Hello and welcome to the Vegan Report podcast.
My name is Shweta and I'm the Director of Communications
at Animal Charity Evaluators. Today, we will
be talking about ACEs charity recommendations,
our newest research launch called Better for
Animals, and ACEs processes in general. I am
joined by two of my amazing colleagues, Alina
and Max. Alina here has a background in social
and political psychology and holds a PhD in social
psychology, while Max has undertaken a range
of policy roles for the UK civil service, including
leading the UK government's animal welfare market
interventions team. Today, they both serve as
senior researchers at animal charity evaluators.
Welcome to the podcast, Alina and Max. Thanks,
great to be here. Yeah, thank you, Shweta. All
right, so Max and Alina, What does ACE do? Yeah,
good question. So ACE is one of several charity
evaluators alongside organizations like GiveWell,
which finds the best charities saving or improving
human lives, Giving Green, which focuses on environmental
charities, or the Happier Lives Institute, which
recommends the best charities for mental health
and well -being. ACE has been around since 2012
and we're the only charity evaluator in the Amble
Advocacy space. Every year we receive applications
from dozens of charities to be evaluated and
carry out rigorous evaluations of say 10 or so.
And to do this we gather information from the
charities themselves about their programs, their
recent achievements, future plans, funding status,
evidence base, their challenges, any leadership
transitions, staff engagement and various other
things like that. And we also consult with external
experts and other animal advocacy organisations
and do plenty of our own desk -based research
so that we can come to a confident decision about
which charities currently represent the best
donation opportunities for people looking to
use their money to help significantly improve
the lives of as many animals as possible. Yeah,
and our selection process to select who gets
evaluated at the first place is already pretty
intensive. So all the charities we evaluate,
we're already confident that they do amazing
work. But we do try to deliberately keep our
list of recommended charities pretty short. So
we end up typically recommending only about five
a year. And as they keep their recommendation
for two years, that means we generally have a
list of around 10 recommended charities. And
yeah, we'll tell you who they are, what the amazing
work is that they do a bit later on. Yeah, once
a charity is recommended by A's, especially when
it's their first time, they typically receive
an influx of funding, and that's both through
reaching new donors, but also through our recommended
charity fund. And that means that we essentially
fundraise for our recommended charities, and
then twice a year we distribute the money to
them based on where we think it can currently
do the most good. And even charities that aren't
recommended, they typically report that they
found the process. really informative. And that's
because we asked them really in -depth questions
about their work that they might not have thought
about before. We asked them to think through
their theory of change with us, and so on. So
yeah, it's really heartening to see that the
pretty like laborious task of participating in
evaluations kind of pays off even if a charity
isn't recommended in the end. We also run a second
program, that's our movement grants program.
And this one is a little bit more explicitly
focused on kind of building and strengthening
the global animal advocacy movement. And in this
program, we distribute grants. They can be like
smaller grants around 5K or larger grants of
over 50K. to projects that tend to use more novel
interventions or help like a particularly large
number of animals. And we're also really interested
in projects that operate in regions where the
movement is less well established. And yeah,
this program also helps us understand better
what kind of interventions can help animals most
effectively and especially kind of in different
contexts and different countries. Thanks for
sharing that so much Max and Lena. I think that's
a lot of information and I think it gives us
a very good picture of the stuff that ACE does,
which essentially is we recommend charities.
We also have movement grants and then we try
and understand what interventions can help most
animals. in different contexts. I think that's
really good to know. I also just want to say
for all our listeners here right now that the
recommended charity fund is currently being matched
dollar for dollar. So if you're a donor, first
time or existing, this is a great time to give
and we'd love to hear from you and receive more
donations from you. All right, let's keep it
rolling. So Max and Lena, you come from very
different trajectories in your careers. How was
your experience of working at ACE? Yeah, for
me, one of the things I really like about working
at ACE is just being given a window into all
the amazing work that people are doing around
the world to help animals. My previous job was
very focused on the UK context. So now I really
like having the kind of global overview of everything
that's going on. And often as well, it's really
inspiring to see people doing work in really
tough contexts where they can face a lot of backlash
and it's really hard to make progress. I think
what's hardest is probably having to make really
significant decisions about which groups to support
when we generally tend to think that they're
all great. And we're very aware that we're working
with a pretty limited evidence base at the minute
on what works best for helping animals. I think
despite that we still owe it to animals to help
them as effectively as possible by making the
best use of the solid evidence that we do have.
