EA - Introducing Allied Scholars for Animal Protection by Dr Faraz Harsini

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Introducing Allied Scholars for Animal Protection, published by Dr Faraz Harsini on May 24, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.We’re excited to introduce Allied Scholars for Animal Protection, a nonprofit creating a unified infrastructure for effective and sustainable animal advocacy at universities. Our mission is to organize, train, and mentor students who are interested in advocating for animal welfare and pursuing impactful careers.The ProblemUniversities play a critical role in shaping the future of society and effecting systemic change. As future leaders, college students hold immense potential for driving progress and cultural transformation.Unfortunately, animal advocacy in universities tends to be limited, sporadic, and unsustainable. The existing clubs on campuses operate independently with no coordination, and students are often hindered by a lack of time, training, experience, and support. Often, when active students graduate, their animal advocacy clubs become inactive. Much time and effort are wasted due to a lack of continuity and longevity of animal advocacy on campuses because students have to reinvent the proverbial wheel each time they restart a group.One of the worst consequences of this is that much talent goes untapped due to insufficient education and inspiration for vegans to choose effective and impactful careers. The EA Community is working hard to reach this talent through career advising and community building. We believe that on-the-ground support for university animal rights clubs can complement EA recruitment efforts and can encourage vegan college students to engage with critical intellectual work being done by the EA community. We also think that community building work focused specifically on animal advocacy can help reach vegans who might not be as interested in other cause areas or the broader EA project.Some animal advocacy organizations provide opportunities for students to volunteer, but enabling a strong campus movement is not the sole focus of these organizations. Having a single organization dedicated to providing infrastructure for campus activism would therefore fill a highly neglected niche in the current animal advocacy ecosystem.Building a strong campus animal advocacy movement is also highly tractable. There are many vegan students out there who care deeply about these issues but do not feel they have the knowledge or resources to organize a group of their own. By providing the needed support, we can dramatically lower the barrier of entry to vegan advocacy and broaden the pool of talent going towards highly impactful careers.Our ApproachAnimal organizations often focus on training individual students rather than on building a sustainable vegan community. ASAP takes a more holistic approach. Our strategy for constructing a strong campus animal movement involves the following:Building a growing vegan community while investing in and strengthening individuals. This means conducting outreach to vegans who might like to become more active as advocates, and training vegans to conduct effective outreach to nonvegans.Providing on-the-ground support to student groups.Collecting thousands of signatures through petitions.Streamlining the process of starting and running student animal advocacy groups.Facilitating systemic and long-term educational frameworks, rather than just one-time events. We will provide educational seminars to empower vegans and educate the general student population, with a special emphasis on plant-based nutrition for future healthcare professionals.Fighting speciesism and humane-washing while promoting plant-based options.By facilitating more effective student advocacy, we believe ASAP can help produce more influential vegans who push for change. We want to inspire the next Eric Adams, Co...