’d love to see us bring these skills together– shoutout to the coalition between Animal Activist Collective and International Council for Animal Welfare who are doing exactly that.

Replicating #2, the salience of the issues in corporate media outlets, is slightly out of our hands. In the U.S., the animal movement has struggled greatly in recent years to attract sustained media coverage, and not for lack of trying. But in the UK, Animal Rising has had great success dominating media coverage with culturally loaded stunts like disrupting the Grand National horse races. Each wave of coverage has led to a dramatic increase in new activist signups through their website, proving once again that media coverage can be converted into activist power.

I suspect #3 is the most important thing on the list: people feel that the presidential election is materially relevant to their lives. Most people will never feel that way about helping animals, but lots of people already do. While I don’t believe that we can win just by mobilizing 3.5% of the population, I do think we could get huge victories for animals by making our movement relevant to the large segment of society, vegans and vegetarians, who do care deeply about farmed animals. Meanwhile, the wider public can be energized by disgust over food contamination and anger at being lied to by food companies.

Finally, #4 is the core message experienced organizers never shut up about: activism follows from local, in-person community building. The Democrats are able to do this community building in every community because there are Democratic candidates to organize around in every community.

If we can create effective campaigns that have local targets in as many communities as possible, communicate why those campaigns matter, organize real local community events around them, and attract media coverage where possible, perhaps we can mobilize activists regardless of whether or not we also hire development officers.

My Pilgrimage to the Sages

“When the student is ready, the teacher appears.”

I had my list, and I had my doubts. I decided to look for help reconciling them. List in hand, I charted a course for the fabled land of Los Angeles, seeking the counsel of wise oracles drawn together for that most auspicious of gatherings, the Animal and Vegan Advocacy Summit.

I presented my question to friends new and old:

What qualities of an organization determine whether it can successfully mobilize unpaid activists?

The First Sage: Community & relationship building (and that’s all)

“People don’t get radicalized by arguments; they get radicalized by belonging.” – Hahrie Han

Steven Rouk is founder of Connect for Animals, an effort to support community building by bringing together every farmed animal movement event in the world (in-person or digital) into a single app. Steven’s answer was: reaching out to people and building relationships centered on activism is both necessary and sufficient.

Including this on the list was easy for me; actually, in my mind, it had already been there implicitly, so obvious as to not bear mentioning. Before CFA, Steven and I organized together in DxE for years, where we both learned that building community is essential for activist momentum. When I first started organizing, to promote a protest, I would just create a Facebook event page and share it into the local vegan FB groups. Spoiler alert: nobody came, except three or four friends I’d drag along from my university. It wasn’t until I started organizing regular activist potlucks and spending hours a day sending out personal invitations to these potlucks that I started to get any traction for protests, quickly growing from 5 attendees to 50. That’s what organizing is: build a community of people with real relationships and a shared identity of showing up for the campaign.

The surprise was that Steven argued this was the only criterion that mattered, at least compared to all the items on my list. If big, professionalized nonprofits were failing to mobilize activists for their campaigns, it wasn’t because of welfarist demands or corporate cultures. It was simply because they weren’t doing the thing. If you put in the work of building 1:1 relationships, talking to people about the unique ways they can get involved, then it doesn’t matter if your campaign is welfarist or abolitionist, grassroots or professional.

It hadn’t occurred to me that the big groups struggling to mobilize just weren’t doing the thing, but Steven would know better than I: after our time at DxE, Steven spent years working at one of them.⁴

The Second Sage: Leadership development

“The function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers.” – Ralph Nader

Chrys Liptrot is the founder of the International Council for Animal Welfare. A large part of ICAW’s raison d’être is bringing energetic grassroots organizing tactics back to the world of welfare campaigns– aiming to disprove my first list item about abolitionist demands in the process. Chrys’ answer was: developing small-l leadership capacity inside the movement, and recruiting from that internal pipeline for big-L Leadership roles.

Chrys’ point has a rich social movement literature backing it up. Organizing legends like Marshall Ganz and Paul Engler fixate on leadership development in their writing. In an article published by Harvard, Ganz says of social movement organizations, “their most critical capacity is consistent formal and informal leadership development.”

From Chrys’ perspective, this was the key mistake that led to a decline in mobilization for groups like THL– she got her start in the movement there, and watched as the organization filled more and more senior roles with people who had impressive corporate resumes but no background in animal activism. This contrasts sharply with how recruitment worked in groups like DxE. For better or worse, the informal job application process in DxE was to volunteer full time for at least six months. If you proved you could be effective within DxE’s framework, you’d get offered a job without ever being asked for a resume.

