2025 Year in Review
FUTURE-PROOFING OUR MOVEMENT
IN A FAST-CHANGING WORLD
2025 was a whirlwind year across the globe – and from this uncertainty, Vegan Hacktivists gained new clarity about the vital role that our services play. Even when financial markets are unsteady, when technology moves too rapidly for most organizations to keep up with, and when governments attempt to slow progress, VH’s forward-thinking services help organizations, funders, and activists like you stay ahead of the curve.
In 2025 we doubled down on the features that define VH, while also finding new homes for projects that no longer play to our utmost strengths.
We did this in three ways: by honing in on our most impactful programs and saying goodbye to those that no longer served their purpose, expanding our scope of services to include next-generation offerings such as automating AI agents, and partnering with more leading organizations such as Thrive Philanthropy and Kickstarting For Good.
Every day, we at VH think: How can we best serve the people who advocate for animals? What tools and technology do advocates not even realize they’re missing? And how can we bridge those gaps? That is what lays the foundations of what we do and how we serve our movement at large.
With your support, 2025 was our most innovative and collaborative year yet, and we’re looking forward to continued partnership.
James Morgan & David van Beveren
Vegan Hacktivists’ Executive Director & President
THREE WAYS THAT OUR TECH
SUPPORTED THE MOVEMENT IN 2025
Saving the movement time, money, and stress, while continuously elevating how we can all leverage tech to help animals in the most efficient and impactful ways.
The VH team increased opportunities for highly specialized volunteers to enter the animal advocacy movement while helping organizations receive a broader range of volunteer support. We did this by launching an expansion and rebrand of our volunteer platform, Flockwork. We also improved the grantmaking and grant application experience by delivering significant functional upgrades to our platform, Granti, making the process smoother for both grantmakers and applicants.
Strengthening partnerships in regions where factory farming is just beginning to take hold, supporting organizations working to stop it, and mentoring promising new initiatives to ensure that their impact sticks.
We helped strengthen grantmaking across Africa, where interventions to stop the rise of factory farming are crucial, and shared our expertise with promising new initiatives as they distilled the foundations of their organizational strategy via Kickstarting For Good.
Doubling the estimated value provided through our free programs and services to the movement in just one year!
Even though VH supported a similar number of services in 2024 and 2025, the impact in 2025 was far greater! In particular, the AI automation services that we introduced in September saved organizations hundreds of hours by handling repetitive tasks, allowing them to focus on high-impact work for animals.
VEGAN HACKTIVISTS’
IMPACT IN NUMBERS
No statistic can fully capture the value of a dedicated tech capacity-builder with deep movement context providing hands-on support to farmed animal groups. But while numbers don't tell the whole story, these outcomes are a significant part of it.
Every year, we at VH provide hundreds of services – averaging almost $2,000 USD each – to the most in-need and impactful animal organizations across the globe!
Here's how we served the movement in 2025 alone:
$425K
estimated value of our free services
147
organizations supported
242
services provided
GRANTMAKING SIMPLIFIED &
ENHANCED WITH GRANTI 2.0
Granti is the one-stop platform developed by Vegan Hacktivists to manage, track, and simplify grantmaking: so funders can focus on helping animals, not chasing emails – and grantees can access more opportunities with less effort!
In 2025, we incorporated feedback from key funders and grantees to introduce Granti 2.0 – a significant update that saves grantees time and provides funders with easier access to key information, making the entire process faster and more seamless than before.
Funders can browse grantee profiles based on selected filters – such as area of focus, country, or grant size – and allocate grants immediately. While you still have the option to request more information via a custom form, these updates allow you to skip the steps of creating new grants or requesting additional information if desired.
Grantees can also spend less time on admin work while managing their information more efficiently. By updating and maintaining a single profile, you avoid the hassle of inputting the same information into different grant applications. Now, grantees only need to provide extra details, such as your latest budget or reports, when specifically requested by a funder.
Granti’s impact
$36.25 Million
facilitated in grants through Granti
$200K
saved for the movement through Granti
compared to using costly and less-customized services!
ROLLING OUT OUR EXPANDED
VOLUNTEER PLATFORM
How much important work could be done if every organization had access to the best volunteers across the globe? And how much could our movement grow if every eager activist could find and apply to high-impact volunteer opportunities with ease?
