In the midst of an avalanche of bad funding news for nonprofits and the foundations and donors who champion them, one cause continues to gain traction: the effort to stop industrial animal farming and build sustainable food systems. Farmed Animal Funders (FAF), the affinity group for donors focused on factory farming, reports a 500% increase in funding over the past decade to groups in this area, with donors driven by a desire to alleviate animal suffering and stop the collateral damage industrial animal farming causes to the environment, biodiversity and public health. These are all issues particularly animating to the young, meaning that the great wealth transfer happening now is acting as fertilizer for the cause.
We’ve written about other donor affinity groups, such as Grantmakers in Aging and the Jewish Funders Network, both of which bring people together to bolster their knowledge, build connections and increase efficacy. Like these, Farmed Animal Funders provides networking and education for donors and foundations interested in its specific cause. It’s a small group — under 50 member entities, including individuals, foundations and family offices — each of whom gives at least $250,000 a year to end factory farming and build sustainable food systems. Less than 0.1% of all philanthropic dollars go toward ending factory farming, with FAF members responsible for more than three-quarters of that funding. Member organizations include Open Philanthropy, India Animal Fund and Stray Dog Institute.
Certainly plenty of “mature” donors care about ending factory farming; L.A.’s Jim Greenbaum, for example, an FAF member who is over 65, has shifted nearly all his giving to expanding veganism and ending factory farming, making him one of the nation’s top funders in the animal rights and plant-based food space. But millennials are flocking in. “We have funders in the movement and within Farmed Animal Funders who represent all the ages, all over the world, but the issues that factory farming touches are particularly important to the up-and-coming generations,” said Shannon Campion, executive director of FAF. “There is a lot of alignment between this cause area and the issues that the new generations care about like climate change and animal welfare.”
FAF is well positioned to offer next-gen support through education, networking and serving as a de facto program officer for new donors and those without large staffs. This customized philanthropic advising is attractive to younger donors, particularly those from the tech sector, who take a lean start-up approach to philanthropy. “Say you’re a donor with $500,000 to give. We will work with you to create a customized portfolio that aligns with your values. That’s a large part of what we do,” said Campion. “It’s part of reducing barriers and making it easy to give effectively, without having to have all that structure.”
While so many of today’s critical issues are too big for philanthropy to address alone, funders can still have a huge impact — as in the case of farming practices. This record of success makes it a particularly rewarding field to fund.
How FAF members helped change lives for egg-laying hens
I met Campion in Los Angeles last week. She’d traveled from her home base in Washington state to visit donors in the area, and was joined by Brooklyn-based FAF steering committee member David Coman-Hidy and Philadelphia-based communications consultant Jamie Berger. We sat down to talk over vegan focaccia and olive oil at a restaurant in Santa Monica. The trip was a welcome chance for the three of them to meet, too, given the remote structure of FAF.
Coman-Hidy, aged 35, with tattoo sleeves up both arms, is the president of The Navigation Fund, which has farm animal welfare as one of its five key cause areas. Before taking on the role at Navigation Fund, he led the Humane League, one of the world’s largest farm animal advocacy organizations. He said it’s a great space to work in, partly because a donor can make a substantial impact. The work is essentially advocacy, policy change and corporate campaigns. “You’re not providing direct service. It’s not like building shelters for cats and dogs. That’s meaningful work and important, but it’s very expensive. Here, you can do a lot with a little,” he said.
Case in point: free range eggs. About 10 years ago, only 3% of egg-laying hens in the U.S. were cage free. Today, it’s about 40%. That’s a change you have probably noticed in the span of time between, say, serving one conventionally farmed egg to a first grader (if you have children) and four free-range eggs to that same child who is now in high school. The free-range egg phenomenon is a result, in part, of corporate campaigns, which have included actions such as asking businesses to change their practices and helping them make good on promises made. More than 1,000 companies have reported fulfilling their pledges to eliminate battery cages for egg-laying hens from their supply chains, FAF reports. (Battery cages are one of the three most confining, inhumane forms of factory farming, the other two being gestation crates for mother pigs, and veal crates.)