Social movements have a unique culture unlike other nonprofit or for-profit workplaces, and each individual movement org thrives when it develops a strong sense of identity among its members. Effective movement groups are often accused of being cults. Such comparisons betray a serious misunderstanding of both social movements and cults, but the grain of truth is that movement orgs can accomplish great things when their members are bound together by a shared purpose and distinct culture. Leaders from outside this world lack both the understanding and the legitimacy needed to inspire volunteers. DxE’s approach, while it could probably be improved on, ensured that paid staff were seen as legitimate leaders of the community, and inspired the next batch of recruits to strive hard knowing that if they proved themselves, they too could live the dream of working in the movement. It also motivated the current leaders to spend extra time mentoring promising activists, knowing they might find their next colleague among them.

Hiring movement outsiders, however glamorous, sends the opposite message to both volunteers and volunteer managers, a fact Chrys saw when she started hiring campaigners for ICAW. Chrys was first hired at THL after proving herself volunteering on cage-free campaigns. A decade later, when it was her turn to hire, there was a paucity of up-and-coming leaders volunteering in the welfare space. Fortunately, she was able to build a crack team by hiring from the grassroots leadership pipeline– people who were a few steps ahead of me in leaving old grassroots vs. professional and abolitionist vs. welfarist distinctions behind.

The Third Sage: Coordinate with values, rather than bureaucracy

“Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” – Peter Drucker

Connor Jackson is the founder of the UK branch of Anima International, known locally as Open Cages. Anima runs welfare campaigns across Europe, targeting both corporate and government policy. Connor’s answer was: building a radically autonomous structure using a clear set of guiding principles.

Anima has earned a reputation in the movement for maintaining an agile, whatever-it-takes culture, scaling up well past 100 paid employees without succumbing to the bureaucratic inertia that has plagued groups of a similar size. In Connor’s view, the key to Anima’s success has been maintaining what he proudly calls “a cultish obsession with culture.” The centerpiece of that obsession is Anima’s core values.

Lots of corporations have lists of ‘core values’ or ‘guiding principles.’ Respect, Integrity, Communication, and Excellence were Enron’s values as its executives carried out one of the largest financial frauds in history. The slaughterhouse corporate JBS claims their values include animal welfare, sustainability, and respect for workers.

But while corporate values are usually nothing but window dressing, these lists of principles can play a very different role in less-hierarchical activist organizations. Principles and values take the place of a strict command hierarchy, enabling members of the org to act more freely while keeping everyone pointed in the same direction. The values act as a sort of constitution for the org, bestowing certain rights and duties on every member regardless of stature.

Connor’s description of Anima matches my experience in mass protest groups like DxE and Extinction Rebellion, a grassroots climate protest org based in the UK. The values are not just a poster on a wall somewhere; they are an important part of the day-to-day life of the organization. During deliberations, it’s common for people to reference specific values to buttress one decision over another, and these references can often be the decisive point in a debate.

This approach has its own downsides and risks. A list of values can be instrumentalized by a clever arguer who has them memorized better than others. After a few brilliant years, Extinction Rebellion spiraled into groupthink and infighting as people weaponized the values in service of a power struggle over the group’s direction. This partly resulted from a broken structure, but it was fueled by flaws in the values themselves, which frowned on any imbalance of power in the organization even as a result of meritocracy.

Anima’s example shows that paired with a clear structure with a light hierarchy specifying who is responsible for what, a thoughtful set of values can help focus a highly effective culture. Anima’s values paint a picture of an organization obsessed with candor and meritocracy, the kind of workplace where someone on their first day would be encouraged to argue it out with the Executive Director if they think that a wrong decision is being made. They clearly assign a broad mandate to every member of the organization to experiment and take risks, without needing to seek permission. (Anima’s values aren’t shared publicly yet, but for some other examples I love, check out Pro-Animal Future and the Sunrise Movement.)

At Anima, even the values themselves are not beyond questioning. Ultimately, though, getting the right values written down is the easy part. The hard part is holding onto a culture where they matter more than internal politicking.

The Fourth Sage: Build the movement, not your brand

“It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.” – Harry S. Truman

Ben Newman is the co-director of Animal Rising, a UK-based group that to me represents the best of what grassroots social movements can do. I spoke to Ben last, sharing my notes from the previous conversations. We agreed that while the original list forms a surface-level pattern that people tend to focus on, the new list reflects much more important truths, and we swapped stories illustrating each one. Then he offered his own answer: grassroots groups prioritize the movement over their own organization.

