Hive's 2025 in Review and 2026 Plans and Funding Needs

By Kevin Xia 🔸, SofiaBalderson, Hive @ 2025-11-20T11:59 (+22)

Also posted on the Hive blog.

TL;DR

The Problem: The farmed animal advocacy movement is up against a trillion-dollar industry. To be effective, we need to be coordinated and strategic, but our potential is often lost due to a lack of shared infrastructure.

• Our Solution: Hive provides this infrastructure. We are a global, impact-focused "digital home" for over 4,500 farmed animal advocates across 100+ countries, serving as a movement multiplier through our active Slack community, widely-read newsletter, and strategic connections.
• Our Track Record: In 2024, we facilitated over 70 "High Impact Outcomes" (HIOs)—including job placements, new projects, and funding connections. In 2025, we have so far facilitated 77 HIOs. Our Slack community is the most active community in the broader Effective Altruism ecosystem, and our movement updates newsletter reaches over 4,500 subscribers.
• Our 2026 Plans: We will deepen our support for advocates in neglected regions (particularly Asia, Latin America, and Africa) through our Global Ambassador Program, focus on the depth of engagement in our community, and plan to pivot to recenter our most scalable program, the newsletter.
• Our Funding Gap: Our 2026 budget is $463,000. We have a remaining funding gap of $200,000. For our End-of-year campaign, we are planning to raise $62,000, ensuring we can retain our team and build on our momentum. Marginal funding will directly support our core programs and our expansion into underserved regions.

The Challenge: A Fragmented Movement Against a Goliath

The global farmed animal movement battles urgent timelines, entrenched industries, and well-funded opposition. To stand a chance, we must be coordinated, strategic, and collaborative.

But too often, our potential is lost—not for lack of talent, but for lack of infrastructure. Advocates work in silos, duplicating efforts and struggling to find the right collaborators, resources, and opportunities. Promising talent can burn out from isolation or a lack of a clear path forward. Collaboration, knowledge-sharing, and coordination are often left to chance rather than being intentionally cultivated to drive high-impact outcomes.

Our Solution: Building the Movement's Digital Home

Hive is building that missing infrastructure. Our mission is to multiply the impact of farmed animal advocates by deepening global connection, collaboration, and coordination.

We are a "digital home"—a year-round, globally inclusive hub that empowers advocates to move from first connection to lasting contribution. We are both an on-ramp for new advocates entering the movement and a launchpad for established professionals to accelerate their impact.

We do this through a synergistic ecosystem of programs:

• Hive Slack: Our core program is a thriving online community of over 4,500 members. It is the most active Slack space in the broader EA ecosystem (to our knowledge!), serving as a 24/7 hub for advocates to connect, ask for help, and collaborate.
• Hive Highlights Newsletter: A twice-monthly briefing on the most important news, opportunities, and research in the movement, delivered to over 4,500 advocates. It helps centralize curated information and keep everyone informed more easily.
• Hive Connections: Our team acts as high-context connectors, making strategic, warm introductions that lead to jobs, funding, and new projects—opportunities that likely wouldn't have happened otherwise.
• Global Ambassador Program: Our newest initiative provides targeted, culturally-sensitive support for advocates in underserved and underfunded regions, starting with Asia and Latin America.
• Learn more about our programs here!

Our Track Record

Over the past few years, Hive has grown to a team of approximately 5 FTE and achieved several major milestones. As community builders, we have provided 3 years of active, consistent, and ambitious support to farmed animal advocates. This support has been continually refined as we receive feedback, collect data, and run experiments. The programs that we run and their theories of change are synergistic.

We have learned that the culture and environment of a community are something that can be intentionally steered or left to chance. From the beginning, we have been actively engineering the conditions and containers that incentivize agency, impact, support, trust, global focus, and avoidance of duplication of efforts within the global farmed animal advocacy space. 

In numbers:

Our most recent reporting period showcases this model in action. Some of our key metrics for 2025 (as per October 2025) are:

• 77 High Impact Outcomes, including:
  • 22 job placements, including placements at organizations like FarmKind, Animal Advocacy Africa, and Shrimp Welfare Project.
  • 7 new projects or initiatives started, including a Pledge Partnership, a book on AI and animals, and a separate book project on animal welfare in aquaculture.
  • 16 high-impact volunteer placements, including placements at organizations like the WAT-R Lab at NYU, Screwworm Free Future, and Planet for All.
  • 6 instances where advocates received funding for their work, including an AI training program for 1,000+ animal advocates, an EAA group in Nigeria, and an AI and alternative protein project.
  • 26 referrals to intensive, selective training/mentorship programs, including High Impact Professional’s Impact Accelerator, Food Policy Pathways, and Kickstarting for Good.
• 71 instances of impact that specifically supported advocates based in or working on neglected geographical regions or with neglected species.
• 700+ weekly active users on our Slack community with 4,500+ community members
• 4,500+ subscribers to our twice-monthly movement newsletter with an open rate of 45%

This recent progress is part of our larger story. Since launching in 2023, Hive has grown into a global hub across 100+ countries, and we have logged over 190 High Impact Outcomes to date.

