RESOURCES FOR HIGH-IMPACT
ANIMAL ADVOCACY CAREERS

This page recommends resources that can be used as part of your planning to help animals as much as possible over the course of your career.

 

We suggest that you select resources by sub-title, rather than attempting to read from top to bottom.

HIGHEST PRIORITY RESOURCES

• Animal Advocacy Careers' intro to vegan jobs

• Animal Advocacy Careers' glossary and summary of ideas relevant to career strategy

• Animal Advocacy Careers’ skills profiles

 

SECONDARY RECOMMENDATIONS

• Animal Charity Evaluators’ short post on “Why Farmed Animals?”

• Centre for Effective Altruism’s Introduction to Effective Altruism (or equivalent resources)

• Animal Advocacy Careers’ discussion of career fulfilment factors and findings, by nonprofit role type, on difficulty to hire

• Animal Charity Evaluators’ reviews of their “top charities” (see the the “Overview” tab of each)

• Sentience Institute’s “Summary of Evidence for Foundational Questions in Effective Animal Advocacy”

• Animal Advocacy Careers’ introductory online course

• Our informal spreadsheet with a list of role types and links to careers resources

 

CAREER STRATEGY

• Animal Advocacy Careers’ glossary for impact-focused career strategy

• 80,000 Hours’ key ideas

• Various other resources by 80,000 Hours

• Ryan Carey and Tegan Mccaslin: “SHOW: A framework for shaping your talent for direct work” (tips on breaking into work at impact-focused organisations if you’re getting rejections)

• High Impact Professionals, “Paths to Impact for EA Working Professionals”

 

DECISION-MAKING

• 80,000 Hours: A (free) weekly career planning course for positive impact (medium-term pathways)

• 80,000 Hours: How to make tough career decisions (concrete decisions)

• Peter Hurford: “Using a spreadsheet to make good decisions: five examples” (also 80,000 Hours’ example spreadsheet and AAC’s example spreadsheet)

 

KEY CONCEPTS IN EFFECTIVE ALTRUISM

• William MacAskill’s TED talk

• Centre for Effective Altruism: “Introduction to Effective Altruism”

• Centre for Effective Altruism’s Map of Effective Altruism Concepts

• Scott Alexander on resource tradeoffs and maximising value

• A short summary of expected value thinking applied to doing good

• Centre for Effective Altruism’s discussion of heavy-tailed distributions

• Brian Tomasik: “Why Charities Usually Don't Differ Astronomically in Expected Cost-Effectiveness”

 

CAUSE PRIORITISATION

• Various cause profiles by the Centre for Effective Altruism and 80,000 Hours

• 80,000 Hours: A framework for comparing global problems in terms of expected impact

• Founders’ Pledge: “How good is The Humane League compared to the Against Malaria Foundation?”

• Sentience Politics: “The importance of the far future”

• Sentience Institute: “Moral circle expansion: Animal advocacy and the long-term future”

• Sentience Institute: “Why I prioritize moral circle expansion over artificial intelligence alignment”

• Centre for Effective Altruism: “The Long-Term Future”

• (2 hour interview) Toby Ord: “Why the long-term future of humanity matters more than anything else, and what we should do about it”

 

SUB-CAUSE PRIORITISATION WITHIN ANIMAL ADVOCACY

• Sentience Institute: “[meta] Long-term vs. short-term focus”

• Sentience Institute: “Farmed animal vs. wild animals vs. general antispeciesism focus”

• Animal Charity Evaluators’ short post on “Why Farmed Animals?”

• “Reducing wild animal suffering literature library” — see the “Introductory Material”

• Jordan Ross, “Why Does Wild Animal Suffering Matter?”

• (30 min talk) Persis Eskander: “Reducing Wild-Animal Suffering Through Research”

• (3 hour interview) Persis Eskander: Wild animal welfare and what, if anything, to do about it

• Animal Advocacy Careers’ introductory online course

 

INTERVENTION PRIORITISATION

• Animal Advocacy Careers: “Animal rights vs animal welfare”

• A cage-free explainer/timeline video shared from NowThis featuring Josh Balk from the Humane Society

• Animal Charity Evaluators’ interventions reports

• Further “intervention research” reports by Animal Ask, Rethink Priorities,  Social Change Lab, and Charity Entrepreneurship

• Sentience Institute’s “Summary of Evidence for Foundational Questions in Effective Animal Advocacy”

• The animal product alternatives section below

 

