How Small Actions For Animals Can Lead to Scalable Actions For Animals

One idea for this week: small, scalable actions. 📈

Let's say you're trying to have the greatest impact possible for animals.Some projects might be big, high-impact, very difficult projects—like starting a new alt protein company or getting legislation passed at the national level. These things could have a very big impact if successful, but they're much bigger bets and take a lot more energy to accomplish.Another way to help animals is to do something much, much smaller—and then figure out how to scale it. 🌎

For example, a smaller action might be getting a local high school or college to host an animal-focused documentary screening. You might first figure out how to do this one action really well, and then figure out if there's a way to scale up these documentary screenings to dozens of schools—then hundreds—then thousands. 🎥

Or instead of a documentary screening, maybe you want to advocate for some kind of "default veg" policy at your school, college, city council, business, church, etc. First, you could figure out how to build support and get one of those policies passed. Then, you could figure out how to scale it up to dozens, hundreds, or thousands of other places.One of the keys to scalable actions is that they have to follow a fairly standard pattern and have a fairly high probability of success if you follow the right procedures. You also need to figure out the mechanism for scaling—can you scale using technology, or do you need people involved at every step? If you need people, how are you going to find and organize them?Getting a school to go entirely plant-based is a bigger ask that probably requires lots of conversations, campaigning, politics, etc.—that kind of campaign is harder to scale. (Though still possible, certainly!) Getting a school to do plant-based one day of the week is probably much easier, and thus more easily scalable (if you figure out the scaling mechanism). Getting a school to do one plant-based day of the month is probably even easier than that. 🌱

One plant-based day per month doesn't sound like much, but what if you could scale that to all ~24,000 high schools in the United States with a 95% success rate? 🚀 📈

This isn't to say that smaller, more scalable actions are necessarily better. They're just another tool in the toolkit, and another way to think about making a big impact for animals. 🛠