S5. E11: Aryenish Birdie: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Animal Protection
“I think that when the animal protection movement really started gaining hold in the seventies... in the United States at least, I think there was a lot of harm done in the ways that we messaged the connections between humans in marginalized communities and animals. And I think that there's also a dynamic where… communities of color are often struggling for basic rights, basic needs to be met. And so, fighting for others is kind of a nice to have.”
- Aryenish Birdie
Aryenish Birdie is founder and Executive Director of Encompass, an organization that is fighting to increase the effectiveness of the animal protection movement by fostering greater racial diversity, equity, and inclusion, while empowering advocates of color.
The group’s work highlights that the animal protection movement would be at its most effective for humans - and animals - only when its voice is as diverse and inclusive as the population it aims to appeal to.
Of course, having a diverse movement is not only key to helping create a sense of belonging for the people of color who are advocating for animals, but also helps organizations to authentically outreach to communities of color too.
Before founding Encompass, Aryenish was a federal lobbyist at the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. She was part of a four-woman team instrumental in reforming the Toxic Substances Control Act to ensure that animal protection language was integrated into the law.
Aryenish’s work is so important. Her team at Encompass is changing the lives of humans and nonhumans - and is making the animal protection movement as powerful as it can be.
Learn More About Encompass
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Read More about Aryenish on Species Unite
Transcript:
Aryenish: [00:00:00] I also think that when the animal protection movement really started gaining hold in the seventies I want to say, in the United States at least, there was a lot of harm done in the ways that we message the connections, between humans, marginalized communities and animals. I also think that there's a real dynamic, where communities of color often struggle for basic rights and basic needs to be met, and so fighting for others is kind of a nice thing to have.
Elizabeth: [00:00:46] Hi, I'm Elizabeth Novogratz and this is Species Unite. We have a favor to ask, if you like today's episode and you have a spare minute, could you please rate and review Species Unite on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts? It really helps people to find the show. This conversation is with Aryenish Birdie. Aryenish is the founder of Encompass, an organization that makes the animal protection movement more racially diverse, more equitable and more inclusive.
Elizabeth: [00:01:37] Aryenish, thank you so much for being here and for doing this today. I'm really excited to have you on, so thank you.
Aryenish: [00:01:46] Of course. Thank you.
Elizabeth: [00:01:48] I want to go back to before you were even born to start, because I just love your parents' story. I want to talk about it. I love it. So, will you talk about them first and kind of how they met and the journey that produced these two incredible sisters?
Aryenish: [00:02:05] My parents started dating as teenagers in Karachi, Pakistan. One of the things that they did, as they were falling in love, was taking care of stray dogs on the streets. They themselves don't really know where this love for animals came from inside of them. I think there was just something about seeing that suffering that really spoke to them, and they were very much alone in caring for animals on the streets. I think that bonded them together in a very deep way, and they were teenagers. I forget exactly the ages, but they were about 15 and 16, so quite young. My dad is my mom's first and only boyfriend. That spirit of just compassion and justice was just very deep inside them. So, my parents immigrated to the United States in nineteen eighty five. My dad came to get his master's in engineering at the University of Kansas. My mom came shortly thereafter and they were just enamored with the United States. It's just like the whole place to be. They just reached it and one of the things that they really wanted to try to do in raising their future children, was they wanted to raise us with vegetarian ideals and that diet and ethic. My mom is a Montessori teacher and one of her coworkers that she was talking to about this. The coworker was saying, oh, your child's brain is not going to function properly and just all of the health arguments which are obviously now very debunked. But my mom and dad kind of believed that. This was before the internet, where they could do their own research. Then they were like, OK, we don't want to make things harder on our children. So I didn't grow up with vegetarian or vegan ethics, or that diet. It was really when I was presented with the frog dissection project when I was in the seventh grade that I saw this reawakening in my mom.
Elizabeth: [00:04:07] What did she do in terms of the frog dissection project?