Hang around grassroots activists from any movement long enough, and you’ll hear an identical story: a scrappy local group works hard on a campaign for years, and just as they’re about to win, a big professional nonprofit that had been ignoring them jumps on board and makes a minor contribution. Then the big group announces the win on social media as if it was theirs, and raises more money in a few days than the grassroots group’s entire yearly budget.

Whether or not these tales leave out important contributions that big groups make behind the scenes, the pattern says a lot about the strained relationships between grassroots and professional organizations. And while grassroots groups grumble about this in private, I think Ben is right that one of the defining attributes of these groups is that they care more about the health of the movement than their own organization.

DxE used to host an annual gathering called the DxE Forum, which was intended essentially as a bootcamp. Organizers from chapters across the world would visit Berkeley for a week of training and community building. In 2017, organizers from other grassroots groups heard about it, attended, and had a great time, and as soon as Forum organizers realized there was interest from outside the DxE network, they completely overhauled it. In 2018, it was rebranded as the Animal Liberation Conference. The first ALC was nominally co-hosted by many groups despite DxE still doing virtually all of the work to put the conference on.

Animal Rising exhibits the same movement-centric attitude, flowing in the opposite direction. Each time an Animal Rising campaign really takes off, they end up giving it its own brand and spinning it off as a largely independent organization. Plant-Based Universities, Vegans Support the Farmers, and Communities Against Factory Farming are all efforts that started inside Animal Rising but now operate independently of AR’s brand.

Don’t get me wrong: there’s plenty of ego in grassroots activism, leading to intense infighting and bitter feuds, both of which increase as grassroots groups come under more pressure to professionalize. But I agree with Ben that there is an initial default tendency for sharing credit, reflecting a wider difference in how grassroots leaders and professional leaders view their organizations. Professional orgs are trying to build up permanent institutions that can act as long-term power centers for their cause. For better or worse, grassroots orgs live more in the present; they’re less concerned with whether the group will still exist two years from now than from making an impact that might leave the overall movement in a stronger position. I was particularly struck by this when I spent time with Extinction Rebellion in 2019. XR activists saw the whole thing as a single shot, go-for-broke strategy. They believed the window to stop catastrophic climate change was about to close, and they were going hard for two years to try to catalyze a nationwide mass protest movement to force the government to act. If it didn’t work in a few years, they would all give up and go start farms in the North of England to start preparing for the collapse. Many of them made good on those plans when the Covid pandemic derailed XR’s momentum.

This connects back to one item from the original list, about grassroots groups having a higher tolerance for risk. Protest and social movement tactics are an example of a hits-based strategy. Most attempts to trigger a mass protest event don’t go anywhere. Rarely, though, the stars align, and you get a cultural shockwave like the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. From a movement level, it’s worth it to have someone sitting in front of this cultural slot machine, spinning the crank over and over until their arm falls off, for the chance that the entire movement could hit the jackpot. Grassroots groups are willing to pursue these kinds of high-variance strategies (though not all grassroots strategies are nearly so high-variance.)

Growth, Impact, and Community

As I reflected more on the example of the Democratic party, I decided to add my own answer to the list: effectiveness. The reason people give their free time to the animal rights movement is to make a difference for animals. Yes, community is an important part of sustainable activism. But I think in my early years as an organizer, I focused too much on ensuring every activist had a sense of community and not enough on their sense of impact.

Research from my old colleague Eva Hamer at Pax Fauna supports this conclusion. In interviews with dozens of activists who had in the past volunteered at nearly full-time hours for animal advocacy groups, the most common cause of burnout was a feeling of inefficacy. As one organizer put it: “It’s very exhausting to just look back at four or five years of hard work, lots of weekends, giving up lots of money, time, effort spent to think like, ‘God, have we even helped a single animal?’”

This was the rock that the grassroots movement of the 2010s ultimately broke apart on. From the time I got involved in 2015, grassroots animal activism grew exponentially until around 2018, with most of that growth driven by DxE, Save, and AV as mentioned earlier. By 2019, growth had plateaued or started to decline. The pandemic in 2020 knocked the movement out, but it was only accelerating a trend that had already started.

