CAA Updates

2009 Year in Review

The Bridges program gave 82 presentations in 2009 reaching over 2400 students and others. Each presentation has been logged in the Bridges Rapport database which includes a description of how the presentations went during that visit to the school. 2009's presentations break down like this:

9 Middle school presentations

61 High school presentations

9 College presentations

1 for TLOV

1 Adult Learning class

1 Senior Center presentation

We received many outstanding compliments from students and teachers, many of whom have expressed an interest in veganism as well. We also followed up with students who had criticisms to better explain our perspective and better understand their concerns.

In addition, Bridges gave away a couple of thousand food samples and materials during the presentations, held four training sessions (including the one at TLOV), sent a mass email gaining several new teachers, and participated in the Go Green Expo to hand out just about another thousand food samples. We were briefly interviewed there.

 

I just spoke to a Star Tribune writer, and there will probably be an article written about me and my 'healthy lifestyle habits' including veganism and bike commuting. A mutual friend introduced us. I will hopefully tie CAA in. You can see her last article here.

We're working on the annual report. See the 2008 one here. Tisha, a new volunteer, is working on it.

We completed some year-end fund raising phone calls. This is the first time we did this. We called people who donated a bunch in 2008, but hadn't donated in 2009.

Ben and I share the duties of answering emails sent to info@exploreveg.org. This is CAA's main contact address, so it gets all sorts of questions. Most of them are pretty simple, like "how can I volunteer?"

From time to time, we get one that requires a more involved answer. I thought I'd share a question we got recently, and the answer I sent.

I am not prepared to become a vegetarian or vegan because I honestly do not care for many vegetables. However, I am very prepared to eat less meat - and ... more so - to ONLY purchase it from organic farms - or whatever they are called .. farms that do not abuse animals.

I believe animals can be raised outside, allowed to live a decent life, and be humanely killed for food. I realize it would be better not to eat them at all - but the least I can do is NOT support factory raised animals ... that is the most appalling thing I have ever seen.

Do you have ANY info on where I can purchase non-factory raised meat? I looked up Omaha Steaks and they look like a big giant factory!!

This is pretty timely, given that the board just discussed the idea of a campaign to promote the use of Certified Humane products. Here's the reponse I sent ...

Hi, XXXX,

Thanks for contacting us.

This is a tough question. CAA doesn't really support any use of animals, and as such we're not comfortable endorsing any particular supplier of animal products.

While a "free-range" supplier may better than modern factory farms, they are still extremely cruel. For example, a cage-free egg facility still keeps thousands of hens in crowded, uncomfortable conditions. Those conditions are certainly better than battery cages, but they're still pretty horrible.

When it comes time for slaughter, there are, to the best of my knowledge, no certification programs for any sort of humane slaughter. These animals will go through the same horrendous slaughterhouses as every other animal.

There is a program that has been endorsed by the Humane Society of the United States called Certified Humane (http://www.certifiedhumane.org/), that has at least some minimal certification standards for animal ag facilities.

But Certified Humane is very far from the image I think you may have, of animals running around freely, living naturally until they're humanely slaughtered.

The only way you're going to find that is by visiting individual suppliers and assuring yourself of the conditions. If you do find a supplier like this, it will probably be quite expensive. Factory farming greatly reduces costs, and I suspect at least part of the reason what you want is hard to find is that no one is really willing to spend that much money on meat.

Also, be aware that there are a lot of other "standards", many of which are created by the producers themselves. Certified Humane is the only standard I know of with independent inspections, which is crucial in maintaining any sort of integrity. HSUS has some information about egg labeling on their website at http://www.humanesociety.org/issues/confinement_farm/facts/guide_egg_labels.html

You say you don't like vegetables, which is funny, because I was the same way before I first went vegetarian. I was a picky eater, and mostly preferred to eat beef and chicken. I found that once I stopped eating meat, I was forced to explore new foods, and I even enjoyed some of them!

As part of your effort to reduce your meat consumption, maybe you could make a point of trying out some new vegetarian food once a week. That could be a new vegetable, a new recipe, or maybe even tofu or a mock meat product. There are a lot of great mock meat products out there. My current favorite is anything from Gardein (http://www.gardein.com/). It's pretty amazing stuff. Of course, it's also expensive.

We have some recipes on our website at http://www.exploreveg.org/resources/recipes. Also check out http://www.vegweb.com/, which has a huge selection of recipes to browse.

