Our foundational principle is the fact that we cannot advance the causes of animal protection and environmental conservation without addressing how to change ourselves and the ways in which our societies coexist with other animals and the natural world. We therefore understand the issues of animal exploitation and environmental degradation as fundamentally social problems, requiring BOTH social and bio/ecological understandings to solve.

For this reason, we instead utilize a holistic working framework and approach to project implementation and grant-making that recognizes the necessary connections among interwoven and overlapping issues of exploitation and degradation, and which therefore requires interwoven and overlapping solutions. This working framework is anchored in the dialogue that must be achieved between universal aspirations towards a world that safeguards the wellbeing animals and ecosystems, on the one hand, and the culturally specific, place-based ways in which those universal aspirations will take shape and become a reality in local contexts, on the other. Our theory of change is therefore intentionally social AND biological, while also inclusive of communities, their livelihoods, and their existing relationships to — and efforts on behalf of — other animals. Incentivizing this inclusivity and recognition of complexity in all the projects we implement and provide grants to will promote dynamic and robust models of eco-literate and culturally nuanced change, while normalizing an approach to animal advocacy that unites the needs and considerations of animals, communities, and the environment simultaneously.