The problem was that each of these groups primarily focused on a rinse-and-repeat strategy that didn’t create incremental wins. DxE activists went out month after month staging disruptions inside restaurants and grocery stores; Save activists holding mournful vigils outside slaughterhouses; and AV activists conducting vegan outreach to strangers in bustling commercial areas. After a few months or years of doing this, you might have seen the movement grow, but you weren’t getting any indication your work was having an impact on the wider world. People lost motivation. Some drifted away quietly, while others directed their frustration into vicious infighting, further grinding away momentum.

This should have been entirely predictable. If I’m going to keep showing up to volunteer my time week after week, I need to believe not just that the group is making a real difference for animals, but that my participation is meaningfully increasing that impact. If this isn’t self-evident, it’s backed up by a growing scientific literature called Self-Determination Theory.

You’ve probably heard of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, the first empirically-based psychological theory of motivation.

Maslow’s Hierarchy is still relevant, but for workplace motivation and volunteer organizing, a newer framework is more useful. Self-Determination Theory identifies three key drivers of intrinsic motivation. They each go by different names, so I prefer to remember them as ABC: autonomy, belonging, and competence.

I was too lazy to make my own graphic; this one has a different word for ‘belonging’

Autonomy is our ability to express ourselves creatively through our movement participation. It is the feeling that it matters that I am here, rather than someone else; I am irreplaceable. This is where the emphasis on flatter hierarchies arises in grassroots groups, but avoiding titles like executive director is a misunderstanding of the need. Impact-oriented activists don’t need to feel like they have an equal say in everything– indeed, these people hate decision paralysis and design-by-committee. Anarchy drives them away. What they want is the freedom to pursue their own entrepreneurial initiatives within a well-articulated framework.

Belonging, aka relatedness, the sense of community we’ve already discussed. Having friends in the group, and eventually starting to refer to the group as we, are the signs you’re looking for to see this is met for your activists.

Competence is personal efficacy and growth. It comes from seeing that the group is winning, and from seeing the causal link from my own participation to those wins. It also comes from learning new skills, taking on challenging new experiences, and feeling that participating in the group is causing me to grow as a person.

The simplest way to give your activist that feeling of efficacy is by winning campaigns. But whether or not you can serve up incremental wins (and some genuinely impactful strategies have a harder time doing this in the short term) you need to put in time and effort communicating your strategy and theory of change. DxE’s co-founder Wayne Hsiung excelled at this. Through his frequent speeches explaining the lessons we could draw from past social movements, Wayne inspired thousands of people to dedicate serious time to DxE. After several years without concrete wins, that momentum fizzled, but it showed that effective storytelling can jumpstart your movement.

If competence calls for leaders to clearly communicate their theory of change, autonomy requires the same of organizational structure. Activists won’t be able to initiate creative projects within your organization if they don’t know who is responsible for what resources. This is easier said than done; most orgs fall short on transparency not because they lack the intention, but because they figure activists won’t be interested in boring details about organizational structure, and because communicating those details takes precious time from both organizers and activists. Organizers face a constant struggle when communicating with activists; we have so much information to share and so many requests to make, and holding people’s attention is getting harder every year. But one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned from years of organizing is that people are hungry for detail. Every time I have put out a detailed explainer of our theory of change or organizational structure, activists devour it and ask follow-up questions. If you are trying to mobilize people, it is worth a lot of effort to create clear resources walking new activists through your theory of change and organizational structure.

Autonomy, Belonging, and Competence ring true both to my own movement participation and to my years as an organizer trying to get others to participate. Self-Determination Theory points out that we all have multiple reasons for participating in movements. Having an impact is one of them, and there are other motives that benefit us personally. That’s OK. Movement participation is therapeutic, and activists deserve the community and catharsis that comes from taking action together. We just have to be mindful that these motives don’t displace impact as the primary driver of our organizations. But that’s a subject for another post.

The New List

“In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.” – Yogi Berra

I started out with a list of attributes differentiating grassroots and professional organizations. Steven, Chrys, Connor, and Ben all agreed that most of the items on that list describe a division that exists today, but not the way things ought to be. There is no good reason it should not be possible to mobilize en masse around meaningful, incremental welfare reforms. It has happened before, not long ago: mass numbers of Brits and Australians were mobilized in protests against live export in 1995 and 2018 respectively, and hundreds of activists in California and Massachusetts volunteered for months in 2016 and 2018 for ballot initiatives banning intensive confinement.⁵

It would not be healthy for the movement if every organization was burning itself out after two or three years, or only pursuing go-for-broke strategies. We all benefit from having some orgs accumulate long-term institutional power. And it’s not hard to understand why an org trying to build up a 2-year financial runway⁶ would find it irresistible to fundraise off of every win they could. These frictions arise from different structural incentives, not from dishonest behavior. But all told, these differences describe dynamics every group should be aware of, not a hard distinction between two different approaches to advocacy.

