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You Want to Help Animals, But How?

Giving Compass
This is a Giving Compass SelectionThis article is deemed a must-read by one or more of our expert collaborators.
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You Want to Help Animals, But How? - giving compass - animal welfare
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Heart, head, and hands are the keys to effective philanthropy. When it comes to animals, the heart is easy: but how do we also use our heads?

One of my best friends has been an animal rights advocate and activist her entire life, and a really effective one. The funny thing is, she doesn’t like animals, and never has. This always struck us as hilarious: the vegan activist who couldn’t stand her mother’s pet cats. Her defense of animal rights has always come purely from the head: to her it’s morally and logically inconsistent for humans to kill and eat animals.

Most donors, however, are motivated to give to animals by their hearts. We may be inspired to get involved in animal issues by a film like Blackfish, or by a personal experience, such as witnessing abuse or maltreatment. Regardless of how we come to animal philanthropy, what becomes quickly apparent is that the needs are overwhelming and it can be difficult to figure out where and how to give.

As with all giving, developing a focus can both increase your effectiveness and your joy: when we feel like our giving is making a real difference, we feel more fulfilled. To develop a focus within animal issues, it’s helpful to first orient ourselves to the full range of what falls under the “animal” umbrella. To start, animal issues can be broken into three overarching topics: animal rights, animal welfare, and animal conservation.

Giving to animal rights generally involves supporting advocates who are working for policy changes such as freedom for captive orca, or legal changes, such as animal personhood. Animal welfare is a bit more complex as there are many different threats. This category can include protecting farm animals, animals used in laboratory research, working animals such as circus animals or bomb-sniffing dogs, animals whose fur or skin is used in clothing, and finally, pets and companions. In animal conservation, one might choose to focus based upon how threatened the species is guided by sources such as the IUCN Red List, which documents the level of threat to every species worldwide.  Finally, one can think about which of the six basic animal groups you are most inspired to help: amphibians, reptiles, invertebrates, fish, birds, or mammals.

 

animal welfare

Learning about the full range of animal issues and categories may seem like a counterintuitive way to narrow. But most people find that looking at the big picture makes it easier to put a stake in the ground and feel confident. What are some resources you can draw upon as you learn about animal philanthropy?

  • Read articles here on Giving Compass focused on animal issues to orient yourself to the range of topics, ideas, and organizations.
  • Consider giving to the animal welfare fund hosted by the Centre for Effective Altruism. It is like a mutual fund for giving to support animal welfare, managed by an expert who reports frequently on how the funds are allocated, which organizations are supported, and why. Issue funds like this one offer a wonderful opportunity to learn while doing.
  • Check out Animal Charity Evaluators, which reviews and recommends animal organizations and also conducts and shares research on relevant topics. It also offers lots of excellent “how to” advice for animal donors.

My friend the animal activist has recently shocked us all: she adopted two stray kittens and is clearly besotted with them. She’s still one of the most effective animal advocates you’ll ever come across, but now she has her heart in the game, too. How about you: do you have your head in the game?

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Stephanie Fuerstner Gillis leads the Impact-Driven Philanthropy Initiative at the Raikes Foundation and is a Strategy Advisor for Giving Compass.

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Since you are interested in Impact Philanthropy, have you read these selections from Giving Compass related to impact giving and Impact Philanthropy?

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    Paid in Full Investment Strategies: Vital to Impact Philanthropy

    Giving Compass' Take: • Stanford Social Innovation Review discusses how to reorient philanthropic investments for justice-oriented impact. • The upshot here is that systems-level change requires us to take a healthier view of ourselves in relationship to those we serve and build more collective action grounded in those ideals. • Here's how we can create more equity and opportunity through such a "paid in full" mentality.  Close your eyes and think about why you chose to serve at a nonprofit or a philanthropic institution. Think about the hope you had for communities, the programs you wanted to develop, the lives you desired to impact, and the fulfillment you envisioned feeling when you went home at night, believing you’d made the world a better place through your efforts to eradicate poverty. Now open your eyes and think about why it’s not working out that way. Philanthropic leaders, however, you’ve answered that “why,” we’d like to put forward that the root of the gap between what we envisioned and reality is in the routine of our privilege, and our lack of empathy and authentic understanding toward those we’re serving. What we mean to say is that somewhere along the way, we developed a false view of ourselves and our own basic needs, and as a result decided we are drastically different from those we’re charged with serving. This distance separated “us” from “them” and created a situation in which we were no longer able to see that the very things we bet on for our own children, spouses or partners, and families to achieve our dreams are the same bets we need to place in our daily work with communities. Instead, poverty became the new werewolf, and we had a silver bullet solution to try to put the monster down. We created isolated strategies that, in a way, made it acceptable to walk past suffering, because it didn't fit into our program portfolio. With partial investment strategies, we can create only outliers of success. These success stories, sprinkled throughout our annual reports and materials, arise from instances where a momentary low tide enables a small few to maneuver a life raft through a stormy sea to shore. But if we don’t comprehensively change the network of systems producing the storm of inequality, eventually the sea will swell and consume the escape route for all those behind. Some ways we can improve in this area: Multiple Partnerships We fully understand the importance of niche expertise. No singular institution or organization can be effective at fixing the multitude of challenges broken systems have unloaded on our communities, nor should they. Specific public value In defining public value, we must be careful to not miss the mark with respect to what we can actually impact. For instance, if our mission is to train high-quality teachers, we might focus on recruiting quality candidates into a teaching pipeline, training them on professionally proven pedagogies, and creating some sort of career pathway in which they have room to advance and perhaps train or positively affect the induction process of other teachers.


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If you are interested in Animal Welfare, please see these relevant Issue Funds, Charitable Organizations or Projects where you can get involved.

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