Guide for Local Vegetarian Groups - The Basics of Organizing a Local Vegetarian Group

Guide for Local Vegetarian Groups

The Basics of Organizing a Local Vegetarian Group

Credibility, Open Leadership, and Outreach: The foundations for growth

What convinces people to move toward a vegetarian diet? Factual information and delicious recipes are important and necessary, but nothing beats personal contact with other vegetarians in one's own city or town. Meeting and sharing food, thoughts and experiences with those who have already eliminated meat from their diets gives the almost-vegetarian powerful encouragement and support. He or she needs to have some personal contact with real vegetarians--people who not only don't eat red meat, but don't eat poultry, fish, or other flesh, either, and who look normal and feel great.

Enter the local vegetarian group, which exists just to bring such people together to form an active community. This community not only deepens the vegetarian commitment of those already a part of it, but also, through outreach events, educates the general public about vegetarian issues as well. Ultimately it is in the best interests of everyone (as well as every creature and the planet itself) that the work of local vegetarian groups be as wide-ranging and successful as possible. Vegetarian groups should be as "ecumenical" as possible, representing the broad diversity of vegetarian viewpoints. People become vegetarians for many different reasons, and adopt different vegetarian diets as well. We should strive to make them all feel welcome.

To establish a solid foundation for growth, a group must weave the following three qualities into the fabric of its organizational structure: credibility, open leadership, and outreach. Our conclusions are based on our own experience with local groups, the experience of people in other cities, and the VUNA survey of local groups. In 1992 the Vegetarian Union of North America (VUNA) asked local vegetarian groups a number of questions--questions about their size, their activities, and their mode of organization. This survey is not the last word on vegetarian organizations, but does provide a starting point for understanding and interpreting our experience with local groups.

Credibility

This is important in terms of both the public and your own members. You should use dependable information, both about vegetarianism and about the workings of the group. If you say an event is starting at 4:30, start it at 4:30. If you say you have a bimonthly newsletter, make sure it comes out bimonthly. There must be a firm relationship between what you say and what you do. That way your members, the public, and the media will all know that your group can be taken seriously.

Several things go hand in hand with developing credibility:

Get a post office box, rather than someone's house, as the address of the group.
Have a phone and an answering machine for the group.
Unless the group is very small, you should strive to incorporate. This is almost essential for obtaining tax-exempt status (see the discussion under Treasurer responsibilities).
Some form of regular communication, usually a newsletter, is very valuable, even if it is as simple as a postcard sent to all members about upcoming events or meetings.

Open leadership

Any group can attract some volunteers, but it is much easier to attract volunteers if you are a democratically organized group. The largest and most successful local groups in North America are those which have adopted a democratic framework. One of the most striking results of the 1992 VUNA survey of local groups was that local groups which had an elected board of directors had an average of nearly three times the membership of groups which didn't. Democracy does not create energy, but it does help ensure that the energy that you do have is used efficiently. One of the surest ways to kill a promising group is to give all power (and work) to one person (or to a couple). If the group is to grow, you need to attract and keep talented people and new ideas, and that is most easily done if you establish the principle that the leadership is open--to new ideas and to new people.

Several things involved in open leadership are:

Adopting a set of simple bylaws that provide for a democratic method of selecting how the leaders of the group are chosen; but specify that only vegetarians can hold office (so nonvegetarians cannot take over the group).
Trying to include a wide diversity of vegetarians in your leadership group--people from every age group, gender, race, religion, and so forth.

This advice is less important for small groups than for large groups. In a small group, just a few people (or even just one person) will be doing most of the work and making all the decisions regardless of elections or bylaws; indeed, you should avoid lengthy and tedious discussion of the bylaws. But for large groups, or small groups hoping to become large, "open leadership" is important.

Outreach

Another important result of the VUNA survey of local vegetarian groups was that groups that did "tabling" activities (having a literature and information table at a public event such as a fair) had significantly more members. In fact, groups tabling "very often" had nearly seven times the members that groups that "never" tabled had. To a certain extent this is probably because increased membership means an increased pool of volunteers; but it is doubtless also because the vegetarian groups which experienced growth are those groups that wanted to do outreach events, rather than just be a group that has potlucks. Outreach is one of the basic reasons for a group's existing in the first place. Not only does participating in outreach strengthen the cause, it also strengthens your group by giving it a morale boost--people begin to get the idea that your group is not just a social club, but a group actively educating the public about vegetarianism, which is what it should be.

Several things involved in outreach include:

Newsletter. This is how you communicate both with your members and with the public.
Tabling. The literature table, present at a public or semi-public event, is how you make your ideas accessible on a more personal level.
Public talks about vegetarianism, to other groups of adults or in schools. These are difficult to set up but can be quite effective.

These three principles--credibility, open leadership, and outreach--all go together. Credibility means that we have a consistent, dependable message, whether it is about plant sources of protein or the location of the next potluck. Open leadership means that we are consistent and fair with our own membership; and outreach means we are consistent and accurate in taking our message to the public.

On the basis of these three principles we can take our message about vegetarianism to the public, insuring that this is an issue which will never "go away"--until we have a vegetarian world.

Maintained by Judy Miner jwminer@accessvt.com