This win for hens is a victory for humans, and not just at breakfast. Bird flu comes largely from caged hens, Campion said, and industrial agriculture contributes to climate change in multiple ways. Agriculture accounts for about 10% of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. The novelty of working on industrial animal agriculture as a climate change solution draws donors. “You don’t even have to care about the hen to care about this,” she said.
FAF members have also helped spur important state-level ballot measures in the U.S. and policy changes in the EU, such as the spread of meat-eating reduction programs. Denmark has been a leader in curbing meat consumption and trying to make their food system more friendly to animals and to the environment. In the U.S., Campion pointed to a handful of ballot measures that passed in states across the nation over the past two decades. As of 2024, in both California and Massachusetts, for example, it is illegal for companies to sell pork from mother pigs housed in gestation crates, part of a multi-animal, multistate cage-free movement. “The return on investment is incredible compared to other cause areas, which is particularly valuable for philanthropists who are impact and cost effectiveness oriented,” said Campion. “And you can change the lives of hundreds of millions of animals.”
Or, as the musician, songwriter and animal rights activist Moby is quoted as saying on the FAF website, “The end of animal suffering can happen in our lifetimes, but only if we coordinate strategically. I’m excited about FAF bringing more attention to this issue.”
Related Inside Philanthropy Resources:
For Subscribers Only
FAF supports young donors
Because of the small size of the group, funders have a great deal of access to experts, activists, nonprofit leaders and fellow funders. FAF does events with top strategists and hosts regular webinars about specific campaigns or sectors, like the treatment of egg-laying hens or fish raised in aquaculture. “There will be a panel of leaders, and donors can ask them questions. To me this is incredible access to have as a philanthropist,” said Coman-Hidy.
The relative newness of the field and its small scale means many big names in the movement are still involved, yet there is room for younger donors to “make their mark,” said Coman-Hidy. “We’re seeing laws passed, and the donors who made that happen are still involved. There’s still that core kernel. It’s exciting to be around that; you can come in on the ground floor and be part of something exciting. My foundation gives across causes, and what I see here in this space, what I am so impressed with, is how collaborative and welcoming they are to new philanthropists.”
Who is funding an end to factory farming
Donors come to the cause from a variety of backgrounds and for different reasons. Some, like David Meyer, founder of Adopt-a-Pet.com, started out with a concern for cats and dogs. “I had started an NGO and foundation largely focussed on companion animals in an effort to lessen the number of dogs and cats killed in animal shelters across the United States and Canada. That was very successful, but I realized that many, many times more animals are killed for our food, and the daily situation of most of those animals for every day of their life is absolute cruelty,” said Meyer by email. “I then came to learn all of the other terrible effects factory farms have on people and our environment. I now feel that this is one of the most impactful areas any philanthropist can contribute to in order to promote human health, environmental sustainability and animal welfare.”
Others are motivated by the interconnectedness of factory farming and so many other issues. “With innumerable problems to solve and so many possible philanthropic focus areas, we are interested in addressing systems changes to mitigate the problems at their source,” said FAF member Timi Sobrato, a member of the powerhouse Bay Area family who give through Sobrato Philanthropies. “For example, rather than rescuing individuals (while valuable), we aim to find the initial cause of a problem and learn strategies to remedy from there.”
For Coman-Hidy, the heterogeneous nature of the donor community adds to the vibrancy of the field. “It’s nice making all these connections with these committed, fascinating people. People really, really care. It’s an issue close to their heart. You see the principals at many of these events, not staff a few layers down.”
Why funding for farm animals may be uniquely Trump resistant
Unlike other causes that have (or had) a combination of private and public funding, ending factory farming never had much in the way of government support. This may make it one of the most resilient philanthropic causes in this era of ever-widening cuts to government programs. “There’s not substantial federal or state funding going into replacing factory farming,” said Campion. While the administration did cut a farmed animal welfare research department at the USDA, there aren’t direct cuts to animal protection organizations because they were never funded in the first place.
“It’s one of the most important issues of our time in terms of the suffering of animals and the downstream impacts — climate change, biodiversity loss, public health, food security,” said Campion. “You are in a role to make a difference or be personally responsible for a new strategy being deployed or starting work for a new species or in a whole new region of the world. This cause area is an example of the power of philanthropy, and for relatively little investment compared to what it would take in other cause areas.”