In stories:

Behind these numbers are stories of how our community infrastructure translates into tangible progress for animals.

A Launchpad for High-Potential Initiatives 

Sentient Futures (formerly AI for Animals): The idea that later turned into Sentient Futures was sparked by a speculative question from Sofia, Hive’s co-founder, which led its founder, Constance Li, to explore the intersection of AI and animals in depth. Hive then provided the platform, feedback, and visibility to develop the field, which has since spun out as an independent organization and received funding from Open Philanthropy, EA Funds, and the Navigation Fund.

Anonymous Project: A project idea about improving the accuracy of public information on animal advocacy, posted by someone who didn’t have the capacity to pursue it themselves, drew in over 70 community members who now coordinate and collaborate on it. That energy and collaboration empowered another member to build out the concept into a fully incubated project.

An On-Ramp for Career Pivots and Co-Founder Matching

After a decade in health tech, a community member found Hive to be the "on-ramp that gave me the confidence to dive into animal advocacy". The community not only provided support but also the crucial connection to their future co-founder, with whom they launched a nonprofit to advance alt-protein innovation.

Strategic Talent Matching for Critical Needs

When the Fish Welfare Initiative (FWI) struggled to find aligned advocates for their work in China, Hive served as the "perfect middleman." Ryan Tseng, who was looking to pivot into the movement, found an FWI opportunity through Hive, giving her the confidence to "go all-in into animal welfare" and fill a vital role for the organization.

Similarly, Hive connected the Shrimp Welfare Project with Jessica Gamez, who was a perfect fit for two different part-time roles they never expected to fill with a single person.

You can read over a hundred public testimonials and impact stories on our testimonial wall.

Our Plans for 2026: Deepening Global Engagement

In 2026, we are focused on deepening our global impact. Our strategy will prioritize:

1. Cultivating a Truly Global Community: One of our key priorities is expanding our Global Ambassador Program. Having hired ambassadors for Asia and Latin America in 2025, we've seen how crucial this localized support is for bridging cultural, linguistic, and infrastructural gaps. Marginal funding would allow us to maintain and potentially expand this program into new regions like Africa, ensuring advocates who face the steepest barriers have a seat at the table.
2. Scaling our highest-value program: We will continue to prioritize our Hive Slack as the movement's core hub. We plan to invest in tools and strategies (including AI tools and an expanded volunteer network) that allow us to scale our high-touch, personalized support, fostering the deep connections that lead to high-impact outcomes.
3. Re-centering our most scalable programs: We are exploring a strategic shift to make the Hive Highlights newsletter and email list our primary on-ramp into the movement. This would allow us to reach a much larger audience with high-quality information at a very low marginal cost, while keeping the Slack community focused on deep collaboration for highly-engaged members.

Our Funding Situation & What Your Donation Will Achieve

Our total projected budget for 2026 is $463,000. This would cover a team of 6 FTE, program costs, and operational overhead needed to build on our momentum and deepen our global impact. We have a remaining funding gap of $200,000.

To provide full transparency on how we use marginal funds, we've broken down our budget into tiers, starting with what it takes to maintain our core functions and building up to what it would take for us to thrive and grow.

Level 1: Crucial Momentum ($247,000 - raised)

This level of funding covers our most essential operations and prevents us from having to significantly downsize. It ensures we can:

• Keep Hive's lights on: This covers our core infrastructure, including our Slack Pro plan fees ($20,000) and the staff time to produce our flagship Hive Highlights newsletter ($10,000). Without this, our two main programs cease to function.
• Retain core leadership: This secures our Executive Director and Managing Director, whose strategic oversight and direct connection-making are responsible for many of our High Impact Outcomes.
• Maintain core team at lower capacity: At this level, we can retain most of our core team, albeit at a reduced capacity. This largely excludes our Global Ambassador Program.

This is the funding we have already raised, barring major unexpected costs. 

Level 2: Momentum ($334,000 - where your donation will likely be)

This is the budget we need to roughly maintain our current level of impact and program delivery, with a particular focus on our global reach. Funding at this level allows us to:

• Fully fund our Global Ambassador Program: We can retain our Ambassadors for Asia and Latin America at their current capacity. Their work is essential for bridging cultural and linguistic gaps and has already led to a significant increase in outcomes for advocates in these underserved regions.
• Maintain our core team’s capacity: This ensures we can continue our individual donor fundraising and MEL (Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning) efforts, and scale up our communications work, which are critical for funding diversity, growth, and program improvement. This also ensures that we can outsource our operations work, freeing up leadership capacity.

Funding at this level means we don't lose ground. We’d have to scale back slightly, but we can continue serving our global community effectively and delivering on the programs that have proven most valuable. Currently, your marginal donation will likely fall into this level, as we are not confident that we will raise it otherwise.  

