In my last blogpost, I mentioned how the vegan community tends to only preach to the converted in discussing veganism. I mentioned a couple ways in how to be a real active vegan in educating people who are non-vegans.
Today, I want to talk about other very effective ways to educate non-vegans, including ways I said yesterday, in no particular order:
Schools
Be it grade schools or colleges, go to the teacher of the class and ask nicely if you can give a vegan presentation. Many places of education would allow you to come in and educate their students about a healthy life. You'll be reaching people (students) mostly under 30 years of age.
Churches
Churches, especially large ones with many programs and other things going on there throughout the week, would welcome someone coming in to talk to the congregation about veganism/healthier way of life. If you are a member or at least regularly attend worship services at the church, you have an even better chance of being allowed to present veganism there. If you are a member and your church has an area where members do tableing for social justice causes, ask the main organizer of the tables if you can do a vegan table with pamphlets and samples of delicious vegan food. Who mostly attend church? People who are over 30.
So with educating the schools and the churches, you will be informing all the ages and generations of people.
Follow everyone who follows you, so as you Tweet, all the non-vegans, which will be most of your followers, will see your vegan tweets. I say follow everyone because if you don't, many (non-vegans) will stop following you. If you want to have a section at Twitter to just see fellow vegan tweets easily, simply make a Twitter List of all your vegans before following everyone else. You can make many Twitter Lists for any category you want.
Tweetdeck
Tweetdeck is a marvelous way of spreading the vegan message! After you register there and get the deck, type in the word vegan in the search at the upper right corner. After you click for the search, you'll see only the tweets at that Tweeter column with the word "vegan" in it as mentioned. Go to the bottom of that search and click at Add Column. Now, when you see someone asking about the vegan life, you can tweet them back with information. Believe me, you'll see A LOT of people asking for help. Plus, you'll help many other non-vegans, as you'll have many non-vegan followers because you are following everyone who follows you, so they'll read your informative vegan tweets. This also can work in other social networks.
Outdoors
If you want to spread the vegan message in a more public way, do it openly outdoors! Most non-vegans will not go out their way to hear vegan/animal rights talk. By having vegan gatherings out in the parks, you'll be taking the message to where non-vegans normally are. Make sure it's very accessible to non-vegans and not in such a way where a person has to go through a gate to get there, as I said, non-vegans will not go out their way to hear the message, so have the entrance wide open, like in a public park.
How to Tell if You're Being an Effective Vegan Activist
In your activism, whether it be in public in person, on your podcast, on your blog, your emails, etc. if the majority of people responding to you are praising you and agreeing with pretty much everything you say immediately without questioning you, then you are not being an effective vegan activist! You are simply just informing other vegans what they already know, and your vegan activism will be nothing but a vegan club for fellow vegans. Non-vegans (who most of your audience should be) will not quickly praise you; they will be asking a million questions, challenging you, debating you, mentioning their fears, being skeptical....at first until you give them more information to their satisfaction as it pertains to them as an individual. Then they may express gratitude and praise toward you for being so informative.
You can certainly do whatever you want in speaking the vegan message, and not take my advice, as you are not hurting me. Who you are hurting are animals in the world by spending most of your time talking to people who already are vegan/animal activists.
I would think a school with Nutrition classes, or Food Science classes would do good to have someone give a talk on vegan life for sure.
ReplyDeleteYes. Excellent idea. And with schools, if activists want great tips/have questions on how to give a great presentation, they can get in touch with the expert at giving school talks, Gary Yourofsky. I have emailed him in the past and he answers his mail personally and always within 48 hours.
DeleteAt 1:31 PM, I just added an outdoor idea in my blogpost as a way to spread the vegan message!
ReplyDelete