Grand Objectives and Strategic Milestones: Creating a Clear Strategy
Some social movements of the past have a clear, well understood end goal. This is certainly true for movements to overthrow dictatorships…
Some social movements of the past have a clear, well understood end goal. This is certainly true for movements to overthrow dictatorships or to expel colonial rule; for the Indian independence movement (1857–1947) “swaraj” or self-rule free of British interference was the aim. Other examples include Otpor, the student movement to overthrow the dictator Slobodan Milosevic, the Palestinian intifadas and the Colour Revolutions in Eastern Europe.
We all know that having a clear goal can help in devising a focused and clear strategy. For movements like ours as well as environmentalism, women’s rights, LGBTQ+ rights and the movement for black lives there isn’t one clear defining goal that we could answer yes or no as to whether it has been achieved. Work needs to be done to create a vision and an idea of what “liberation” might look like. So we have plenty of pathways to choose from.
The Freedom to Marry campaign offers an example of what a unifying goal can do. Winning marriage equality was chosen as the goal, amongst many other things that could have potentially be achieved (some members of the movement didn’t believe it was even the right goal to be striving for), since it was understood that this was an essential milestone for combatting homophobia. For a period of time this issue was the focus of the movement and almost the face of it.
This was an eyes-on-the-prize campaign that drove the national strategy that would achieve that singular, bold but focused goal, and to bring together the partner organizations, multiple methodologies, and contributions of many across an entire movement. The central campaign allowed them to partner with many different organisations; national LGBT organizations, national non-gay allies, businesses and labor groups, groups across the political spectrum, funders, state-level LGBT and allied groups, regional US groups, and even international organizations.
We can see here how a singular goal creates the ground for powerful strategic partnerships within a movement.
This is the grand objective and strategic milestone model from International Centre for Non-violent Conflict (ICNC). It provides a super simple framework for understanding movement goals and strategy.
(1) So you have your Grand Objective — what you are attempting to achieve, the end goal. This might be what a movement wants to achieve within a generation, 40 years, 15 years, 10 years or some other timescale variation.
(2) Strategic Milestones: what are some intermediate goals that put us on the path towards achieving this grand objective.
(3) Campaigns: Initiatives that put you on the path towards achieving your strategic milestone.
(4) Tactics: methods and strategies that support you to achieve your campaign goal.
The framework provides us with clear logic: the ultimate goal is our guiding star and frames everything else.
Learning from the Past
Two major “milestones” or strategies during the Civil Rights movement were desegregation and voter registration. These initiatives targeted the institutional pillars and legislation that held up racial discrimination. Segregation was tackled in lunch counters (lunch counter sit-ins), public transport (Rosa Parks, the freedom rides) and the in schools (the little rock nine and the Brown vs Board of Education ruling). This was coupled with voter registration drives and the pursuit of protection for black voters; the Voting Rights Act of 1965 prohibited racial discrimination in voting.
We at Animal Think Tank were inspired by these examples when considering how to choose our major public facing goal or “grand objective”. There are so many different legitimate strategies in the movement from achieving personhood, improving the welfare of animals, making alternative protein the default, achieving representation for animals in politics, targeting factory farming or experimentation and more. When shifting public opinion and creating debate, we want to find something that is focused, symbolic, visionary and achievable. To get to this we are in the process of surveying the landscape and collecting input from many different parts of the movement to generate ideas.
We hope that this will contribute to creating coordination in the movement behind a well-informed and deliberated goal.
Our methods and plan
Through a variety of methods, including a series of 1–1 interviews, workshops, focus groups and round tables, we are seeking input from movement players across the different areas; from grassroots organising, civil disobedience, political lobbying, corporate campaigning, alternative foods, progressive and conservative animal advocates. A proportion of our focus groups intend to bring in the motivations and opinions of key demographics (non vegans, the general public, youth, conservatives, and faith groups) we want to work towards engaging in the issue.
To be able to find a good public facing goal we want to bring in insights from our narrative work (see here for more information) so we can present some that is bold, visionary and achievable but also tells the right story. In the Freedom to Marry example mentioned earlier, consider how marriage equality legitimises the love between gay and lesbian couples; symbolically it says a lot. We too have to make sure that we are telling the right story through our goals and the campaigns we run.