One more thing ... often, when people reduce, the first thing they eliminate is beef and pork, and they compensate by eating more chicken. This is unfortunate, because birds are the worst treated animals in our factory farming system, and being smaller, more of them need to be killed to produce the same amount of meat.

Thanks, and good luck,

Dave Rolsky

The final board meeting of 2009 dealt with some big topics, including whether or not to give Ben and Unny salary increases. Ben and Unny used Republican tactics to delay the measure, but the board prevailed and voted in favor of raises.

We further discussed the outlines of a more active, focused student group on campus, and what their work would entail.

We finalized some details on the summer food giveaway internship. Ben, Suzy and Kedar will be on the hiring committee.

The board discussed the topic of the Humane Farming Association and whether or not it fits with CAA's mission. The consensus was that it does not. However, this does not preclude CAA from working on other "welfare" initiatives in the future.

As many volunteers may have seen, at CAA we use our wiki a lot. I'm sure some of you find the wiki annoying, and might wonder why we don't use something else. Well, here's why ...

First, we need to understand what makes a wiki a wiki, as opposed to a word processor or chat room, etc.

There are several factors that make a wiki what it is. At its heart, a wiki is a website that's made up of a bunch of pages linked together. In that respect, it's like any non-wiki website.

Wikis are designed to make editing as easy as possible. You don't need special software, you don't need to pick fonts, you just click the "edit" button and start typing.

Wikis are also designed to make linking pages together easy. A good wiki is well-linked, so that you can start from top page and easily find areas of interest. CAA's wiki does reasonably well in this regard.

Finally, a wiki makes editing safe. When you save a page, the wiki keeps all the previous versions around, so we can compare them, and revert changes if necessary.

The particular wiki software we use (as of this writing) is pretty bad. It's not that easy to use, and it's implementation of certain features (like viewing past versions of a page) is downright terrible. That's unfortunate, and I'm hoping to move us to new wiki software in the future.

But the overall wiki concept is a good one. The wiki makes it (relatively) easy for new volunteers to contribute. Unlike Word documents, you don't need any specific software to edit wiki pages. Everyone has a web browser. Also unlike Word documents, you can't accidentally save the document on your own computer. Since the wiki is a web site, it's always available to everyone.

Because pages are linked together, it's easy to organize related documents. By comparison, organizing word documents is harder, as the documents themselves cannot easily link to other documents.

The wiki is also searchable. Again, our particular wiki software does this badly, but there is a search feature, and because wikis are basically just plain text, they're easier to search.

At CAA, we use the wiki as our collective memory. If you're involved in planning the 2010 fundraising banquet, you'll find that we have wiki pages for every banquet we've done so far, for the past five years. If you want to know who was invited, who donated food, or what the evening's program was, that information is all there.

We don't want to see this knowledge fragmented. This is why it's important to keep as much knowledge as possible in the wiki.

Of course, the wiki isn't right for everything. Some things need layout, like mailings or newsletters. In that case, the wiki should be used for creating the content. Once the content is finalized, we can move to a Word document or graphic design program for the layout.

Does this answer the question of why we use the wiki? If you have more questions, please leave a comment here, and I'll address it in a future blog post.

Fall semester is upon us and we have a swarm of presentation requests due to a mass email we put out at the beginning of the month. We completed 20 presentations just in Oct! There were likely over a dozen students that expressed out load that they were trying vegetarianism and I heard an interesting story. A girl, one of three who received a piece of literature before going into the circus last weekend, said she rode the elephants and it helped her "understand why the elephants had bruises all over them". The conversation came up when I showed the class an elephant hook.

If you would like to shadow, with no obligation to learn and practice one of your own, I could use the help handing out items to the students and you could get a first hand look at the presentations.

Here are some dates we have scheduled:

• Nov 13th, Ethics & Environment - four times from 8:10-11:35 at Robbinsdale Cooper High.

• Nov 18th, Circle Of Compassion - once from 11-11:50 at Century College for an Ethics class covering Animal Rights then, again...

• Nov 19th, Circle Of Compassion - twice, 7:45-9 and 2:15-3:30 at Century College (White Bear Lake).

• Nov 23rd, Our Food Our World - six times from 8-2:40 at Minnetonka High.