Aryenish: [00:04:11] So, there was a PTA or some sort of parent teacher conference in the very beginning of the school year, and my biology teacher mentioned that the project was going to be happening. My mom came home and she told me, you're not doing this project that is coming up. I had no idea what the project was, of course, I was just a seventh grader just going through the world and I said, OK. I didn't even understand exactly what that meant. So, she explained that there's going to be a frog and the frog is going to be dead, and they're going to be cutting open this once living creature and creature deserves to live. It was mainly hearing her description and then also seeing her fight the administration. This is when I was starting to learn about systems and institutions and seeing her kind of combat and talking with the principal. There was no alternative at the time, it was required that we do it. My mom was really just fighting for an alternative more than anything else. So I think it was on us to find the alternative, my mom did most of that. Of course there are so many amazing computers and now it's even better than what I had in nineteen ninety seven. There are so many technological advances that we were able to make a compelling and convincing case. By the end, I was sitting in a computer lab doing it while I smelled that formaldehyde. I remember very much that day where I made a commitment to myself to fight for animals, for the rest of my life.
Elizabeth: [00:05:45] How cool and how cool that your mom got involved like that. It's such a good story. This was the beginning then, the frogs. Then, how did you really start getting involved and interested in expanding?
Aryenish: [00:05:58] The vivisection, the animal experimentation issue is really my entry point, and because I became so impassioned around it, I really wanted to take that on. To me, I think it was one of the first times I saw injustice in a way that just really lodged inside me. I had been to Pakistan many times and I had seen poverty and we ended up traveling a whole lot in the United States. I'd seen injustice, but there was something about the lack of power, and just something about that human, non-human dynamic and that coupled with watching my mom, it just really struck a chord. I would do a lot of grassroots activism with my peers. I've got a ton of leaflets around animal experimentation which I use trying to get my friends to stop buying animal tested cosmetics and household products. So at that time, a lot of my peers would say, are you even vegetarian? Kind of as a way of being like, I want to dismiss everything you're saying. I said no and this was partly that inconsistency that my critics were reflecting back to me. As well as I had two amazing black lab mastiff dogs, who were just my everything. Seeing their range of emotions and their capacity for joy and just their totality as living beings made me realize, there's of course this isn’t just in humans and dogs. Of course, all animals have this range of experiences. So, all of those things kind of together led me to start making dietary changes. Then from there, I started learning more and more about how animals are used in circuses, fur farms and zoos, all the different ways animals are used and abused in society. Once that started happening, I was just on fire, an animal advocate in all the ways. Some of it was that I was in that angry activism stage that a lot of especially angsty children go through. But I had some amazing mentors who were elder women in my community. They started a group called Animal Outreach of Kansas, and so connecting with them and learning about the ways that we can more effectively communicate and coming from a place of compassion and love and education. That very quickly kind of got me on a different journey. So that's a little bit of my path.
Elizabeth: [00:08:32] When all this was happening, did you know this was what you were going to do with your life?
Aryenish: [00:08:36] Yeah, I mean, it really was that sitting in the room in the computer lab during that seventh grade dissection project that I thought, I'm doing this the rest of my life. I made a commitment right then and there.
Elizabeth: [00:08:52] That's incredible. Wow. Because a lot of your work, before on campus, was with experimentation.
Aryenish: [00:08:57] That's right.
Elizabeth: [00:08:58] Which makes sense. So, talk about that. What were you doing? Were you doing it for a long time?