Yeah definitely big plus one to everything Maxad
said. And yeah I think for me on top of that
what I really love about this work is when we're
able to support charities work sometimes that's
in a way that can be really transformative for
them. That can be by unlocking completely new
donor bases or making it much easier for them
to hire qualified staff because of the kind of
exposure they get through. a recommendation.
And sometimes it takes like years until we learn
how an ACE recommendation or a grant has actually
changed the trajectory for a group. But when
we do, and we also can see how this has kind
of tangibly helped animals on the ground, I find
that really, really energizing and rewarding.
And yeah, I guess comparing that to... being
an academic researcher obviously some academics
have like incredible impact with their work but
also I think a lot of papers that we write kind
of disappear into the ether and you never really
see what happens with them in a in a way that
actually tangibly impacts animals. Yeah on the
flip side I think maybe similar to what Max said
it's really really hard to reject grant applications
I really don't like it. I also really don't like
not recommending charities, especially because,
like I said, I do actually feel like they all
do really, really effective work. But obviously
the funds are so limited in our space and we
can't do everything that we want to do. So sometimes
we just have to be really ruthless in how we
prioritize. But yeah, I'd say that that's definitely
the least favorite part of my work. Thanks for
sharing. I feel like these are the waters that
we tread. It's just, it's hard. But it is so
important, especially because the funds are so
limited and we're trying to help as many animals
as possible. So thank you for sharing your thoughts.
I understand that alongside evaluating charities
and the movement runs work. and the applications,
you've both also been working on a project to
find and distill the main sources of evidence
on dozens of different animal advocacy tactics.
What led you to work on this issue? Yeah, I love
talking about this. I think another big shift
from being an academic to now working at ACE
was that, like many academics, I had a very niche
interest that I was able to just focus on for
years. So for years, I was able to just explore
these really circumscribed niche research questions.
And then you're kind of thrown into an environment
where you're suddenly supposed to be an expert
on like a really, really huge and broad range
of tactics that animal advocates use. And they
kind of span different disciplines. Like it could
be more sort of like sociology and social movement
related or more psychology related when it comes
to kind of influencing individuals and individuals'
behaviors. But yeah, so essentially part of our
job is comparing these vastly different approaches
that advocates use and essentially try to figure
out what helps animals the most. This is really
tricky. It's tricky because a lot of groups don't
just use one tactic, but they use many. It's
tricky because tactics don't really operate in
isolation, but they kind of support each other.
There's this whole ecosystem of interventions.
And yeah, you have to... compare apples and oranges.
I have to look at, for example, a campaign trying
to get chickens out of cages by pressuring a
retailer to a campaign or a research project
on wild animal welfare science, for example.
And ideally, I want to compare them on the same
metric, which would be something like how many
animals can be saved per dollar. Yeah, if that
sounds really tricky, that's because it really
is. So yeah, it can quickly become really overwhelming.
And then as an added challenge, Max alluded to
this a little bit. In our field, we just don't
have the same level of scientific evidence available
as, for example, people working in global health
and development. In that field, we have some
pretty robust randomized controlled trials of
interventions, and we kind of roughly knows what
works best at the moment. But people have become
interested in how to help animals effectively
as opposed to helping humans like much more recently.
So we just don't have the same level of evidence.
But it's quite an exciting time to be working
in this field. The amount of studies conducted
on this topic has been increasing faster and
faster over recent years. There's more and more
researchers seeing it as a legitimate field of
study. I remember that when I was starting my
PhD, submitting papers on human -animal relations
to journals was really difficult, and we had
to really justify often why is this relevant
for humans in order to be published. And now
there's even a dedicated journal just about human
-animal relations. If you're interested in this,
that's the FAIR journal, which stands for Psychology
of Human -Animal Intergroup Relations. And yeah,
they do really cool work. That means we have
much more research to work with now but that
also means it's becoming harder to kind of keep
up to date with recent findings and we found
over the years of doing evaluations that there
really wasn't an easy way to get an overview
of the state of the evidence for a particular
intervention like if I wanted to know for example.
what's like everything that we know about protests,
what makes them work, what doesn't make them
work. There isn't an obvious place to go. And
we also talked to a bunch of other advocates
and researchers who also agreed that there's
this real need for up -to -date summaries on
the evidence base for different interventions.