Consulting the movement: Ideas generated at AVA
At the Animal and Vegan Advocacy Conference (AVA) 2022, Animal Think Tank held a 2-hour pre-conference workshop for attendees. In small groups, participants discussed promising movement strategies, and long-term goals and milestones for reaching animal freedom:
Legal wins
Strike down the ag-gag laws
Enshrine personhood for individual species
Win right to rescue
Create new categories within law (property +)
Implement animal welfare evaluation systems
Create alternatives to killing/mistreatment (e.g. birth control) and corresponding policies
Develop popular/ballot initiatives and direct voting
Achieve whistle blowing, investigations and rescue
‘Greener by default’ as policy wherever food is served
Expand legal animal protection beyond cruelty — laws against being treated as property
Remove agricultural exemptions so farmed animals are treated like dogs and cats
Lobby government/obtain legal wins
Implement revocable licensing for all animal use
Prop. 12: expand across states/at national level
Ban meat ads (like tobacco)
Creating Alternatives
Release animals to sanctuaries
Develop alternative protein
Make vegan food more widely available
Level the economic playing field
Public Support and Opinion
Make support for animal rights a mainstream conversation
Support farmers’ rights
Increase the proportion of people identifying as vegan — especially those with power/influence, young and educated groups, Gen Z
Movement Infrastructure
Build broad coalitions
Work with other movements
Create acceptance as a popular social justice issue
Build influence in the media
Create a global activism network to support best practice
Support advocates’ mental health
Embrace all forms of non-violent advocacy
Create alliances with the human rights sector
Culture and Psychology
Increase research into animals’ cognition, inner lives etc. and public awareness thereof
Develop our understanding of spiritual connections between humans and animals
Create social stigma around eating meat (see smoking, drunk driving)
Normalise non-speciesist language
Nutrition, Vet Practice, Medicine
Lead the vet/med sector to a consensus declaring animal ‘products’ unethical and unhealthy
Education
Change school curricula — teach children about animals as individuals
A few ideas came up multiple times. Ending subsidies for factory farming and developing the availability of vegan food and alternative protein were the most popular ideas.
Numerous, diverse ideas about strategic litigation, public policy and ballot initiatives were expressed.
The main targets and spheres of influence mentioned were markets, government, courts and public opinion (in order of recurrence), with several suggestions to push governments to lead the transition.
Within the Movement Infrastructure theme, being seen/accepted as a social justice movement came up most often.
More ideas
Building on the output of the workshop, we identified a few gaps and under-explored areas.
Ensuring a healthy movement ecology (insert link to ecology article)
Grassroots organising/ mobilisation
Winning public support/sympathy
Persuasion using effective stories and language
Alternative protein and vegan food were the most popular alternative creation strategies
Vision-building strategies:
Focusing on sanctuaries
Implementing vegan farming methods
Alternatives to animal testing
Popularising adoption over breeding
Parliamentary representation of animals, etc
Who should make up the movement?
We should also consider groups that can strengthen the movement’s power and reach :
BIPOC
The farming community
Young professionals
Faith communities
Students, academia, scientists
Politicians
Doctors, teachers, parents, vets
Journalists and people in the media
Goals and milestones that engage powerful sectors of society, for example the media, schools, hospitals, veterinary practices, people in politics and more, could be a promising avenue. These are the pillars that hold up the practice of speciesism so getting these people on side would be advantageous.
Some interesting ideas that have come out of our grassroots consultations include:
A right to a natural lifespan
Ban child and mother separation in cattle farming
A referendum on killing animals for food
Publicly funded national sanctuary program
Wild animals to outnumber farmed animals by 2040
End forced insemination of animals
Turn farmland into wild areas initiative
Win a pro-animal Act in a devolved power in the UK (Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland)
Build a youth network to be able to campaign in schools (for more plant based options, sanctuary visits and not zoo visits, after school clubs and more)
What next?
After data collection is complete and after a series of internal discussions to synthesise and shortlist ideas, we will then seek feedback from movement players to inform our final selection. Seeing how the short-listed ideas land with the general public and key demographics will also play into that choice; is this a goal that will capture the public’s imagination and tell the right story?
Keep an eye out for our final report which will include our selected public facing goals and a summary of all the ideas, insights and suggestions that have arisen through the consultations process.