I set out to understand what determines whether an organization can mobilize unpaid activists. The answers I came away with were not intended as a general guide to nonprofit effectiveness. Yet looking at the list below, the first thing that jumps out at me is how general most of it is. That’s my biggest takeaway from all of this. The old grassroots dogma taught me that orgs need to abstain from certain choices in order to mobilize. The truth is simpler. You don’t need poverty wages and anarchist governance. You just need good organizational best practices and hard work.

How organizations mobilize activists:

1. Run and win campaigns that create tangible change for animals. (Yes it’s obvious, but it gets neglected in too many conversations about mobilizing.)

2. Build local, in-person communities around your campaigns (and activism in general).

3. Take the time to communicate the ins and outs of your strategy with your activists, including the gritty details and tough choices.

4. Develop volunteers into leaders, and hire from this internal leadership pipeline whenever possible.

5. Give everyone in your organization (paid or otherwise) autonomy and creative ownership over their own participation.

6. Define your values clearly, and observe them in the day-to-day life of the organization.

7. Use media spectacles to attract attention, if you are prepared to absorb new recruits from it.

8. Prioritize building the movement over building up your own brand– it will pay off even for you.

Effective people want to be part of effective movements. Not everyone will be excited about every organizational choice you make. Some activists have strong commitments to particular structures or practices (fully horizontal organizations, consensus decision-making, total liberationist messaging) for ideological reasons that go beyond strategic impact. You can’t build an effective organization by trying to accommodate every political philosophy. Choose structures that serve your strategy,⁷ communicate unapologetically about why, and trust that you’ll attract people who care most about the same things you do: winning meaningful change for animals. In the long run, what will alienate activists most is failing to deliver the goods.

I’m glad to say that today, I no longer feel tied to my identity as a grassroots campaigner. Instead, I want to win. I still believe in the tremendous power of mobilizing unpaid activists to win campaigns; we’ll never be able to defeat our adversaries without it. But now I feel free to draw on a wider range of tools.

In the end, we decided not to hire a development officer. After a few of us tried doing it ourselves for a couple hours a week, it became clear that a new hire would be less effective than existing team members. It turned out to be an easy decision once the ideological layers were peeled back.

Frugality and Morality

I still have some unresolved questions, mainly around money. When I hear about organizations renting individual hotel rooms for every employee, I wince,⁸ not to mention salaries that fall above the 90th percentile of U.S. workers. This could still be lingering dogma from my early days in the movement, or there could be more to it.

As a younger organizer, the main reason I favored low salaries was to avoid widening the gulf between paid and unpaid members of an organization. If salaries are low, then taking a job in the movement will be seen as a sacrifice rather than a privilege, and volunteers won’t wonder why they’re showing up for free when the person next to them is being paid. There’s also another, simpler reason: low salaries are cheaper, and mean we can get more done with our very limited budget.

I learned countless things from founding my own organization, and it changed my perspective in ways I couldn’t have foreseen. One of those changes was how reverent I came to feel about spending other people’s money. Every dollar in our bank account had been donated by someone in order to help animals. I knew most of these donors personally, and the amounts they gave were not trivial for them; these weren’t people with money burning a hole in their pocket. Even if they were, their donation to us was often money that would have gone to a different animal rights group instead. That set the bar high. I felt an almost spiritual duty to make the absolute most of every dollar we were given.

At the same time, I learned to question some of my earlier assumptions about how to honor donors and activists alike. That came from talking to donors and activists, who were often the same people. Together, they were the fifth sage on my pilgrimage.

When I finally asked donors what they thought of their money being spent on higher salaries, they all said two things. First, they wanted the people busting their asses for the movement to be financially comfortable and not ever be stressing about money. Second, they wanted their money to be spent in whatever way was going to win, and if that meant competitive salaries to recruit high performers, so be it. Activists gave a similar answer: they just wanted the organization to succeed, and they trusted the people responsible to spend money accordingly, though they appreciated transparent explanations of all these decisions.

