Farm Animal Welfare
Accelerating the end of factory farming
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Jesse Marks
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In a world where global problems can feel overwhelming, I see advocacy to improve the welfare of farm animals as a bright spot. Despite the scale of the problem (over 90 billion land animals and trillions of aquatic animals are killed for food annually) and limited resources fueling the work, I’ve seen remarkable progress in my 20+ years in the field. Advocacy campaigns have transformed the lives of billions of animals while also transforming the people who participated, instilling both a belief that change is possible and a powerful sense of agency.
This is the dual lens that underpins how I think about grantmaking: creating change for animals while building a movement that can make what seems impossible today a reality tomorrow. During a decade of advocacy at Animals Australia, I saw how an engaged supporter base fueled early campaign wins against McDonald’s and Aldi Australia. Similarly, when we secured national phase-outs of battery cages for egg-laying hens and the export of live sheep, these victories depended on hundreds of thousands of caring people we’d mobilized around the cause.
My later work leading global programs at Mercy For Animals underscored the same lessons: every win is only as strong as the movement standing behind it. We’ve proven we can get that combination right, and I’m more convinced than ever that we have the tools to fundamentally change how the world treats animals.
The Field Today
Approximately five times more animals are factory farmed annually than humans who have ever lived. The vast majority are subjected to practices and conditions that cause immense suffering, while few industries rival this system’s toll on the planet and public health. Yet efforts to reform and replace factory farming receive just 0.04% of global philanthropy, over 100 times less funding than causes like climate change or global development.
Despite this, the movement has proven it can win. More than 500 million hens no longer live in battery cages. Over 3,000 companies, including many of the world’s largest food brands, have pledged to move away from the most severe forms of confinement. A quarter of Americans now live in states where it is a crime to sell eggs from caged animals. These successes demonstrate that with the right tools and sufficient resources, transformative change is possible.
The opportunity is significant, and so is the urgency. The movement is at an inflection point where additional capital could translate directly into millions more animals spared. But it remains dramatically underfunded, and progress made is not automatically progress kept. This moment calls for funders willing to invest not just in immediate wins but in building the movement power and infrastructure needed to make those wins stick and to take on the harder fights ahead.
Our Approach
We invest in projects spanning a variety of timelines, theories of change, and risk profiles with the understanding that every initiative we support succeeds or fails twice: whether it achieves its material demands today, and whether it builds the power to make bigger demands for animals tomorrow.
As campaigner philanthropists, we:
- Move quickly to deploy funding despite our small team size. In 2025, with one program officer, we deployed $24 million using a blend of research, network contacts, and field-based intuition.
- Engage experienced peers who inform strategy, program design, and impact measurement.
- Maintain close contact with key campaigners to respond quickly to opportunities, deploy funds for timely tactics, and strengthen coordination across the movement.
- Take on high-leverage, high-risk bets, including interventions with fuzzier feedback loops that other donors are less positioned to fund.
- Seek out promising emerging interventions and support work in strategically important smaller countries.
- Incubate projects that drive movement innovation.
- Serve as a flexible coordination vehicle for key groups and other donors.
Funding Priorities
1. Institutional Impact
Support projects to directly change the policies and practices of institutions (such as food corporations, government, legislation and other significant public institutions), and build policy momentum.
2. Movement Power
Support organizations to build more power to influence institutions through:
People Power and Disruptive Capacity: Increasing the capacity to 1) mobilize and 2) organize people to influence institutional decision-makers.
Narrative Influence: Increasing the capacity to influence important conversations and influence how farm animal issues are framed, particularly with key audiences. (Our priority audiences are listed below. Other audiences may be of interest for specific projects.)
Policy and Electoral Capacity: Increasing the capacity to change institutional policies, and increase the importance of animal issues in the political sphere.
3. Invest in Reaching Critical Target Audiences:
Youth: Increase the number of youth (e.g. high-school and especially college students) actively engaged in the movement.
Elites: Increase our influence on cultural and political decision-makers and leaders, and get movement allies into decision-making positions.
4. Capacity Building
Invest in capacity building for the movement, such as operational support, training, and strengthening movement cohesion and collaboration.
5. New Funding
Support initiatives to bring new funding into the farm animal movement, such as major-giving programs, monthly-giving, and bequest programs.
6. Innovation and Experimentation
Support new or underfunded approaches, particularly those that address the above priorities or that find solutions in important regions that currently seem less tractable.
Interested in Supporting This Work?
We collaborate with institutional funders and individual donors on pooled funding, co-funding opportunities, and strategic advising.
Here is the Overhead and Indirect Cost Policy for our Farm Animal Welfare program. You’ll find more details on our thinking, regional priorities and potential research interests in our strategy summary.
Select Grant Recipients
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Our Process
Grant applications are by invitation. We identify potential applicants by researching and engaging with diverse organizations and individuals year-round. We have three grant cycles each year: Q2 (March-June), Q3 (July-September), and Q4 (October-December)–with most grants funded in Q2 and Q3 and finalized before December. We are open to considering unrestricted, project-based, and multi-year grants. We also occasionally consider time-sensitive proposals outside these cycles.