With Flockwork, we're tackling those questions head-on. Growing out of the Playground program we'd run for 5 years, Flockwork is a revamped platform that matches professional animal advocates with skilled volunteers on projects that align with their skills and passions. Unlike traditional job platforms, we handle the vetting and matching, saving organizations time and money that they can put directly toward achieving our shared mission: helping animals facing systemic exploitation and widespread suffering in the food system and in the wild.
Key takeaways:
Organizations loved the new feel and experience of the updated platform! Former Playground clients and new Flockwork users alike found the user experience easy and enjoyable.
There were some minor bugs reported, which our pilot stage allowed us to fix early.
Requiring volunteers to create new accounts on Flockwork and select new skill specialties on Discord did slow down our initial applicant pool, which has since grown several hundred percent.
In 2026, we'll be promoting Flockwork to the wider public to grow and retain the user base, as the platform can only be as successful as the organizations in need and the volunteers looking to offer support!
Flockwork’s improved interface:
Offers organizations more clarity and control when submitting requests
Supports a broader range of volunteer skill sets
Enables volunteers and organizations to easily track their projects and update their progress
In September, we invited selected organizations that frequently used Playground to be the first to share their needs on the new Flockwork. By leveraging our volunteer networks via Discord and our co-managed communities on Reddit, our pilot launch tested the platform's functionality and identified potential areas for improvement.
REFINING OUR FOCUS
+ SAYING SOME GOODBYES
It's always bittersweet to consider saying goodbye to work we're proud of.
Vegan Hacktivists has developed many platforms which we either didn't have the bandwidth to maintain or which no longer served their intended purpose. We couldn't simultaneously maintain this many projects at our high standards, and we're now freer to focus on areas where we have a competitive advantage, like AI automation and digital security. These weren't easy decisions, but we knew they were right for the movement.
The projects we decided to sunset in 2025:
We said goodbye to Vegan Linguists, our free volunteer translation tool, in summer 2025 in response to major improvements in the quality and accessibility of AI translation.
We also gifted Vegan Bootcamp, one of our earliest projects, to We The Free. We delivered a complete handover, including technical improvements ahead of the transition and continued support throughout a defined warranty period.
We're still exploring whether other organizations could benefit from taking ownership of additional legacy projects we've built.
MAKING FAST FASTER
WITH AI AUTOMATIONS
In the first year after VH took over FAST (Farmed Animal Strategic Team) – the network connecting nearly 2,000 animal advocates from 500+ organizations around the world – we implemented some changes to the way it was run. But we felt like they were band-aid solutions that weren't addressing the issue at its core. While FAST functioned great for users, running it was a manual, resource-intensive process, requiring one or two days per week of our key staffers' time. But who better to leverage our tech expertise and streamline this process, ultimately reclaiming approximately 800 human hours annually for the movement?
The old FAST
In its early years, FAST was a Google Group, a big mailing list that allowed members to send an email to thousands of subscribers at once. It required a surprising amount of time to run properly for all of the organizations and community members using it since 2012. Managing FAST involved 15+ weekly tasks: managing accounts, submissions, digests, issues, and handling approximately 25 different types of support requests daily related to our list, resources, academy, and more.
The big change
We leaned into our expertise, and built out a system that would hand off 95% of the work to an AI Agent through automations. A few tools now manage everything 24/7: n8n (our AI agent of choice), Mailgun (our email provider), a single Google Sheet and form, plus some GPT written code. Together they handle rule-checking, member validation, preferences, and sending without delays.
The outcome
Now, FAST is more secure, faster, richer in features (like the new ability to select what type of emails you’d like to receive), and just overall better across the board. As David van Beveren, Founder & President of Vegan Hacktivists and FAST Community Manager, put it, “I automated myself out of a job – and you can do it too.” So that instead of spending your time on manual, repetitive tasks, you could use it for tasks where you – your expertise, your experience, and your unique insights – are needed most.
Now, the AI automations free us up and save $18,000 worth of team member time per year.
EXPANDING OUR SERVICES
LAUNCHING A NEW
AI AUTOMATION SERVICE
Following a successful pilot using AI agents to automate FAST, VH began offering free automation support more broadly across the movement, collaborating with organizations to automate their most tedious, repetitive tasks that took up a lot of time but didn't require human input at every step of the process.