Yeah, it's really fascinating and also sounds
very hard, but we do have to compare apples and
oranges because we're speaking about different
species, we're speaking about different contexts.
And it's hard to compare things across all of
these different metrics. And at the same time,
like we're now in this place where there is like
unique sites to both having like a lack of data
as well as an abundance of data, they seem to
both have their positives and negatives. I would
love to know about how like this tracker of evidence
summaries actually work and how does this help
us make decisions? Yeah, so. Max and I started
this as a pretty ambitious literature review
project early last year. Essentially, we wanted
to create an overview of the evidence for the
30 or so intervention types that we come across
in our work most frequently. And we wanted that
to be pretty comprehensive, but also dynamic.
So we wanted it to change as the evidence changes.
And also to make it even more complicated the
goal wasn't to just say oh this tactic is good
or this tactic is bad because that isn't really
how tactics work in the real world and success
usually almost always depends on contextual factors
like the how, the where, the who. For example
like take a corporate campaign like if you want
to pressure a kind of major publicly traded fast
food chain to adopt say a cage -free policy then
that might be really successful in the US where
the brand is probably super sensitive to consumer
perception, to media sentiment and so on. But
if you just try to take that same playbook in
a different country with a totally different
culture, with totally different corporate laws,
it might be a waste of time if you're lucky or
it might even create backlash and harm animals
in the long run. So essentially for each intervention,
we try to dig into the research to ask. Does
this actually work? What are the risks? And under
what conditions does it seem to be more or less
effective? And to do that, we developed a research
protocol, and our programs team, along with some
really amazing volunteers, then searched everything
from academic databases to movement research
libraries, like the one that Formalytic runs,
and also reports from other research groups in
the movement. Yeah, for some topics, we had to
review like nearly 50 or so articles to get a
clear picture. But for others, like, say podcasts,
for example, which is a pretty novel intervention,
the evidence was really, really thin. And then
we often had to essentially look at research
from other fields, like from the climate movement
or other environmental movements, or rely more
on theory or expert opinions. And yeah, what
was really great was that through this project,
we developed lots of relationships with other
researchers and advocates. Like we got so much
advice and feedback from other researchers, from
advocates, from funders. So hopefully that also
means that the project is now as valuable as
possible for them. Well, hopefully this podcast
can help be one more. data piece in the larger
scheme of things for us. This sounds like an
amazing resource for all the activists and organizations
trying to see what would be effective interventions
in their areas. I'm wondering, is this resource
live? Is it a work in progress? What stage are
we at? Yeah, it's both. It's both live and a
work in progress. Internally, we're already using
it loads at ACE. We use it in our evaluations.
We use it in grant making. If we want to assess
an organization's theory of change, for example,
we would look at what interventions they use.
We would look at this project, which we've called
Better for Animals, by the way. Essentially,
it's a really, really good starting point to
think about, OK, what's the best practice when
it comes to this intervention? What risks should
they be keeping in mind? Is this likely to work
in the context that they're trying to make it
work and so on? And yeah, we've also shared it
publicly a couple of months ago. So yeah, really
hope that it will help advocates and funders
strengthen their strategies. But we also really
wanted others to review and critique our conclusions.
So it's kind of a live document that people can
leave comments on and they can email us with
suggestions and so on. Because it's definitely
not perfect, we didn't have the time or capacity
to do a full systematic review. There are lots
of challenges like publication bias, where there's
more studies out there that find a positive effect
than studies that don't. And almost all of the
research kind of necessarily, I guess, focuses
on short -term effects. So we know much less
about the long -term effects. Yeah, and like
I've mentioned earlier, most research also looks
at interventions kind of in isolation. But in
the real world, no movement just like runs one
intervention. That's not how things work. They're
part of this whole ecosystem where a corporate
campaign might be happening at the same time
as a public awareness campaign. A new policy
change that another group is advocating for might
be influencing both of these and so on. And yeah,
empirical research is often struggling to capture
how all of these pieces kind of interact and
influence each other. So yeah, we have a really,
really long list of improvements that we want
to work through. We are trying to keep the resource
up to date whenever significant new evidence
comes out. And yeah, we've seen a lot of engagement
with it already and gotten a lot of positive
and also some maybe more constructive feedback.
