Putting the HR in Animal Rights

The term HR has become something of a joke, referring to a department within every company that works hirings and firings and occasionally organizes a holiday party. So it’s easy to forget the concept behind “HR” which is the idea that human beings, people, individuals are a vital resource to any company or endeavor. Without people we are small, weak, easy to ignore. But people bring their collective knowledge, their experience, their brilliance, their wild creativity or analytic logic to our efforts. They supply the steam and the enthusiasm behind every effort.

Those of us working for animals should take note of the changing climate within corporate America. Where once employees were considered a disposable resource, easily renewed with fresh recruits, many innovative companies are discovering that it is actually much more costly to replace their people power. There is time and effort lost training those brand new people, and it’s doubly hard to get the new people up to speed if the people already versed in the information and tested in the field aren’t there to help them along.

The entire Animal Rights/Vegan community isn’t a single company that can enact an employee assistance program, but we do benefit from retaining people and keeping them involved and active.

I’ve been to a number of discussions on burnout, discouragement, depression, and despair among animal activists. In general I found these discussions to focus around the concept of individual weakness, the idea that some activists just aren’t cut out for the tough work of standing up for animals. Generally the people expressing this view did have it very rough themselves, they were vegan when vegan wasn’t cool so to speak. Many came up through an animal control or humane society environment and possibly participated in putting thousands of animals to death themselves. They might think they had to toughen up so everyone else should too.

But a smart HR strategy is to meet people where they are, find ways to utilize their particular skills, engage and train them to strengthen those skills, and then retain them, keep them doing what they do well. Some people are very tough and they have a role to play. Others bring a different skill set, different talents and we need to keep them engaged as well.

Many animal organizations have become quite good at fundraising. They know which types of appeals bring in money, so they keep hitting the button that produces the bucks. They know how to work with businesses to raise money. They know put on benefits. But we should also keep in mind that if fundraising is a piggy bank that we keep adding to, keep dropping coins through the top slot, then losing supporters, losing activists is like a huge leak in the bottom of that piggy bank.

Each time someone finds themselves in so much despair over animal suffering that they just turn away, we lose their voice from our chorus. Every vegan who goes back to being an omnivore because they’re too burnt out to think or even feel at the moment is not just one ex-vegan eating animals. Through that one ex-vegan we lose access to all those she might have influenced. Another living example of how livable and fulfilling veganism can be drops off the map. Every person so disillusioned with the in-fighting and dishonesty in the corporate animal rights realm that they dissociate from animal rights altogether is a huge loss to the animals.

If we are all trying to plug into a network to pool our collective knowledge, information, skills, and talents, then we need to keep as many people as possible plugged in. Each connection that goes dead leaves us that much more isolated. People are a resource more precious than money for our movement, we need to find ways to keep them with us, keep them involved, and support them so they can be the best activists possible.