Level 3: Cost-Effective Growth and Safety ($414,000)

Once our current operations are secure, additional funds can be used for growth initiatives for which we are fairly confident in their cost-effectiveness, and to build a sustainable foundation to help us thrive in the long term. This includes:

• Increasing leadership capacity: We can maintain a part-time Executive Assistant. This is a high-leverage role that directly increases our Executive Director’s capacity for strategic connections, thought leadership, and innovative program development.
• Expanding our presence: We can increase our conference travel budget, allowing us to attend more events, connect with advocates in person, and build the relationships that fuel our online community.
• Establish a contingency fund: A 10% buffer allows for more sustainable budgeting and protects us against unexpected costs, ensuring we can operate with stability.

Level 4: Building for Sustainability & Exploration ($463,000)

Reaching our full funding goal would allow us to not only execute our plans with confidence but also invest in our sustainability and explore new frontiers. This funding would allow us to:

• Offer market-rate salaries: To ensure long-term sustainability and talent retention, we need to offer fair, market-rate compensation. This reduces the risk of burnout and makes it possible to re-hire for key roles without a drop in quality should a team member leave.
• Explore adding a third Global Ambassador: With full funding, we could begin exploring the addition of a third ambassador to expand our support into another high-priority region, such as Africa or Brazil.

Risks and Uncertainties

We believe it is important to be upfront about the uncertainties in our work:

• Measuring Counterfactual Impact: It is extremely difficult to know for certain if a job placement or new project would have happened without Hive. We rely on self-reports and internal judgment, and we acknowledge that we may be over- or under-reporting our impact. Whereas last year we tried to address this by being more rigorous in our MEL, this year we faced a trade-off between our MEL capacity and our object-level work, and opted to approach our MEL from an 80/20 perspective, enabling us to do more object-level work, but further adding uncertainty to our numbers.
• Optimality of Our Approach: Community building is complex, and there is no guarantee that our specific strategy is the most impactful one. We mitigate this risk by staying lean, running experiments, having strong feedback loops, and being willing to deprioritize programs that are not working.
• Maintaining Focus on Impact: If we assume impact in the farmed animal movement to be heavy-tailed, only a small share of the outcomes that we could facilitate are responsible for the majority of our impact. Providing a space as open as our community will not necessarily automatically select for the highest impact opportunities being realized. We try to mitigate this by being more proactive and hands-on with the organizations and opportunities that we believe to be most impactful. 

How You Can Help

Your support is critical to ensuring the farmed animal advocacy movement has the infrastructure it needs to succeed. By investing in Hive, you are not just funding one organization; you are multiplying the impact of the entire movement. In expectation: 

• $40 hosts nearly ten advocates connected on Hive’s Slack for a full year, fostering real-time collaboration and support across regions.
• $100 empowers one advocate for a full year through Hive’s community and programs, keeping them connected, supported, and effective. (Plus give a boost to Hive’s programs.)
• $250 equips 4,500+ global advocates with a complete edition of the Hive Highlights newsletter, ensuring they have the latest tools and insights.

The value of individual donations to our work is particularly important. While large grants form our bedrock, your donation provides something just as critical: speed and strategic flexibility.

A perfect example is our Global Ambassador Program. Last year, the $15,000 we raised from our community campaign allowed us to hire our Ambassador for Latin America, Alexia. This promising idea wasn't part of a formal grant yet, but community funding let us pilot the program, prove its value, and (fingers crossed!) secure long-term support. Alexia has since facilitated multiple High Impact Outcomes and built a network with advocates in Latin American countries where animal advocacy efforts are rarely formalized and often isolated from the rest of the region and the global movement. 

Your donation does the same. It allows us to act on opportunities immediately and experiment with new programs without waiting months for grant decisions. It's a direct investment in our ability to innovate and seize the highest-impact opportunities as they arise.

Thanks to generous community members and Mobius, every dollar you give right now is matched up to $31,000, instantly doubling your donation until the match runs out. 

Hive Community, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization.

Thank you for considering a donation to Hive. With your help, we can make 2026 our most impactful year yet.

Want to Dive Deeper?

We believe in full transparency and are always happy to share more about our work. If you'd like to learn more about our strategy, impact, and community, here are a few resources to get you started:

On the Hive Website:

• Our 2024 Year in Review: Fully dive into our work in 2024, including (even) further resources.
• Who We Are: Learn about our mission, vision, and the story of how Hive came to be.
• Our Programs: A detailed look at our core offerings, including the Hive Slack, our newsletter, and events.
• Our Testimonial Wall: Hear directly from our community members about the value they get from Hive.

If you have any questions, please feel free to ask them in the comments below or reach out to us at kevin@joinhive.org or sofia@joinhive.org directly. You can also send us a Slack DM! We are always happy to discuss our work in more detail.

Thank you for your support to help farmed animals.