Aryenish: [00:09:03] Yeah. So, working on animal experimentation issues was really my entry point, but also my core focus for most of my years doing activism. I was at the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine for a little over seven years working on this issue. One of the things that we were focused on as an organization was looking at toxicity testing and the testing that happens for products. This included chemical products, household products, pesticides, drugs, all those kinds of things. There was a bill that was going through the Legislature that was looking at toxicity testing and how to reform a very old law from nineteen seventy six to make it more modernized and protective for human populations and even the environment to some degree. I was working with my colleagues and kind of became a lobbyist through necessity. I was working with members of Congress and other scientists and the EPA to include language that requires alternatives to animal experimentation, if they were available. What we were really trying to get at there was language that said, if a non animal test exists, it must be used before an animal is killed. It seems so basic to me, like, of course, why not? But it was a very big fight and there were a lot of ups and downs. So I guess, long story short, we ended up successfully getting that language in the now law. I was invited by President Obama's White House to watch him sign that bill into law, and I actually have a framed photo of it with his signature on my wall just to remind me because it was one of the highlights of my career in law.
Elizabeth: [00:10:53] That is so cool. Since it's passed, has there been a huge difference in terms of testing?
Aryenish: [00:11:01] Yeah. So, I left PCRM shortly after the bill signing. This is a very long term process, decades. But I have been keeping up a little bit with the news of it, and it does seem like there is a task force focused exclusively on alternatives, which is one of the things that we were trying to get in and EPA has a plan. So from my advantage point, things are moving forward. Of course, we would need to ask the experts how they feel, but we predict that over the course of decades, this will save hundreds of millions of animals from extremely painful experiments, in which they get absolutely no pain relief.
Elizabeth: [00:11:39] It's astonishing how much we still do, and it's so unnecessary. So this is a long period of your life in which you're working on this. When did it happen that you looked around and thought, wait a minute, this whole movement has so little diversity in it. I need to change that, because that's a huge shift.
Aryenish: [00:11:59] I was in the Grassroots sector of the animal movement for about thirteen years. I did a number of things. I co-organized the Grassroots Animal Rights Conference in New York City in two thousand five. Of course, I worked professionally at PCRM. Throughout that time, it was always something I noticed. That I was one of the only people of color in the room when animals were being discussed. I think partly because of my upbringing, being light skinned, I was quite comfortable in those spaces. It wasn't a situation where I was really actively fighting to be there, but I always had this feeling that I don't totally belong. There were comments that were made along the way that reinforce that such as, why are you here? Why do you care about this? It was those kinds of small questions that I am fairly certain my white colleagues didn't get. So, there was this sense of belonging that I was, that I am, constantly searching for. So coupled with this observation that I had consistently been making, and with racial awareness becoming more and more front and center, this was again in twenty sixteen seventeen. It felt like it was time to really go in and try to affect change in our movement. I was having conversations with a lot of leaders across the animal movement, because I had been around, I was fortunate to have those personal relationships. I could have candid conversations with people who would say, well, I really care about this, I just don't know how to talk about it. I don't talk about it because I have fear that I might say the wrong thing, I don't know if I should say black or African-American. There are lots of questions that prevent the conversation from happening. I realized that something I really wanted to do and contribute to the movement was identify those gaps, and try to create more space to make our movement bigger. So I decided to take this very precarious leap in starting Encompass, a non-profit organization and I had no experience starting a nonprofit. I definitely did not realize all the things that were going to be required of me through doing this, but I'm really glad I did. That's a little bit of how I got here.
Elizabeth: [00:14:28] Was there resistance within the movement when you started? Such as people saying, why are you bringing other issues into something that needs so much focus, or that kind of thing?
Aryenish: [00:14:39] Yeah, it was something that I was anticipating getting more of, but to be honest, I really didn't get a lot of those questions. I think in certain spaces those conversations were happening, and I saw other people taking the reins from me and explaining that, which was really nice. I just had a lot of allies, is I guess what I'm trying to say there. I was honestly bracing for more than what we got. I think especially with what we're seeing now, this in society, I think it's becoming more and more clear to the animal movement that we need to be having these conversations and if we don't actually risk losing our relevancy as a cause.
Elizabeth: [00:15:22] Tell me about the lack of diversity, why is it such a white movement and what's it's like? What happened there?