We were pleasantly surprised by the number of organizations that came to us with specific ideas for how they could automate their work. We expected this service to be in demand, but the response we saw far exceeded our expectations.
After releasing the service in September 2025, we provided an estimated $35K USD in value through custom AI agents in just the initial three months.
For 2026, we're aiming to launch a volunteer-supported AI agent program. That way, we can scale the amount of support we offer to meet the movement's needs while helping more volunteers enter the movement and growing the movement's expertise in AI.
STRENGTHENING THE
MOVEMENT’S DIGITAL SECURITY
An oversight in digital security can quickly become expensive and damaging, and it's often only noticed after something goes wrong. Understanding that many organizations were already stretched thin on staff, capacity, and headspace, we began offering free, confidential digital security consulting services to help them stay protected. Our goal was to help organizations feel empowered to take care of their security instead of feeling overwhelmed and intimidated.
Services we started offering in 2025:
Helping organizations implement security best practices
Running security assessments to ensure everything's protected
Helping organizations respond to active cyberattacks or security threats
While value can be assigned to the security consultation itself, the most important aspect is preventative: the potential damage, crisis, or disaster avoided by ensuring that all necessary protective measures are in place.
PROVIDING
GO-TO SUPPORT FOR THE MOVEMENT
We were also glad to assist many organizations this year with both time-sensitive and highly technical hands-on support that would have been either impossible to obtain or incredibly expensive on the open market. We helped resolve DNS (Domain Name System) issues, stepped in when organizations were locked out of their websites or emails, prevented emails from being marked as spam, fixed issues where organizations couldn't reach their mailing lists, and much more.
PARTNERSHIPS
As a capacity building organization, Vegan Hacktivists can only be as powerful as our collaborations. Our goal is to serve animal advocates in ways that no one else can, which is why in 2025 we strengthened numerous partnerships to multiply each other’s impact.
THRIVE PHILANTHROPY x GRANTI
In 2025, we partnered with global grantmaker Thrive Philanthropy to better support organizations driving food systems change across Africa and strengthen funding for high-impact organizations working on the ground. To achieve that, we leverage Granti, a VH-built platform that streamlines grantmaking in the animal advocacy movement.
Here’s how it works:
1. Granti integrates with Thrive's Africa Pooled Grantmaking Fund
On Granti, grantmakers can now fund the plant-based food systems movement in Africa through Thrive, which works with regional experts, advocates, and networks to ensure funding allocation is regionally effective and culturally appropriate.
2. Thrive Philanthropy and its Africa-based staff handle all applicant vetting and provide ongoing support and training
Africa's advocacy landscape is evolving rapidly, with many small organizations navigating frequently shifting local dynamics. Thrive's vetting process ensures grants reach the most effective organizations, creating structured and reliable funding processes. Additionally, Thrive offers management support and training to grantees, equipping them with the tools they need to succeed.
MENTORING KICKSTARTING FOR GOOD
As ongoing mentors of the Kickstarting For Good program, we supported promising initiatives in the early stages of their launch. Kickstarting For Good is the world's first incubator program designed for nonprofit organizations and impact initiatives working to transform the food system.
At the end of 2025, we provided expert support to 15+ graduates from the 2025 cohort and mentored initiatives on their impact strategy, pitch deck, operating model, and collaborators.
Our Executive Director, James Morgan, also led a cybersecurity workshop for the 2025 cohort and consulted with graduates in person in Berlin.
BLOG POSTS HIGHLIGHTING OUR 2025!
3 Things That Shifted Our Advocacy Mindset: AVA 2025
We’ve Joined 1% for the Planet as an Environmental Partner!
A Quick Guide to Understanding and Handling Copyright Claims
(co-written with Animal Defense Partnership and We Animals)
Your Complete Guide to Nonprofit Digital Security
Photo: Andrew Skowron
THANK YOU FOR YOUR SUPPORT
Whether you've been with us since the beginning, just discovered us, or worked with us along the way, thank you. 🩶
VH has grown and changed a lot since 2019. We're constantly learning how to better serve the movement in our shared mission to end animal suffering and exploitation. Your support, your belief that tech can amplify this work, and your feedback on what matters most has shaped who we've become. We don't take that for granted.