Is coordination our comparative advantage?

Why coordination matters

The animal movement is trying to change huge industries, coordinating at a massive scale. But they have a key weakness. The incentives of animal industries are generally self-interested and profit-driven. For a great example, in 2019, Walmart was found to have funded ‘grassroots’ activism calling out Amazon for anti-competitive behavior, while dismissing similar criticisms of their own business.

At our worst, in the animal movement, we compete for funding, credit, and attention. We assume the worst of others. We guard knowledge, credit, and resources instead of sharing. As a result, we miss opportunities to accelerate change.

At our best, we’ve proven we can unite behind a shared mission to end animal exploitation. We build trust. We share credit and resources generously. This is a distinct comparative advantage for us over animal industries.

I often hear friends in other fields marvel at the level of collaboration and sharing in our movement. Unlike animal agricultural industries and other for-profit sectors, we’re on the same team. We should make the most of this advantage.

Fortunately, in recent years, much of our movement has been pursuing the path of higher coordination. There are many inspiring examples of the successes of collaboration:

• Prop 12 succeeded after one of the largest signature-gathering campaigns in U.S. farm animal advocacy history. Dozens of groups rallied in 2018 to get California to vote in some of the strongest anti-confinement laws ever to pass for farm animals.
• A broad coalition of allies in Denmark helped inspire the development of a national plant-based action plan. The Danish Vegetarian Society, along with policy-makers and others, is now collaborating to expand this success across the EU.
• Last year, Animal Enterprise Transparency Project and Growth and Impact Group pulled together a short-term tactical team of activists from several countries in Europe to lend support to the successful campaign for a ban on cages for hens and castration without pain relief for pigs in Slovenia.

There are certainly conditions that make coordination easier: When resources are abundant and when we have momentum with wins. However, it’s also true that, regardless of external conditions, we have considerable agency to foster a culture that strengthens coordination.

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How do we strengthen coordination?

Here’s the potential beginning of a recipe for coordination, mostly taken from observation and personal experience – first as an activist and now as a grant-maker. I’d be glad to see others expand and improve on this list.

• Spend time together, in person. This builds trust and understanding across differences. It lowers the barrier to picking up the phone and opens doors to future collaboration or knowledge sharing. Events like AVA Summit or CARE are great for this. But there’s also a lot to be said for how unstructured or loosely structured time hanging out allows you to build relationships.
  
  • Suggestion for funders: Support in-person events that foster relationships among people across the movement.‍
• ‍Build unlikely friendships. Forming friendships with people who have differing approaches or roles in the movement helps us find common ground, strengthens our strategic thinking, and enables us to empathize with others. I’ve seen a lot of value gained in the animal movement when grassroots and ‘professional’ advocates spend time together and partner on projects.‍
• Be generous. In my experience, the most effective advocates are incredibly generous. They celebrate the successes of others, freely give credit, and share knowledge and resources enthusiastically. It’s tempting when thinking about funding, in particular, to assume a zero-sum mindset. But sincere credit and praise are easy to give and demonstrate a self-assuredness in your own work that instills confidence. It’s okay to want to be the best at what you do, but striving to get there while uplifting and encouraging the great work of others will raise the bar for all of us, helping you become a better ‘best’ than you could achieve alone. There’s also so much more to be gained from sharing knowledge and resources and seeing others improve and iterate on those ideas, not to mention reciprocating with fresh insights.
  
  • Suggestion for funders: Consider asking your grantees for recommendations of other groups to fund.‍‍
• ‍Put a name to it and talk about it. It’s so much easier to talk (and think) about what you’ve named.
  
  • It can be useful to name our barriers to collaboration.
  • In this great presentation, Jan Sorgenfrei of Anima International offers the term ‘Moloch’ to describe zero-sum thinking – named after a mythological god who demands ritual sacrifices from villages in exchange for luck in war (you can imagine the race to the bottom this encourages). Whatever the term you use, being able to name something helps you notice it more often and talk about it more constructively.
  • And it’s equally useful to name what we are aspiring to. The same applies to naming the norms and values we want to foster within our movement.‍
• ‍Be intentional and open about values and norms. Every group of people has norms and values. Sometimes they are by design. Sometimes they are accidental. We don’t get to choose whether they exist. We only get to choose if we are intentional about them. I’d rather we avoid some variant on the tyranny of structurelessness (the tyranny of intentionlessness?). If we can name the values and norms we care about and want for the movement, then it’s easier to aspire to them. When we started thinking about our strategy for The Navigation Fund, we sketched out the below as a rough guide to the values we were looking to support in the movement:‍
  
  • Movement-minded: Focuses on what’s best for animals, rather than an individual or group. Is generous with credit and knowledge. Appreciates different approaches.‍
  • Ambitious: Takes calculated risks. Tracks impact. Is strategic about using current initiatives to also build power for the long-term.‍
  • Growth-minded: Humble and curious to understand others. Learns from failure. Seeks truth and is willing to change their opinion.‍
  • Accountable: Honest with themself and others about what’s not going well. Owns mistakes and adapts. Seeks feedback from others.‍
• ‍Then be intentional about how you model and support those values and norms. People pick up on what we do, not just what we say. Modeling values and norms is probably more important than even naming them.
  
  • ‍Suggestion for funders: When funders share information openly and consider what’s best for the movement ecosystem, rather than focusing too narrowly on their own impact, this improves the pace of grant-making, allows people to make better-informed decisions, and models a movement mindset for others.
• ‍Contribute meaningfully to coalitions. Coalitions rely on their members to succeed. We all have competing priorities. But if a coalition is worth joining, then it’s worth contributing to its success. We all benefit (and most importantly, the animals benefit) when our movement is winning. Winning attracts more attention and support for the whole movement. When an honest assessment of the situation leads you to conclude your organization’s priorities are more critical in this moment than the needs of a coalition, be open about that with the coalition. Then be intentional about making up for it next time.‍‍
  
  • Suggestions for funders: This is an area where there is a lot of opportunity.‍
    
    • Join Senterra Funders. They provide a valuable affinity group and community for funders in our movement, offering resources, advice, and collaborative funding opportunities. This model is surprisingly quite unique to our movement.
    • ‍Fund coalitions, not just individual groups. If a coalition is achieving impact, consider funding all (or most) of the groups that are meaningfully contributing. This makes it easier for groups to focus on collaboration, rather than credit. This often means supporting more than one group doing similar work. I think of this as ‘useful duplication.'‍‍
    • ‍Empower great collaborators. When you see groups or individuals who model great impact through collaboration, those are great people to uplift and empower.‍‍
• ‍Hold coalition leaders to a high standard. Coalition leaders have an outsized influence on the norms and values of our movement. We should expect them to be among the best at modeling the values we care about. (Of course, the same is also true for ourselves as funders.)
• ‍Don’t expect everyone to work together all of the time. The more people and groups involved in a collaboration, the greater the time investment needed to build trust, alignment, and coordination. The time investment is often worth it, but some progress can be achieved without this added complexity. Coordination can be useful, but we should be clear on why we need it, rather than thinking it is an end goal in itself.
• ‍Discuss collaborations with others. Many people have written and spoken more eloquently about this topic than I have here. However, this topic is valuable enough that it’s worth revisiting and maintaining an ongoing conversation within our movement.

Coordination has the potential to be one of our biggest comparative advantages. The more we name it, practice it, and invest in it, the more powerful our movement will become. I’d love to hear your thoughts on how we can make that happen.