Aryenish: [00:15:29] This is one of the questions that almost everyone asks and I have some hypotheses, but this is actually something we're going to be looking at more conservatively. We're going to be starting a research paper soon to look at a little bit of the historical context of how we got here, with very specific recommendations for the movement going forward. First of all, I always say that communities of color have eaten plant-based all over the world for centuries, millennia. It's just that we often don't give them the recognition that they deserve. Then also with colonization, those diets tend to start reflecting the Western standard American diet. There are a lot of advocates across the country and in the world, talking about going back. A lot of Latin X communities have this, a lot of Caribbean communities have this, this historical plant based diet. We are always trying to recenter and remind folks that the way it is now is not the way it always has been. I also think that when the animal protection movement really started gaining hold in the seventies, in the United States at least, I think there was a lot of harm done in the ways that we message the connections between humans and marginalized communities and animals. I think that there's also a real dynamic where communities of color are often struggling for basic rights, basic needs to be met. So, fighting for others is kind of a nice thing to have. I think that that's real. I'm speaking in very broad strokes here, but all of these things have kind of conflated to create this dynamic. I did an informal analysis in twenty seventeen and found that within our movement, the most well-funded groups have only about 11 percent people of color on staff and eight percent in leadership roles. Whereas, the state of society reflects around thirty eight to forty percent people of color in the United States. So, there's a very big discrepancy, even the reflection of our movement as a contrast with the United States. So, that’s another reason why I decided to start in Compass because I think we have a long way to go.
Elizabeth: [00:17:58] How did you start? What was your plan from the beginning? Of course you thought, hey, I want this movement to change. But, it's a big ask, it's a big undertaking.
Aryenish: [00:18:08] Yeah, definitely. So, I left my job before this even had a name. I started with just listening to tours. I was trying to hear voices all over the movement, grassroots, professional advocates of color, white folks, leaders, people who are newer. I probably had about 40 or 50 conversations with people just to get a sense of if they view the movement similarly to me, if they view this problem similarly to me and if they think that there is space to try to create change. It was pretty unanimous, which was quite surprising to me. There were some differences, but I would say 80 to 90 percent of the people I talked to shared this point of view that yes, this is a problem and yes, we need to change it. I don't know how, but let's try. I was just reading and consuming every bit of information it possibly could, and I devised kind of a starting point. I decided to create two core programs. One which was working to support people of color directly, and one working to predominantly help white led organizations understand why racial diversity, equity and inclusion matters and how they should bring it in. So, then with that, I broke it down a little further. I realized that the advocates of color are saying they need our community feeling less alone, they need some kind of leadership skills training and personal resiliency, support and mentorship. Then on the organizational side, I was hearing a need for, how do we have these conversations? What are the informal and formal practices on the nonverbal ways in which we're creating inequity? We just need an audit, we need to understand. We don't know what we don't know. So, that's when we decided to create this kind of consulting practice to support organizations and really dive deep into their culture and pull out what are their stumbling blocks? Where the organizations are doing well, and give them recommendations to create change
Elizabeth: [00:20:22] Give us some examples where you're going into an organization and what's kind of blaring to you that people aren't seeing because they're so in it?
Aryenish: [00:20:32] I think especially with the bigger organizations that we do work with as those organizations move internationally, we see that there's a desire to basically bring what has worked in the United States and just plop it in another organization in another country, and that doesn't work. More and more advocates in different countries are saying this doesn't apply. Even the term people of color doesn't really translate outside the United States very well. Which is why we've actually now started using the term people at the global majority, to be a little bit more globally inclusive. So there is this sense of, we know how to do something, and so we want to empower and create change in other countries. Especially other countries where animal consumption is rising astronomically like in China, India and Brazil. We want to try to translate what we've learned here, there. That is a kind of colonialist, white centric approach to doing things. When we shine a light on that, organizations are very open to look, but it's just that shining a light that needs to happen. Inside the organizations there are a lot of ways in which micro-aggressions or small moments that happen interpersonally, with one person, or with the department and an individual take root and it's often unintentional. So, what we try to do is hear what is happening in the organization and reflect it back by saying, this is actually the impact it has when you say something like this. Then, of course, just actual systems and policies. We are starting to do policy audits to, again reflect back to the organization by saying, this is what you mean, but this is actually how it comes across. So this is how it's being implemented, those are some of the things that we do with organizations.
