Vegan Outreach is a 501 nonprofit organization, working to end violence towards animals. Their community outreach involves signing people up for guided vegan challenges, distributing printed informational booklets, showing virtual reality videos, and organizing vegan chef challenges. As of January 2020, over 30 million hard copies of the group's booklets have been handed out by Vegan Outreach staff and volunteers around the world. Originally known as Animal Liberation Action, the group was founded by Matt Ball and Jack Norris in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1993.
History
As members of the Animal Rights Community of Cincinnati, Matt Ball and Jack Norris spent the winter of 1990–1991 holding fur protests outside cultural events. Their focus turned to vegetarianism in 1992, and the Animal Rights Community of Cincinnati funded the printing and distribution of 10,000 pro-vegetarian flyers entitled Vegetarianism. In June 1993, twelve activists—including Ball and Norris—held a three-day "Fast for Farm Animals" in front of a Cincinnati slaughterhouse. On the last day of the fast, some of the protesters took a large banner reading "Stop Eating Animals" to the University of Cincinnati campus. Following this event, Ball and Norris formed Animal Liberation Action and started a campaign of holding "Stop Eating Animals" banners on street corners. In 1994, ALA developed a booklet called And Justice For All. It focused on the reasons to adopt a vegan diet, focusing on the abuse of the animals involved. The following year, ALA's name was officially changed to Vegan Outreach.
Vegan Outreach's key personnel are based in the U.S and Canada, Mexico, India, Australia, and Kenya. Staff and volunteers conduct outreach with the aim of signing people up for online guided vegan challenges. Community outreach takes place on about 1,000 colleges and high school campuses each semester, as well as at vegfests, cat and dog festivals, Comic-Cons, yoga festivals, farmers markets, and other fairs and conventions worldwide. Outreach involves free vegan food samples, showing virtual reality videos, and tabling with their persuasive booklets like "What is Speciesism?" and "Why Vegan." Their booklets have been distributed in all 50 states, Puerto Rico, ten Canadian territories and provinces, Mexico, and numerous other countries. Vegan Outreach also organizes vegan chef challenges in cities across the U.S. in which local, meat-based restaurants add vegan dishes for a month and compete for prizes, usually resulting in restaurants permanently keeping vegan items on their menu. They also provide a vegan mentorship program for individual, one-on-one guidance in over 1,000 cities and dozens of countries. Vegan Outreach also partners with restaurants, grocery stores, airports, and wholesale companies to guide them in adding plant-based options to their menus, shelves, and cafeterias.
