2023 Year-End Message from the Executive Director

Greetings Volunteers and Friends of Vegan Justice,

With our last event of the year completed, it gives me great pleasure to send you this End of Year Report. (There are no street fairs in San Diego in Dec., Jan., and Feb.)

Here’s some numbers you may find interesting:

• In 2023, we participated in 11 events
• Our volunteers gave out 7,300 cookies (purchased from Tracy’s Real Foods)
• and gave out 7,000 Vegan Starter Kits from PETA.

VOLUNTEERS: I’m often amazed at how skillful our volunteers are with the curious public. This year we had 31 awesome volunteers sign up to cover event shifts. I want to personally thank everyone who come out–even once–to help move our project forward. But I do want to recognize eight of the most prolific volunteers along with the number of shifts they covered:

• Camila – 4
• Nina – 4
• Marco – 7
• Amit – 7
• Jackson – 8
• Carolina – 9
• Leslie – 9
• Liz – 11

We tried two-hour shifts for our last event of the year–Encinitas–and had a good response. So when we start back doing events in March, that’s what we’re going to stay with. We’ll need more people to cover the additional shifts, but I’m hoping the two-hour shifts will attract many more volunteers to sign up.

WEBSITE: If you haven’t visited our website in a while, I encourage you to take another look. Marco has made some real improvements to the home page. The three rotating videos of stressed farmed animals are striking. (The interactive vegan restaurant locator is still on the home page. You just have to scroll down a bit.) 

Billboards:  Our seven billboards first went up around town in March, ’23 and when the six-month contract was up in Sept., we relocated them to new areas in the city. In March of ’24 we’ll relocate them again and change the message.

I’d like us to grow the number of billboards in the county with our compassionate message. After talking with some VJ supporters about our billboard project, they donated $2,000 toward an additional billboard. They cost $6,000 each per six-month contract. If you or some other VJ supporter you know would like to contribute to growing our billboard numbers, please let me know. With another $4,000 we can have one more up in March.

I think our billboard message has an effect on those who observe it day after day as they drive, bike or walk to school, work or shopping.

Happy Holidays everyone! I can’t wait to work with you all again in the new year.

For the Animals,

Hal Brody, Exec. Dir.