We Win Campaigns. But We Don’t Have Power...Yet

What 53 people with 800 years of combined experience told me the movement to end factory farming is missing.

For the last six months I dove deep into one question: how do we build durable power in the movement to end factory farming. I spent two months reading. Histories of our own movement, but also labor, environmentalism, civil rights, and the anti-abortion movement and how it took down Roe. Then I spent three months in conversation. 53 in-depth interviews with people who know this movement from the inside and from the edges: campaign directors and nonprofit executives, program officers at the foundations that fund us, senior strategists from Europe and Latin America, law professors, journalists who cover this beat, contract farmers, corporate insiders working on welfare from inside big food companies, and a few authors who study how movements win.

Between them, those 53 people represented an estimated 800 or more years of experience in and around this cause.

Here is what I found:

1. Political power is the missing ingredient

The logic is simple and a little devastating. We are extraordinarily good at winning things. Corporate commitments, ballot measures, legislative language. We are not good at keeping them. Companies find little consequence when they renege on policies. Policies are rolled back. Corporate campaigning builds leverage over individual companies, and leverage evaporates when the political weather changes. It does not build power.

The industry has spent decades building relationships with state legislators, trade associations, lobbying operations, voter networks. We have almost none of that at comparable scale. So when the EATS Act or the Save Our Bacon Act moved, we scrambled. I will say, since the report concluded, it was good to see us build more political power around Save Our Bacon Act. It resonated across board audiences. The test however will be what can we build that is permeant off of that interest. We will need political capital to make a win stick.

2. Not only are we not winning the debates, we aren’t even part of them

This was the second strongest signal in the whole project, 16 of 53 giving it their top rating, and it is the one I keep thinking about.

Where does the future of food actually get decided? Editorial pages. Congressional testimony. Policy conferences. Academic journals. The long-form podcasts that have become the most effective opinion-shifting medium anyone has. The books that shape how ordinary people think about what is on their plate. We are barely in any of it. The books come from journalists and food writers with no movement connection. The podcast guests are almost never us. The speakers at university convocations and faith conferences and corporate sustainability events are not drawn from our bench, because we do not really have a bench.

Other movements built this deliberately. Speaker bureaus. Media fellowships. Endowed chairs. A visible cohort of people who can go on a mainstream show and be interesting for an hour without sounding like a press release. We built campaign delivery instead, which is not an accident but a series of funding decisions.

The related finding is even starker. 49 of the 53 people I spoke with raised narrative and communications as a gap. This was one the most universally recognized problem in the entire project. What people are asking for is not better individual campaigns. It is a movement-wide narrative strategy: real message testing, framing built for the audience you are actually talking to, spokespeople trained for mainstream rooms rather than friendly ones, and the discipline to stay on message across organizations that currently do not coordinate at all.

3. The vegan brand is an anchor, not a sail

This phrase came up over and over, from people who had no idea anyone else had used it.

The vegan brand sets a price of entry most potential allies will simply not pay. It turns a lifestyle choice into a membership test. One interviewee with an enormous social media following told me that over 95% of their audience lacks basic knowledge about factory farming, and that people avoid the information because they anticipate the guilt. Vegan framing compounds that. It tells people the cost of caring is changing their whole diet.

You can eat meat and oppose factory farming. You can be a farmer and oppose the contract system that traps you. You can be a pastor, a doctor, a veteran, a mother. The frame that works is many messengers, one enemy. The enemy is factory farming. The identity is not veganism.

4. We have organizations. We do not have a movement.

Multiple people used exactly that phrase. Dozens of groups with overlapping missions, no shared strategic table, no mechanism for the kind of alignment our opposition takes completely for granted. The diagnosis is not that we need more organizations. It is that we need a structure that lets the ones we have act like a movement.

5. There is a talent crisis

The generation of campaigners who built what we have is aging out. The pipeline behind them is thin. Campus organizing, which twenty years ago was the engine that produced our current leaders, has quietly withered because talent kept getting pulled toward corporate campaigns where it could be deployed immediately and measured quickly.

We stopped replenishing the thing that fed us. And our funding culture rewards organizations rather than individuals, so talented people who hit a ceiling often leave the field entirely, and nobody ever names what drove them out.

6. The work most likely to build durable power is underfunded

I call this one measurability bias. It was the single most cited structural problem in the project, and in May it drew 11 green dots and zero pushback in a room that included the funders whose own grantmaking creates it. That kind of self-awareness is genuinely hopeful.

Funders described feeling pressure to show impact inside 12 to 18 month grant cycles. Grantees described building strategies around what they could credibly measure rather than what they believed would actually work. Every individual decision is rational. The aggregate result is a movement starved of exactly the investments most likely to matter in ten years: organizing, pipeline, narrative, political infrastructure, culture.

7. The missing North Star

Every movement that has won has had a North Star. Net zero. Marriage equality. Voting rights. We do not have one. Without a shared, named, time-bounded ambition we cannot align strategy, and we cannot answer the question every funder and every legislator eventually asks, which is what does winning actually look like.

A movement without a North Star is a series of campaigns. A movement with one becomes a force.

We have spent decades proving we can win, and we are damn good at it. The next few years decide whether we can hold what we won. Holding wins means building political muscle, a base of people instead of a payroll of staff, voices credible enough to carry the argument all rooms, and an answer to “what does winning look like” that a stranger could repeat back to us. It’s time to build durable power to end factory farming. I believe we can turn around every single one of the below seven points. I've already seen a huge shift in the interest around building political infrastructure, for example. This is not a list to fret over- it's a map that I hope inspires us to go forth and conquer.

And if you want to read the full report, just reach out. I am happy to share it.