Elizabeth: [00:22:34] That's awesome. So I know you've only been doing this for a few years, but a lot of people have jumped on board. What's the impact been like so far?
Aryenish: [00:22:44] I would say the biggest impact is starting to have greater racial literacy. Being more comfortable and understanding, that being uncomfortable as a part of the process. I think for a lot of folks when they think about doing this work, they'd say, of course, I don't want to be racist, I want to do the best that I can do. Without understanding that it's actually going to be a really uncomfortable process to get there and that you're going to have to look inside and it's going to be a little bit uncomfortable to realize, I may have actually caused harm. Many years before I got to this point where I am now, I need to ask myself the challenging question, especially post George Floyd. Why did George Floyd Impact me the way that it did? Why didn't it happen with Trayvon Martin? Why not all the people in the past who have been murdered and where there have been mass protests? So, those introspective questions can be very difficult and what I'm starting to see now is, this is actually part of the process. I don't have to feel uncomfortable and then shut down. I'm feeling uncomfortable and that means I'm doing the work.
Elizabeth: [00:23:54] So, since George Floyd's death, how has that changed your organization and everything you're doing?
Aryenish: [00:24:02] This summer in the three months, June, July and August, we probably received more requests for support than in the entire three years of our existence, at all different levels. It's been extremely intense and I do have a lot of hope. It has very much energized me. I do have a feeling inside of me and I actually just finished writing an essay on this, it's going to be published next month. It’s about asking that question, why now? I would say to my colleagues, why now? I'm so happy you're here, let's do this and work together, but let's not let this moment die. But yeah, I had to have a slow to respond auto response email because I could not keep up with my inbox. It was just like hundreds and hundreds of emails every week.
Elizabeth: [00:24:58] Is it from organizations, mostly?
Aryenish: [00:25:01] Everything. It's from organizations seeking support, we are doing intakes kind of around the clock. It's from advocates of the global majority saying I actually experienced this thing and now I feel more empowered to say something about it., can you help me figure out how to do that? It's been from donors saying, We now really understand the need for your work, how can we support you? Which has been awesome. It's been from members of the media asking for interview requests, and that kind of thing.
Elizabeth: [00:25:30] The need for you obviously has been there for decades, but the fact that everyone is now really aware of just how essential what you're doing is and how vital it is, it is really cool.
Aryenish: [00:25:43] Yeah, I really do feel so energized. Sometimes this work can be really emotionally laborious and at Encompass we really try to check in on our emotional reserves and build self-care into a lot of what we do. This involves taking time off whenever we need it, trying to have a more reasonable work life balance with reduced hours at times and all of those things. Even though it's been more intense than ever before, I do feel more energized than ever before.
Elizabeth: [00:26:11] What have been some of the biggest challenges since you started?
Aryenish: [00:26:15] There are a few things, especially in the beginning. There were a lot of moments where I wondered if we would have financial support to continue on. Especially now that we have staff, it's all on me to make sure that they have a regular paycheck, I'm not used to that kind of pressure. There was also a point before George Floyd, where I wondered, are organizations really going to take our recommendations? Is it a situation where they want a little bit of a rubber stamp, and are we doing that and are we actually causing more harm to communities of color by doing this work? That's probably the thing that I have the most fear of, actually giving substantive changes that will actually create the change we want to see, not just kind of cosmetic changes. I don't think we're doing that, especially because I'm constantly asking myself that question, but it is something that I want to be really mindful of. I want to make sure that I'm supporting advocates of color and putting them in positions where it’s not causing more harm. So, that's probably the biggest thing for me.
