Growing & Showing

It’s our contention that if we don’t allow ourselves the space as individuals and organizations to think creatively about how to solve increasingly complex, relational, and urgent challenges compromising the well-being of people and other animals, we are unlikely to make significant progress in solving them. We therefore ascribe creativity as one of our core organizational values and intentionally make time and space for creative project development. This takes the shape of innovative pedagogic meetings/forums during which we brainstorm, ask hard questions, challenge assumptions, and bring a diversity of perspectives and thought experiments together with the goal of developing solutions and interventions to difficult human-animal coexistence issues.

One thing we are proactively working against is the siloing of interdependent issues facing humans and other animals, as this risks overlooking the common root causes and systemic incentive structures responsible for perpetuating suffering, exploitation, and ecological degradation. Therefore, while our grant-making will broadly fall into the categories of wild, farmed, and domestic animals, we are explicitly seeking to fund what we call ‘Linking Initiatives’ that combine work across these categories - as well as across research, advocacy, and policy focused work - as a way to incentivize efforts to think systemically and holistically about how to effectuate change on these issues in ways that target root causes.

Failure is a necessary and unavoidable part of any honest endeavor towards change. We don’t shy away from or distance ourselves from failure; rather we embrace it and try to learn from it in as many ways as possible, while also sharing these learnings publicly to help others learn from our mistakes without having to repeat them. We ask for this same engagement with failure from our grantees, whom we actively encourage to share failures and learnings with us as part of their grant reporting. We believe that if we don’t incentivize honesty, and if we can’t honestly acknowledge what’s not working and where our assumptions may have failed, we’ll then create a superficial culture that only produces superficial results.

We also make a point to celebrate our successes, while recognizing the impermanence of any singular positive outcome or effect and the fact that there is always more work to do to curb the tide of forces working to destroy rather than create and protect. If you’re interested in learning more about this philosophy don’t hesitate to get in touch with us at katherine@humananimalcoexistence.org to learn more.