And yeah, we really hope that people continue
to engage with it and that we kind of co -create
something that is really helpful for the movement.
to make it as evidence -based and effective as
possible. And yeah, if you want to take a look,
you can find the whole document and some of our
kind of spotlighted highlight interventions on
our blog on animalcharityevaluators .org, but
we'll also add a link to the resource in the
podcast description. Thanks for sharing that,
Alina. Yes, and I think as someone who's leading
on social media for ACE, I do think the interventions
we have put out have been received well and we've
gotten positive feedback from researchers from
our different audiences. So please do check that
resource out. That would be better for animals
and you can just go search that on ACE or generally
on Google and just type ACE better for animals.
And I think as Alina, you alluded to this already,
that this has already been helpful as we've been
working on evaluating this year's charities.
Max, could you tell us a little bit more about
each of ACE's recommended charities? And I understand
that there are two, so maybe we could start with
the ones we recommended in 2025. Sure, yeah.
So as you say, we've just finished up this year's
charity evaluations, and we've got a list of
10 recommended charities overall that we're confident
do amazing work to help animals. I'll just give
a brief outline of each one, but if anyone wants
to know more, you can just go to our website
and read all of our comprehensive reviews there,
and that will give you the full picture of what
they do and why we think they're such strong
opportunities to help animals with your donations.
So in terms of the ones we evaluated this year,
First up is the Animal Welfare Observatory or
AWO and they work across Spain and the EU to
improve welfare for farm chickens and fishes
and soon, crimps. And through corporate outreach
and public pressure, they've helped get major
retailers like Lidl and Carrefour to commit to
higher welfare standards, focusing especially
on cage -free and the welfare standards for meat
chickens that are set out in the Better Chicken
Commitment. They also do a lot of policy outreach
both at the Spanish level and the EU level. especially
to try to bring about better welfare standards
for fishers. And we think they stand out by being
highly evidence -based, highly adaptable, and
they also seem to be really productive and persistent
in their outreach to companies to get them to
improve their welfare standards. Next up, there's
Shrimp Welfare Project. The first charity focused
primarily on improving the lives of farmed shrimps.
They work with producers and retailers worldwide
to introduce better farming practices and through
their Humane Slaughter Initiative, they've deployed
electrical stunners that will improve slaughter
conditions for billions of shrimps a year. And
they're now also expanding their Sustainable
Shrimp Farmers of India program to tackle poor
water quality. and we think they stand out for
pioneering, you know, really large -scale evidence
-based welfare reforms for one of the most overlooked
animals on the planet. Next up there is Sociedade
Vegetariana Brasileira, sorry for any Portuguese
listeners, so SDD. SDD promotes vegan and plant
-based eating across Brazil by working with public
sector institutions, influencing policy and building
grassroots support. In 2024 alone, they partnered
with over 100 schools and over 60 community kitchens
to replace over 60 million animal -based meals
with nutritious, meat -free ones. We think SCB
stands out because they're directly changing
the food served in public institutions while
also at the same time influencing national nutrition
guidelines and government policy to make sure
that plant -based food becomes a real mainstream,
government -backed option. Then there's the Humane
League or THL, one of the most established and
globally influential farm and animal organisations
out there. They focus on improving welfare for
egg -laying hens and chickens raised for meat,
particularly through corporate campaigns, accountability
work, and movement building via their Open Wing
Alliance, which is a coalition of over 80 groups
across over 70 countries, all working to help
chickens raised for eggs and meat. and the efforts
have helped move millions of hens out of cages
and push companies worldwide to adopt higher
welfare standards like the better chicken commitment.
