(Photo by iStock/LoveTheWind)
If you had $100 to alleviate the most suffering and do the most good in the world, what would you do with it? For many philanthropists, the answer to this question lies in newer and less expected places.
One growing community of philanthropists, for example, sees exponential benefits in tackling the harms of intensive animal agriculture. Long overlooked and underfunded, this cause is increasingly attracting donors eager to address the largest social issues of our time. Many funders have woken up to a problem leading thinkers have called “a defining moral failing of our age” and “perhaps the worst crime in history”: the horrific suffering inflicted on farm animals. Others have recognized factory farming’s colossal negative impacts on climate, rural communities, and farmers—or its contributions to pandemic risk, antibiotic resistance, and a catastrophic loss of biodiversity.
Uniting these funders, including many from younger generations, is an understanding that giving to create a more ethical and resilient food system is, dollar for dollar, one of the highest-impact opportunities in philanthropy and that collaboration can help maximize every precious cent.
To this end, in 2018, a group of these funders established Farmed Animal Funders, now Senterra Funders, with the aim of accelerating progress toward a more humane, sustainable food system. Today, Senterra supports high-net-worth individuals who represent about 75 percent of global giving in this sector. It has deployed millions of dollars through a pooled fund and tens of millions more in independent, collaborative donations. It offers a case study for philanthropists and advocates working on other new, underfunded, complex causes on how to coordinate effectively to create wide-ranging social impact.
An Overlooked Cause With Outsized Returns
Science shows that farm animals are as capable of feeling pain, stress, and loneliness as our beloved pets, and given the chance, they experience joy, seek out play, and form deep bonds with one another and with people. However, the vast majority of the billions of land mammals and birds raised for food globally are confined in filthy, windowless warehouses—often called factory farms or concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs)—where they’re denied fresh air, basic comforts, and the ability to express natural behaviors, and where they’re often subjected to brutal abuse. Billions more sentient aquatic animals endure similar conditions. Shifting how we treat these animals is one of the greatest opportunities to reduce suffering at scale.
The very same effort can also save trillions of dollars in ecological and health costs by reforming a system that accelerates climate change and pollution while producing food that is often both unhealthy and unsafe. Intensive animal agriculture is the leading cause of deforestation and a top global water user, in part because it takes 50 to 100 times more land and water to produce a single calorie from meat than from plants. Moving toward a more plant-based food system would dramatically ease the strain on the planet and help build a healthier, more livable future.
Currently, 95 percent of animal welfare donations support dog and cat charities, while just 3 percent go to helping farm animals. And at about $260 million annually, giving to this cause represents just 0.04 percent of global philanthropy and over 100 times less than causes like global development or climate change.
But more funding is beginning to flow in its direction, thanks in part to growing expert and popular concern. Giving to reform and replace factory farming has surged nearly 500 percent in the last decade, and strategic deployment of these funds has led to remarkable wins.
One example is philanthropy’s role in accelerating the end of the use of battery cages for egg-laying hens, a practice widely condemned for its extreme cruelty and risks to public health. Thanks to donor-funded advocacy, more than half a billion animals no longer endure these conditions. More than 3,000 companies, including many of the world’s largest food brands, have pledged to stop sourcing battery cage eggs. The European Union and 11 US states have banned them, and US cage-free egg production has increased from 13 percent to 45 percent in a decade.
Seismic shifts like this are possible, but funding models that help accelerate change are essential. Here are five strategies that have guided Senterra’s approach and progress so far.
1. Build a welcoming front door.
Many overlooked, complex, or emotionally difficult causes lack funding infrastructure to help donors find or navigate them. Creating a personalized, welcoming on-ramp for them can speed up the process.
For example, Senterra sets up calls with interested new members to help them understand how their primary motivations and passions align with various giving strategies. It then educates them on the sector, including important intervention areas and strategies (such as improving living conditions for farmed animals, expanding access to healthy plant-based foods via policy and corporate advocacy, and reducing the food system’s climate impact), wins and challenges, and gaps in the field (such as emerging opportunities in the Global South).
Finally, based on what compels them to give, Senterra shares a deeply researched portfolio of promising projects and opportunities to replicate tested interventions. That said, it doesn’t impose strategy or giving requirements, but rather supports donors to refine their own theories of change and understand how they fit into the broader system, in part by connecting them to an active community of values-aligned peers.
One for Justice—a coalition of philanthropists, business leaders, and other high-net-worth individuals—offers a comparable front door to criminal justice reform. Its team maps individuals’ interests, goals, and risk appetite then provides ongoing advising and learning through curated briefings, site visits, salons, and giving circles. The result is a clear pathway forward that blends community, education, and advising so that new funders can engage efficiently.
2. Support effective communication and collaboration.
The combination of shared learning, pooled funds, and independent, coordinated giving (including rapid response efforts) can create a powerful multiplier effect when applied to under-resourced issues, enabling individual funders to collectively punch above their weight.
Senterra supports shared learning through member calls, working groups, thematic funding circles, retreats, presentations from nonprofit leaders and frontline advocates, and a members-only Slack group. In these forums, members can toss around ideas, examine evidence, and ultimately coordinate donations. They might discuss whether new research on animal sentience should affect which species to prioritize, or debate how to measure impact and progress as a movement.