RESOURCES FOR CONNECTING WITH THE EFFECTIVE ANIMAL ADVOCACY COMMUNITY

• Various conferences and events, including those organised by existing local effective altruism groups and animal advocacy groups

• The effective animal advocacy community directory (add your details here)

• The Effective Animal Advocacy - Discussion Facebook group

• Reach out to a few people to conduct informational interviews by adapting this networking guide. See also 80,000 Hours’ recommended “email scripts for cold-emailing”

• Animal Advocacy Careers' LinkedIn Group

 

PLACES TO LOOK UP JOB OPPORTUNITIES

• Animal Advocacy Careers’ animal advocacy job board

• Animal Advocacy Careers’ list of “13 Vegan Job boards to find your next vegan job”

• 80,000 Hours: “how to get a job”

”Effective Altruism Job Postings” Facebook group

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MOTIVATION AND MANAGING THE APPLICATION PROCESS

• Posts tagged “Motivational” on the Effective Altruism Forum (though these tend not to be specific to animals), including:

  • Maintaining motivation

  • Celebrating rejection

  • When in doubt, apply

• AAC’s online course

 

HIGH-IMPACT DONATIONS

• Animal Charity Evaluators’ “Top Charities”

• EA Funds, “Animal Welfare Fund”

• Tobias Leenaert, “Want to make the world a better place? You may want to rethink your relationship with money”

• Kasia Wypy, “Why I donate to end factory farming”

• 80,000 Hours on earning to give

• 80,000 Hours podcast with Alexander Gordon Brown on quantitative trading

• 80,000 Hours: “Which industry has the highest paying jobs?”

• Julia Wise: Giving now vs giving later (summary from 2013)

• “Phil Trammell: Philanthropy Timing and the Hinge of History” (transcript, video). For more in-depth versions, see his article or the 80k podcast.

• You can read the various questions in our “Animal Advocacy Bottlenecks Survey” article to explore how much you need to earn to make earning to give more effective than direct work

• Animal Advocacy Careers, “What You Should Know About Fundraising for Nonprofits in Effective Animal Advocacy”

 

HIGH-IMPACT VOLUNTEERING

• Animal Advocacy Careers: board of animal volunteer opportunities

• Animal Advocacy Careers: “Is skilled volunteering for you?”

 

PRODUCTIVITY AND MENTORSHIP

• Karolina Sarek’s (Charity Entrepreneurship) thoughts

• Peter Hurford’s (Rethink Priorities etc) thoughts

• Carl Shulman’s (Future of Humanity Institute, formerly 80,000 Hours) thoughts (more for researchers)

• Interviews with productive aspiring effective altruists here.

• Animal Charity Evaluators’ roundtable: How can remote employees maintain a healthy work-life balance?

• Effective Altruism Focusmate and Gathertown groups

• Productivity mentoring (“happy to offer it probono to the directory/community”)

• Magnify Mentoring (formerly “Women and Non-Binary Altruism Mentorship”)

• Gender Equity in Animal Rights

• Apex Advocacy’s Global Majority Caucus (for people of colour / of the “global majority”)

 

OTHER USEFUL CAREERS RESOURCES

• Charity Entrepreneurship, other Non-Profit accelerators, and EA funds

• 80,000 Hours’ careers profiles, e.g.:

  • Operations Management

  • Marketing

  • Journalism

  • Academic research

• Probably Good’s career profiles

• Jeffray Behr’s ideas for possible career paths that help to end animal farming, organised by the subject you might have studied at uni

• An initial list of policy-focused animal advocacy think tanks

 

OTHER USEFUL EFFECTIVE ANIMAL ADVOCACY RESOURCES

• Rethink Priorities: “Effective Animal Advocacy Resources”

• Analysis of AAC’s job board data

 

ANIMAL PRODUCT ALTERNATIVES RESOURCES

• 6 min talk Ted by Bruce Friedrich - "The next global agricultural revolution”

• Introduction to cultivated meat reading list

• Regarding whether or not to prioritise this work, social change vs. food technology is a useful primer

• Animal Advocacy Careers’ skills profile on technical product research

• Identify and connect to alt protein companies with this database

• Various resources by The Good Food Institute

  • Everything under the “Engage” heading

  • Everything under the “Science” → “Careers” heading

  • GFI Student Guide 

  • Familiarising yourself with the other directories and resources that they have. (Visible from the various drop down menus, labelled as “X database” or “X repository”)