Written by Kimberly Costello, a member of the Brock Animal Rights Club (BARC) at Brock University
I recently spearheaded the organization of an outreach/benefit concert titled “Radio-Action for Animals”, with the help of many other members of the Brock Animal Rights Club (BARC). The primary purpose of the event was to raise awareness within the local community about how people can live more compassionate lifestyles and make more informed ethical decisions. Our primary focus was on modern factory farming and promoting vegetarian/vegan diets.
At the event we had outreach tables with display boards and literature on many animal exploitation issues such as factory farming, health/ environmental benefits to veg diets, vegan recipes, battery-cages, anti-fur, animal experimentation, and the Canadian Commercial seal hunt. We also had an amazing free vegan food spread to expose people to different types of vegan foods including vegan pizzas, vegan chili rolls, vegan spring rolls, vegan somosas, breaded tofu fingers, pitas/nachos and dips, and lots and lots of vegan baked goods. The food was catered by a local restaurant that was looking to expand their vegetarian/vegan menu options and many of our club members provided the vegan baked goods.
We also had raffle draws for a cruelty-free (no animal testing, no animal ingredients or by-products) household cleaning products donated by Nature Clean, and cruelty-free/vegan personal care products in addition in addition to free outreach door prizes such as Earthlings/The Witness DVDs, animal rights books, vegan cookbooks, and other vegan/cruelty-free products donated by various companies in the local community.
Lastly, we also recruited 5 local bands representing a wide variety of musical genres to play the event; all bands had at least 1 vegetarian band member.
Overall, the event was very successful. We had over 200 attendees and managed to raise approximately $2000 for an amazing animal charity. We received extremely positive feedback about the vegan food and so we were successful at challenging some of the misinformed preconceived notions about bland/vegan foods. Most importantly we were able to expose people to information about animal exploitation that they perhaps would have never been exposed to otherwise. We can only hope that through making this information easily available to all types of people that we were able to enlighten and empower at least some people to live more compassionate ethical lifestyles.