We think they stand out for pairing relentless
accountability with strategic global coordination,
helping ensure that corporate promises actually
turn into real lasting welfare improvements for
billions of animals. Then finally from this year's
batch there's Wild Animal Initiative, which is
the only ACE recommended charity focused entirely
on wild animals. Rather than running direct interventions,
Wild Animal Initiative is building the scientific
foundation for a whole new field, Wild Animal
Welfare Science, and they fund and conduct research
on key welfare issues like developing validated
metrics for assessing animal wellbeing, they
train and connect researchers worldwide, and
they seed academic collaborations through their
grant and outreach programs. So their goal is
really to build our knowledge base about the
trillions of animals that live in the wild so
that we can develop effective interventions to
improve their well -being. And we think they
stand out for tackling one of the biggest and
most neglected frontiers in animal welfare, really
laying this groundwork for interventions that
could help reduce suffering for trillions of
wild animals. Wow. That sounds like some incredible
work by all of these charities. And it seems
like they're producing the suffering of so many
billions of animals, if not trillions. I'd love
to hear more about recommendations from 2024
as I understand charities carry it to your evaluation?
Yeah, yes that's right. So we do evaluations
every year and each recommendation lasts two
years. So half of our current list of recommended
charities are those we just recommended this
year and the other half are the ones that you
recommended in 2024. So yeah, of those 2024 charities,
first we have the Aquatic Life Institute or ALI.
They work globally to improve conditions for
farm fishes, shrimps, octopuses and other aquatic
animals. And that includes advising policymakers,
encouraging retailers to adopt welfare commitments
and pushing certifiers like the Aquaculture Stewardship
Council to raise their standards. They also founded
the Aquatic Animal Alliance, which is a coalition
of over 180 groups working to protect aquatic
animals around the world. And we think ALI are
great because they think really strategically
about how to engage different stakeholders throughout
the supply chain to achieve lasting change for
aquatic animals which are farmed in the hundreds
of billions but receive even less production
than farmed land animals do. Then in Turkey there's
CHKD. They're Turkey's only non -profit dedicated
to improving the welfare of egg -laying hens
and farm fishes and they do this by combining
corporate outreach, media campaigns, producer
training and on -the -field research. Since they
were founded in 2020, they've secured dozens
of cage -free commitments and helped large fish
farms adopt better welfare practices. And we
think CHPD really stands out because they're
delivering measurable change in a country where
farm animal welfare has historically been very
neglected and they're scaling up strategically
to reach many more chickens and fishes in the
years ahead. Then we've got DVF, the Danish Vegetarian
Society. They work to speed up the shift towards
plant -based diets through policy reform and
corporate outreach and public education and they've
helped secure major government funding for plant
-based innovation and they partner with companies
and schools to expand meat -free options as well.
We think they really stand out for driving systemic
food change from multiple angles, making them
super successful at reducing animal product consumption
both in Denmark and beyond. Then in China we've
got Good Food Fund. They work to reduce animal
suffering by transforming diets and food systems
through chef training, youth leadership programs,
and their flagship Good Food Summit, which brings
together government, industry, and academics
as well. They've also launched the National Good
Food Pledge, trained hundreds of chefs in plant
-based cooking, and they've helped secure government
and university support for sustainable food initiatives.
And we really like GFF because they take such
a clear -eyed view of the challenges of bringing
about food systems change in China and take a
really strategic approach to addressing those
challenges. Then finally, there's Syneria Animal,
which works across Latin America and Southeast
Asia to improve welfare for fangpens and pigs
and to promote plant -based diets. They've secured
dozens of catering and pig welfare commitments
for major companies, they've run institutional
campaigns to reduce meat consumption, and they've
pushed for policy change in jurisdictions where
farmed animal welfare is still relatively neglected.
We think they stand out for combining corporate
policy and diet change work in really effective
ways in regions with huge numbers of farmed animals
but with relatively little existing advocacy.
That again sounds like such amazing work. It's
also interesting to see how so many charities,
especially the ones from 2024, are really spread
across the globe. So please check out the ACE
website for much more information about each
of these charities and the great amazing work
that they do for animals. If you'd like to support
them please consider donating to our recommended
charity fund. All of these charities are selected
in part because they have really promising plans
for the future and could effectively use hundreds
of thousands of dollars in ways that would bring
about huge improvements to the lives of millions
of animals. I hope that was interesting to the
listeners of The Vegan Report podcast. And I
will just close this out by saying thank you
to both Max and Alina. And please check us out
at animalcharityvalueleaders .org. Thank you.
Thank you both. Great to be here. Thanks very
much. Great to see you.