I started out as a animal advocate in 2001 at the age of 12. Nearly a decade later, I discovered effective altruism and decided to start down an earning to give career path as a physician. Currently, I own a health services business and donate my time and money to direct work in animal advocacy. You usually can find me at the Hive (formerly known as Impactful Animal Advocacy) slack community.
Glad that it was interesting for op-sy people!
Accommodations: We self booked the airbnbs and had people fill out a form about accommodation preferences (comfort with sleeping in common spaces, sharing rooms with same/opposite gender, light/sound sensitivity). Then we assigned houses to everyone and set up a whatsapp chat for each of the houses to communicate with one another. One person was the designated housing manager who made sure each house had the things it needed and the relevant airbnb checkin/out info was posted to each whatsapp. We didn't charge anything for housing because the ops side of collecting money for each person corresponding to how long they stayed seemed like too much overhead. Instead of reimbursing people for travel support (which many conferences do), we just offered a free registration and spot in the shared accommodations instead, making it much cleaner from an expense tracking perspective.
I'll share the form privately with you via a DM on the forum!
There is a students channel on Hive, which is a community of farmed animal advocates. You could connect there to find various resources and connections.
One that jumps to mind is the student led Food 4 Thought Innovations. They are having a festival in the Harvard for food transformation change next week.
Short video explainer
I suspect that the majority of positive impact from vegan/vegetarian diets comes from the normalization of these practices in different communities, not from the economic effects. I don't have any data to back this up other than anecdotes of people telling me that I influenced them just by pointing out animal harm in their food choices... which I guess is different from me just being vegan, but I think me being vegan adds to the impact of my words.
It is a pretty uncomfortable problem and not one that I have been able to reconcile very well. One way around it is steering people to support global health/dev orgs that help people while not increasing meat consumption. An example is Female Family Empowerment Media, which improves openness and access to contraceptives in Nigeria. Another examples is the Beans is How Coalition, which aims to double worldwide bean consumption for the purpose of reducing hunger and increasing sustainability.
I really appreciate this transparency write up. It actually did trigger me to immediately reach out to one of the grantees with some critical information about their strategic plan, which I was previously not aware of.