The argument in favor of competitive salaries and private hotel rooms is that they can attract higher-performing people who create more impact per dollar. These talented, experienced, credentialed people are still taking a pay cut to work in the movement compared to what they could make in the private sector, but there’s only so much pay cut they’ll be willing to take.

As I wrestled with all of this, someone recommended a TED talk by a professional fundraiser named Dan Pallotta. Dan rails against the culture in charity that equates frugality with morality, and makes a strong case that charities should be evaluated purely based on impact per dollar, not on how much money they spend on “overhead.” He tells the story of his own charity, a fundraising race for cancer research that became massively successful, raising hundreds of millions of dollars for research before being destroyed in the media for spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on “recruitment and customer service,” administrative overhead categories deemed insufficiently pious. Each time I watch Dan’s talk, it makes my blood boil. I fully agree with his thesis that placing a frugality double-standard on nonprofits is making us less effective.

Ultimately, frugality is not morality; impact is morality. We should spend money in whatever way will get us the most impact. That includes spending money on raising more money, and spending money attracting highly competent people. I can’t deny that I’ve met some outstanding activists over the years who weren’t interested in taking full-time movement jobs because they didn’t pay enough.

But then, I can’t help but think of people like L. L is an exceptionally talented activist who recently quit her high-paying job at a large animal advocacy org, where she was surely due for a promotion soon, in order to take a job at a scrappy startup that will never be able to pay her half as much as she was making before, all because she felt it would let her make a bigger impact. For most people, working in the animal rights movement is a dream come true, and having a job anywhere is enough to satisfy their desire to do good. If they could get paid more while still working in the movement, that’s an easy choice.

Then there’s the Ls, the people who are obsessed with impact. The people on their laptops from 8 am until past midnight, sleeping on couches in crowded Airbnbs, doing whatever it takes. People who wouldn’t hesitate to risk prison time, if they thought it was the fastest way to win. These are the people who make the animal rights movement great. If we have to offer high salaries in order to attract qualified people for certain roles, I just hope we won’t forget who the true elites of our movement are.

If that seems like a confused or contradictory point to end on, well, there you have it. I’m still learning, too.

Build on,

Sandcastles

Mantras:

• Effective people want to be part of effective movements.

• I desire to do whatever is most effective, not whatever is most grassroots.

• Frugality is not morality; impact is morality.

• Build the movement, not your brand.

1. For campaigners outside the animal movement, just insert whatever incrementalist demand is most lampooned by the radicals in your movement.

2. Shout out to my coach Amruza Birdie, an experienced animal advocate and the sponsor of today’s post (just kidding, I don’t have sponsors, I’m just recommending her because she’s great (but hey, I’m totally open to that so email me if you want to buy my soul?))

3. I haven’t done a good job conveying this, but John was the first one to discard his rigid grassroots identity, and had already done so when we had the conversation I described. This story is more about my reaction to what John said than what he was actually trying to say.

4. Connor, who we’ll meet in a moment, shared this about relationship building at big professional nonprofits: “Some volunteers are surprised that I spend time with them at events to chat about activism. They say that they rarely get to speak to people from other welfarist/bigger groups when they do events with them. I find that those groups are also much less likely to want to/have time to hang out after events for dinner etc. I think bigger groups simply don’t prioritise it because they don’t consider it crucial or they have other priorities.”

5. Here’s 100 activists in Paris occupying a Burger King with a welfare demand. Mostly as a note to myself to write a future post about this: many of my early preconceptions about the animal movement (grassroots vs professional, abolitionist vs welfare) seem to be totally invalidated by looking at activism outside the anglosphere, further implying there is nothing fundamental about these distinctions. Apologies to non-anglophone readers for my chauvinism.

6. Financial runway = how long your bank account could cover your operating costs if all revenue stopped tomorrow. 1.5 or two years is typical for established professional orgs; 2 months or less is common for startups and grassroots groups.

7. In my experience, most grassroots groups are aware of critiques of total structurelessness, most famously The Tyranny of Structurelessness, but still want to experiment with different approaches than traditional corporate pyramids. I still celebrate these experiments and believe a traditional corporate pyramid does not best serve most grassroots groups, but my own efforts here so far have lacked sufficient transparency about who owns high-level strategic decisions. I plan to be more comfortable with some hierarchy going forward while still placing enormous value on the autonomy of every member within their role.

8. I’m not saying this is a rational reaction. Hotel rooms are a tiny fraction of the movement’s budget, and there are legitimate reasons people would feel uncomfortable sharing a room with their boss even of the same sex.