How I Learned to Love Shrimp

Thomas “Richie” Manandhar-Richardson, an animal advocate, technologist, and researcher with Vegan Hacktivists, explores AI’s practical potential for the animal movement. They discuss automating research, meeting preparation, data analysis, and creative work, plus tools that help non-coders build useful workflows. The conversation also tackles human oversight, privacy, fabricated imagery, cascading errors, and making AI systems more animal-friendly.

Taj Uppal, an animal-rights lawyer and activist, discusses risking prison after rescuing two sick baby goats from a dairy farm. He explores open rescue, civil disobedience, activism’s personal and professional costs, and why high-risk action needs strategy, support, and strong communities. The conversation also examines campaign escalation, public visibility, and hope for ending factory farming.

Nina Friedrich, Executive Director of High Impact Professionals, holds a PhD in mathematics and previously worked in software engineering and consulting. She discusses transitioning into high-impact animal advocacy, why farmed animal welfare deserves attention, and the skills movements need to grow. They explore career trade-offs, testing the waters, strategic job searches, HIP’s accelerator, and common application mistakes.

This is a new kind of episode! I am trialling something where I am asking other people to be the interview host, rather than me. This has many benefits, one of them being you get a break from hearing my voice. But you also get to hear from a broader range of talented advocates who know much more about a certain area than I do, giving a much richer conversation. The first guest-hosted episode is run by Jesse Marks, Program Officer at The Navigation Fund, who interviews Jiri Krupa, who runs the Growth & Impact Group.This episode focuses on how campaigning organisations can better engage their supporters, members and activists, to win more campaigns. Jesse & Jiri both discuss the power you can build via better supporter engagement, as well as the strong financial engine of regular monthly donors to support your work long-term.Chapters:(00:00:00) - Intro: more effort means more impact (00:08:17) - Pros and cons of grant funding / major donors (00:10:45) -  of Regular Donors in Campaigns(00:17:29) - Supporter-centered communication(00:21:24) - Misconceptions about fundraising(00:30:47) - How to balance fundraising and campaigning(00:34:14) - Training the trainers (00:46:03) - A concrete story of the importance of engagement (00:53:50) - The value of sharing failures(01:02:14) - Understanding the health of an audience(01:10:12) - Closing questions Links & resources from the episode:[email protected] support groupGrowth & Impact academiesThe Power of Moments, a classic airport book:https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/34466952-the-power-of-momentsSubstack: Thomas Coombeshttps://www.hope-based.com/ Mailing list:  Do Something. Anything. Paul de Gregorio / Rally, UK https://www.pauldegregorio.com/With thanks to Tom Felbar (Ambedo Media) for amazing video and audio editing!Note: My (James') views here are my personal opinions and don't represent those of Coefficient Giving.If you enjoy the show, please leave a rating and review us - it means a lot to us!

Anne Hilhorst, CEO of Dutch animal welfare NGO Wakker Dier, who led campaigns ending caged eggs and fast‑growing chickens in supermarkets. She discusses using big ad campaigns and targeted company research to pressure retailers. Short sentences cover praise plus pressure, the ‘plofkip’ framing, long campaign timelines, and efforts to nudge supermarkets toward meat reduction.

Thorbjørn Schiønning (Toby), co-founder of Anima International and longtime corporate campaigner, outlines a new “fair cop” approach mixing collaboration and escalation. He walks through Norway’s breakthrough on broiler breeds and why focusing resources pays off. Short, strategic takes on patience, when to escalate, and why a campaign war chest changes the game.

Seth Ariel Green, a research scientist at Stanford’s Humane and Sustainable Food Lab and author of Regression to the Meat, discusses his meta-analysis of meat‑reduction studies. He explains why defaults often fail, where they might work, and which interventions show tiny but measurable effects. New ideas, research quality problems, and promising long‑term studies also come up.

David Coman-Hidy, advocate and funder urging more political advocacy. David Cole, legal scholar and author offering lessons from past social movements. Penny Tehlilah, organizer focused on pressure campaigns and grassroots action. They discuss pressure campaigns that win concrete reforms. They cover incremental legal change and the rising role of political strategy in animal advocacy.

Dawn Neo, Director of Corporate Engagement at Global Food Partners, has a decade of experience advocating for animal welfare in Asia. She discusses the critical state of farm animal welfare, the stark reality of cage confinement, and the progress toward cage-free commitments by 2025. Dawn shares insights into cultural differences in advocacy, the challenges of informal markets, and the need for localized strategies. She highlights surprising advancements in countries like Thailand and the role of corporate commitments in driving change for a more humane food system.

Vicky Bond has done lots of impressive stuff in her career – she started working as a vet and later ended up running a 100+ person organisation, The Humane League (THL), which many of you might be familiar with as one of the key organisations campaigning to get chickens out of cages. She is now the CEO of Madre Brava, an international climate campaigning group focused on food. Given Vicky’s extensive leadership and management experience, managing teams ranging from 5 to over 110, I wanted to pick her brains about leadership and management in the animal advocacy movement. I would highly recommend it for people who are leading teams of any size or want to learn more about how to do it well!Podcast news:We now have a Substack where we’ll soon be sharing summaries and key takeaways from all episodes! We’ll also be doing polls where you can vote on the next guests. Sign up here.After our last episode with Sjir from Giving What We Can, we’ve had some people take a pledge to donate between 5-10% of their income to effective charities – this is incredible! But I said I would give up to £1000, and most of this is still up for grabs. So if you’re considering pledging, now is a great time as I’ll be donating £50 to Giving What We Can’s effective animal advocacy fund for each person who takes the trial pledge of 1% or full 10% pledge, up to a total of £1000. So, if you sign up via the links below, there is a special tracker that will let me know how many people take it, and I’ll donate accordingly. The 🔹Trial PledgeThe 🔸10% PledgeChapters:00:00:00 - Cold Intro00:09:38 - Challenges and lessons in being a first-time CEO 00:20:40 - Vicky's experience running 100+ person THL00:26:45 - Challenges in running large organisations 00:39:02 - Misconceptions around running large teams 00:42:55 - Advice for running 20+ person orgs 00:46:41 - The downsides of scale 00:56:04 - What makes a good leader 01:02:05 - Overcoming self-limiting beliefs and imposter syndrome01:05:55 - Madre Brava's strategy on protein split ratiosResources:Entangled life: How fungi make our world Mayim Bialik’s Breakdown podcastRich Roll podcastMadrebrava.org and LinkedInThe secret thoughts of successful women With thanks to Tom Felbar (Ambedo Media) for amazing video and audio editing!Note: My (James') views here are my personal opinions and don't represent those of Coefficient Giving.If you enjoy the show, please leave a rating and review us - it means a lot to us!