Sofia Balderson is the co-founder of Hive, formerly known as Impactful Animal Advocacy, an organisation that aims to improve coordination and collaboration in the farmed animal movement through cultivating impactful, intentional, and serendipitous communities

Many listeners may be on the Impactful Advocacy Slack – a Slack workspace with over 2,000 animal advocates and a great place to connect, learn and share ideas. Today, we spoke with Sofia Balderson, one of the originators of that Slack Channel about lessons in starting new projects, the importance of facing rejection, how much you should listen to philanthropic funders to understand the value of your project and tangible ways to measure whether your work is providing value!

This was a very fun and candid conversation which I really enjoyed, so I’m sure you all will too.

Relevant links to things mentioned throughout the show:

• Our website: joinhive.org
• Chi from Global Vegan inspiration
• Hive Slack joining link
• Hive Newsletter (free biweekly)
• Hive volunteer moderator role
• Hive channel lead role (volunteer)
• Hive events
• Our Theory of Change (general + for each program)
• Our metrics: what we measure (including our OKRs and KPIs)
• Our impact estimates for 2023 and 2024
• Our cost-effectiveness estimates: spreadsheet
• Our Year in Review 2023: insights in our programs and results
• Weighted factor model explanation
• My EA Forum post: Writing about my job: co-founder of an early stage charity
• Sofia’s productivity course (Clariteam)
• Hive Fundraising wiki
• Rethink Priorities cross cause cost-effectiveness comparison tool
• Leader Lab book
• Obstacle is the way by Ryan Holiday
• The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday

Chapters
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00:00 // Start
04:25 // History of Hive/Impactful Animal Advocacy
06:43 // Who is the Hive Slack for?
10:24 // Hive's biggest challenges so far
14:19 // Example of projects that didn't work out
18:08 // How important is funder feedback?
26:30

If you enjoy the show, please leave a rating and review us - we would really appreciate it! Likewise, feel free to share it with anyone who you think might enjoy it. You can send us feedback and guest recommendations via Twitter or email us at hello@howilearnedtoloveshrimp.com. Enjoy!

Short but sweet episode this week from Ignacia, author of a recently released book, CEO of a leading organisation in Latin America and mother to two small kids. We're delighted that Ignacia took time out to talk to us about her experiences right across her contributions for animals.

We chat about Fundacion veg and their campaigns in both diet change and animal welfare as well as the decision for Ignacia to scale down her organisation and what led to this decision. We talk about the importance of country context in campaigning and the challenges when working in this field across Latin America.

We ran into a whole host of technical difficulties during this episode with unstable connections so please bear with us during the chat and why not head to youtube to see if you can spot the point at which an entire day passes before we resume filming for the remainder of the episode.

Resources:

• www.fundacionveg.org
• Instagram: @vegetarianos_hoy and @ignaciauribe
• Como ser vegano Hoy
• Open Wing Alliance
• Connect For Animals newsletter
• @peter_singer has a very interesting Instagram account
• @seb.alex and @ryujichua, both have a very unique way to communicate and they speak different languages, which I think it's crucial to get to more people and other cultures where veganism is not that mainstream yet

How can people get more involved in your work? Are you hiring, do you need volunteers and where can people find you?

We don’t have volunteers all year round, but we do calls when we need them, so stay tuned to our social media accounts. We plan to hire a COO this year, so I’d have more time to do lobbying and PR which I think I'm better at, we haven’t published it yet but am very excited for this role.

Chapters
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00:00 // Start
02:36 // Inspiring figures in the movement
05:42 // How to be Vegan Today
10:42 // Balncing work and writing
13:51 // Impact of writing a book to everyday activism
15:51 // The work of Fundacion Veg
23:48 // Approach to campaigning
30:06 // Humanitarian issues
32:01 // Alternate tactics to protesting
37:30 // Biggest successes
41:46 // Senate language case
45:38 // Biggest challenges in Latin America

If you enjoy the show, please leave a rating and review us - we would really appreciate it! Likewise, feel free to share it with anyone who you think might enjoy it. You can send us feedback and guest recommendations via Twitter or email us at hello@howilearnedtoloveshrimp.com. Enjoy!

Bob Fischer is the Senior Research Manager at Rethink Priorities and Associate Professor of Philosophy at Texas State University.

Can insects feel pain? Should people who care about chickens, cows and pigs also care about reducing the suffering of crickets or black soldier flies? In this episode with Bob Fischer from Rethink Priorities, we try to answer some of those questions, as well as talking about the rapidly growing insect industry, and possible ways for advocates to help farmed insects.

We talk about lots of interesting content and research, for some of which there are excellent visualisations, which we’ll link to at the top of the show notes. I highly recommend checking out the Welfare Range Table and Rethink Priorities’ Welfare Range estimates to help better understand some of the points here, both of which are linked.

Bob also had a great conversation on the 80,000 Hours Podcast about the moral weights project more broadly and how they want to try to compare welfare across different species of animals. We think they covered it very well, so we didn’t speak much about it today, so we’ll link it for interested folks.

Relevant links to things mentioned throughout the show:

• Cognitive and hedonic proxies of different animals from Rethink Priorities Moral Weights Project
• Rethink Priorities’ Welfare Range estimates
  • For more on this, listen to Bob’s great episode on the 80,000 Hours podcast
• Research paper, “Can Insects Feel Pain?”, which found that two orders of insects (which include cockroaches, termites, flies and mosquitos) met more criteria to feel pain than decapod crustaceans (e.g. crabs, lobsters, shrimp), which are recognised as sentient by the UK government.
• How I Learned To Love Shrimp YouTube Channel
• Meghan Barrett’s handbook chapter
• Barn 8 by Deb Olin Unferth
• Dominion by Matthew Scully
• Donate to Insect Welfare Research Society
• Donate to Rethink Priorities
• Newsletter for Insect Welfare Research Society
• Newsletter for Rethink Priorities

If you enjoy the show, please leave a rating and review us - we would really appreciate it! Likewise, feel free to share it with anyone who you think might enjoy it. You can send us feedback and guest recommendations via Twitter or email us at hello@howilearnedtoloveshrimp.com. Enjoy!