EA - I have stepped aside from my role as Executive Director because I think it will help more animals by KirstyHenderson

The Nonlinear Library

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: I have stepped aside from my role as Executive Director because I think it will help more animals, published by KirstyHenderson on September 3, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.
Summary
During the last four years, our work for animals in Anima International faced several big challenges.
I took on the role of Executive Director to help cement the foundations of the organization.
Now that we want to build on these foundations to achieve even more impact for animals, we need different skills at the helm.
Anima International leadership has appointed Jakub Stencel as the new Interim Executive Director.
I have moved from the role of Executive Director to that of President.
After four years as Executive Director of Anima International, I pushed for my colleague Jakub Stencel to take over the role at the beginning of July. No, I'm not off chasing new opportunities or planning a quiet retreat. I'm not taking time off to be with my family (possibly my family are breathing a sigh of relief right now) And no, I wasn't forced out either.
Instead, my colleagues and I came to the less dramatic but far more meaningful conclusion that this change would make us a stronger organization.
My tenure
Becoming Executive Director was never a goal of mine. I've always considered myself a 'reluctant' leader, often taking the lead when organizing games in primary school (elementary school for the Americans out there) only when no one else volunteered. Ever since deciding over a decade ago that I would dedicate my life to animals, I have simply tried to work wherever I was the most needed. Back in early 2020, I was most needed in the role of Executive Director. And boy, has it been a wild ride.
I took the reins just one month after much of the world went into Covid lockdowns. This worldwide crisis turned people's thoughts away from animals. Shortly after, the full-scale invasion of Ukraine started. For years, we had been working to help build the foundations of the animal advocacy movement in both Russia and Ukraine, but the war put all of this work into question.
Now, not only did we have to rethink our presence in both countries, but we needed to do all we could to ensure the safety of our colleagues. After lots of deliberation, we reluctantly decided to
end our work in Russia, and while
work in Ukraine continued for over a year despite the ongoing war, we eventually closed our operations there as well.
Throughout all of these difficult moments, our mission to help animals didn't waiver. In Poland, an agricultural powerhouse, we continued to fight for hens - this included making sure that companies are implementing their cage-free policies. An example is our investigation into
the largest caged-hen egg farm in the European Union, yet again showing the dreadful systemic abuse of animals. At the same time, we also worked with the private sector to introduce alternatives to animal-based products and pushed the current Polish parliament to be
the most animal friendly to date.
In Denmark and Norway, we continued to campaign for one of the most abused animals in the world - chickens. We managed to push a significant portion of the private sector to commit to end its worst practices. The impact from our campaigns led to the term
'Turbochicken' - which we introduced to describe breeds of chickens whose genes were selected for the drastically unnatural growth of their bodies - being added, in local vernacular, to the official dictionaries of Denmark and Norway. Furthermore, the Danish government declared they would
stop purchasing fast-growing broiler breeds. These events illustrate how far we've pushed society to recognize the horrors of factory farming, a system within which chicks' internal organs collapse under their own weight.
In countries where our operations are smaller, we still manage to ...