Elizabeth: [00:27:24] Talk a bit about what you're doing with the advocates.
Aryenish: [00:27:27] We have a caucus for advocates of the global majority, and it's a close base, really to create space for healing and bonding and intentionality. So in that space, we now have a hundred and thirty members from across the globe, which is awesome. I think we have almost 20 countries represented, which is far beyond what I expected when we first launched. We currently have a monthly webinar series where we look at all different kinds of issues. From overcoming imposter syndrome, to looking at self-care, like media training 101, how to speak more effectively to your boss, but also to members of the media. So we kind of are working both on the leadership skills training front and the personal resiliency, how to wade through microaggressions and those kinds of things. Then we, of course, have community building opportunities. When COVID hit, we had a number of sessions where it was, how can we support each other? Let's not feel so alone, we are all here together. When conferences were happening, we had in-person sessions at every conference, which was really special. We are also launching right now, we're starting the process of creating a talent of color database. This is so that people of color can more easily find opportunities for board positions, speaking roles or just job opportunities. So we're hoping to be more of a facilitator in making those connections between opportunities.
Elizabeth: [00:28:58] Are you finding that there's a lot of people that are advocates, but they've stayed away because of this?
Aryenish: [00:29:05] Hmm. Advocates of color, you mean?
Elizabeth: [00:29:09] Yeah.
Aryenish: [00:29:10] Absolutely. I've gotten a lot of emails to that effect. These might say, I pretty much had one foot out the door, I still kind of do, but your caucus is the one thing that kind of keeps me going. One person said that she basically had a position in the movement, then she left. She joined her caucus, attended several, and then learned about a executive director position at a small food justice group that does look at factory farming issues as well as other issues. She is now the executive director of it, which is amazing. This is of course all her, but we were just so happy to be a part of her process. To feel like there is still space for her in this movement and we don't want her to leave because she has so much to offer.
Elizabeth: [00:29:49] The animal protection movement is hard. You're up against such massive, massive hurdles. The winds don't come very often and it's devastating. You're just seeing and hearing devastating things every day. So if there's something else keeping you out, it'd be so easy to walk away because it's already so hard to be in there in the first place.
Aryenish: [00:30:10] Absolutely.
Elizabeth: [00:30:11] It's one of the things that makes what you're doing so hugely important. But also with this movement, if it doesn't change, where does it go?
Aryenish: [00:30:20] Exactly, if we don't really start more accurately reflecting the demographics of our country, we are destined to fail and we can't let that happen. The animals need us to be right at this work. Going back to your question about the challenges, one of my colleagues did a study, a peer reviewed study, on burnout amongst the animal protection advocates. One hundred percent of the advocates of color interviewed, identified racism that they experienced in the movement as a source of burnout. One hundred percent is a very convincing group of people.
Elizabeth: [00:30:56] That's just astonishing and really depressing.
Aryenish: [00:30:59] Yeah, and again, I think that a lot of this is unintentional. So this is why I feel so optimistic because of course, there's going to be racism. We're never going to eradicate it completely, as long as I think humans exist. So we will always have some kind of injustice. But we are a social movement, and we're trying our best to make the world better. So I think that that's another reason why I feel hopeful for our cause, because a lot of this is just saying the wrong thing or not thinking through something or being centered in a certain way that you're causing harm without meaning to. Those are the people who I feel most excited to work with. If someone's wanting to change and wanting to be the best that they can be and all they need are the tools, then sign me up. I want to help them.
Elizabeth: [00:31:44] That's what you're doing. I'm sure there's very few organizations that don't need you, so it's awesome. Thank you so much Aryenish. Everything you're doing is incredible and, like I said, so necessary.
Aryenish: [00:32:03] Thank you.
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