• Nov 24th, Our Food Our World - four times from 8:10-11:35 at Robbinsdale Cooper High.

• Dec 8th, Our Food Our World - two times from 11:11-2:00 at Central High (Saint Paul at 94 & Lexington).

• Dec 9th, Circle of Compassion/Our Food Our World hybrid - 9:24-11:18 at Fridly High.

Outreach for Animals Week is underway! Please sign up if you haven't already, and let me know when you'll be leafleting. See the schedule here. It's going slower than we expected, but see below for why fund raising is going great.

We completed our first $10,000 matching donation a few weeks back (as mentioned here), much quicker than we expected. And now we have a second $10,000 matching donation! It applies to any new donations, so please ask your friends and family to contribute. Donations to Outreach for Animals Week also apply.

It has been awhile but Literature Distribution is trudging along. Here are some updates.

Anyone who has been in the office knows that we are running short on space. There is a lot of old literature lying around that should be cleared out. The two grey filing drawers underneath the food can be cleared out and utilized for storage. Most of the literature is smaller like pamphlets, cards and fliers. Good places to put this stuff is in public libraries or coffee shop entrances. Volunteers who stop by the office can feel free to take as much as they like. We should focus on getting this out first.

A couple of our volunteers have had to turn in their green VSK stands. We have 3 or 4 that will be coming in or are in storage. Anyone interested in adopting a VSK stand should contact me at matt.schmittdiel@exploreveg.org

There are 2 volunteer staff positions open for literature distribution. The volunteer staff members will become involved in the literature distribution campaign at a higher level. Anyone who is interested or knows someone who is interested should contact Ben or Unny.
 

On August 19, 2009 the Board of Compassionate Action for Animals held
their meeting at 2641 Dupont Ave. S. in  Minneapolis.  In attendance were
Ben, Casey, Dave, Kedar, Lisa, Matt, Suzy, and Unny.

After looking at the agenda the board decided to begin with the Budget
Review and office rental.  We found a large office that would run about
$7000-8000 this fiscal year, it would be adequate for meetings and other
events.  We might get the office if we can get 40 hours a week of
volunteer commitment and/or a certain amount of monthly donations.  The
board ratified the budget.

We looked at TLOV, while it is one of our largest events and encourages
community- and coalition- building, it does not necessarily promote
education and outreach.  We may send out a survey to get a sense of
activism people have done since the conference.  The State Fair is one
event where we could do outreach to significantly more people who are not
typically sympathetic to our cause.  Another event to consider is a
Vegetarian Food Festival.  We are encouraging people to attend Taking
Action for Animals 2010 in Washington DC as a CAA contingent.

The Board discussed developing a financial plan to communicate our vision
for the future of our group to donors and volunteers.  We will continue to
research other groups to see if they have something similar

Another topic of discussion was the role of the board in the Organization.
The Board exists to satisfy legal requirements, vote on decisions that
can't be approved of otherwise, only steps in when necessary and reserves
the right to veto any decision.  The board does not make decisions for
other committees, and issues should be attempted to be resolved internally
first, before turning to the Board.  The Planning Group can discuss as
they want and make decisions that are within our core values.  We
encourage any volunteer to attend a board meeting and learn how the board
operates.  Attending the meetings gives volunteers 99.9% the power of
being a board member.


We are holding our next board meeting on Wednesday, October 7th, 6:30 pm
at 2641 Dupont Ave. S. in  Minneapolis.  Please consider attending and
learning more about the Board!

Last week we had our Donor Appreciation dinner at the home of some new supporters and old friends of mine. It went well: the food was fantastic, it was very intimate, people had a great time. The major downside was that the attendance was low. Abby Lindekugel, a new volunteer and student at the U, did a great job in organizing the event with me.

Outreach for Animals Week is moving along. We have kick off events and you can sign up online. Check out the page on exploreveg for more details. Please consider helping out! Leafleting is pretty easy and the fund raising is crucial -- we get much of our funding from friends and family of volunteers.

In other news:

• Catering looks like a viable option for the 2010 banquet. Lisa Kimball has been doing some research. If you know of caterers that can make affordable vegan food, send them my way
  
• We continue to research potential foundation funders, without luck
• The matching donation is going great! We have received about a dozen donations for at least $500 from our appeals in the weekly update. This is more successful than we've ever been at email fund raising.

Ok, that's all! Please let us know what you're up to!