Support also takes the form of pooled funding. For example, Senterra's PEP Fund accelerates a shift toward a more plant-based society in Europe by allowing donors to collectively support country-level charities pushing for policy reforms while the time is ripe for change. Many Senterra members don’t have the capacity to vet each group or assess their needs.
Another shared funding model is philanthropic advisory nonprofit Renaissance Philanthropy’s “thesis-driven funds,” which allow donors to back an ambitious, time-bound goal without individually selecting grantees. By relying on the expertise of field leaders, philanthropists can deploy capital quickly and pursue bigger, riskier opportunities than they would on their own.
Finally, Senterra facilitates rapid, decentralized coordination. For example, when a campaign against a global food company that reversed its animal welfare commitments hit a pivotal moment, Senterra hosted a member call to hear directly from a frontline leader and a long-time funder of this work. Based on their insights, members disbursed additional funds to support grassroots advocacy, public awareness campaigns, and shareholder engagement within weeks.
3. Embrace diverse approaches.
Often, under-resourced, complex, or early-stage movements have more than one theory of change, and that’s a good thing. We’ve found that embracing varied approaches makes our donor community and overall movement stronger. The different experiences and issue entry points of Senterra’s members underpin a wide range of ideas about what’s effective. This diversity drives thoughtful experimentation and opens avenues for grantees to test different theories themselves.
The Navigation Fund, a grantmaking organization working across multiple issue areas, focuses on building the animal protection movement’s long-term power. It not only funds major efforts like cage-free campaigns but also works to strengthen leadership, organizational capacity, youth engagement, and narrative influence. By doing so, it helps to propel larger and more durable wins for animals over time.
Meanwhile, founding Senterra member Open Philanthropy's core goal is to phase out the worst factory farm practices. To achieve that, it makes sizable, high-return-on-investment donations to global cage-free campaigns and supports longer-term work like the development of—and advocacy for—new technologies to improve animal welfare. The latter includes an egg sexing technique that could spare billions of male chicks from being killed inhumanely.
These distinct but overlapping approaches have expanded the larger movement’s understanding of what works, what doesn’t, and where new opportunities lie.
4. Work to equalize funder and grantee power.
Giving effectively in any field, but perhaps especially in new and evolving ones, requires that funders bring curiosity and humility to grantee relationships and often directly collaborate with advocates. Getting closer to the advocates’ work creates both stronger relationships and feedback loops that produce more grounded, effective giving.
Many Senterra members actively participate in advocate conferences, including using downtime between sessions to strategize with movement leaders on emerging opportunities and tools (such as how AI could improve data analysis and campaign coordination) and to gather input from advocates (for example, on what types of support services would most strengthen their work).
Some Senterra funders even run their own organizations and work shoulder-to-shoulder with advocates in coalitions. Member David Meyer, for instance, leads Food System Innovations, a nonprofit that offers funding, research, and collaborative thought partnership to advocates advancing plant-based proteins and policy solutions.
5. Finance the conditions for progress.
Effective giving in an under-resourced field requires more than funding programs; it requires building a whole ecosystem around the movement that helps both funders and grantees experiment, take risks, and honestly evaluate their impact.
This includes funding research on human behavior to inform advocacy. For example, behavioral science research has shown that small, well-designed “nudges” can produce large, lasting shifts in behavior without restricting choice. Our movement increasingly applies this insight to food systems by, for instance, making healthy plant-based dishes the default at universities and hospitals, and repositioning plant-based meats at eye level in grocery stores. These subtle interventions leverage social norms and convenience to normalize more sustainable and humane eating. The results are astounding: Across nearly a dozen studies, plant-based “defaults” have, on average, tripled the share of vegetarian meals chosen, often with no drop in satisfaction. Philanthropy-backed research groups like Faunalytics help advocates put these learnings into practice.
Other funder-supported groups offering movement-wide services include Animal Charity Evaluators, which conducts in-depth reviews of organizations and interventions; Animal Advocacy Careers, which helps the movement attract top talent by offering free career support and mentorship; and Animal Defense Partnership, which provides pro bono legal counsel to nonprofits so that they can focus on mission-critical work. “Meta-organizations” like these help push limited funding further by making smarter use of every dollar and sharing learning.
Write Your Own Playbook
Building a more humane and sustainable global food system is a massive, complicated challenge with multiple solutions. One new technology or direct service won’t make a substantial difference on its own. Yet in the case of intensive animal agriculture—a root cause of many of today’s global problems—this complexity is forcing interested funders and advocates to be savvy, creative, collaborative, and resourceful, both in how they tackle the problem and how they fund it.
Most new, complicated, niche, or unglamorous causes have the enterprising spirit they need to build a community and infrastructure that allows even modest investments to move whole systems, not just address symptoms. And when donors work together and funding is well placed, every dollar stands to go extraordinarily far.
Editor's note: October 30, 2025 | The section on research funding to inform advocacy has been updated to reflect different examples.
Read more stories by Shannon Campion & David Coman-Hidy.