John and I got this idea to start a website dedicated to promoting veganism in 1998 when we were traveling through Maine. At the time, I was working at a large animal shelter in various capacities (humane education, animal behavior) and I loved my job, but three years prior, John and I had gone vegan and it was clear that this was our life’s work. By 1998, John had co-founded a communications agency for environmental organizations after a career in big advertising. At the time, though, we were looking for me to transition into promoting this nascent movement full time and as well pulled out of a gas station somewhere in rural Maine, after brainstorming the whole trip around what we wanted the site to be, the name “Vegan Street” popped into my head, clear as a bell. |
By 2013, the vegan world was really starting to make major strides as plant-based grocery items improved, the general public became more familiar and vegans online used social media to promote the vegan message. When we resurrected Vegan Street, veganism had been nudged from the margins it had been stagnating in for years and was much more normalized and accessible. Conversations about compassionate living that once were facilitated by pamphlets were now initiated online in a way that could reach many, many times more people.
Before we resurrected Vegan Street, I had been on Facebook for a few years and thought that the vegan messaging I was seeing could be improved on visually, in terms of research and framing. This was totally in our wheelhouse as communicators and we saw the potential for getting the word out in a way that could influence people exponentially. I remember telling John about this thing called a “meme” and it was the first he’d heard of it. Putting it in terms that were familiar to someone from the business, I said it was like an ad, but instead of selling products, we would be putting out information, promotion and advocacy. |
Thank you for being patient with us as we are slowly are migrating more than 2,000 pages of content that we’ve created over all these years of promoting veganism from our little home on the internet. With VeganStreet.com 3.0, we are organized, streamlined and way more modern, but the heart that beats within is the same one that started that little dream of a website way back in 1998: passionate, enthusiastic and more dedicated to spreading the vegan message - and offering tools for access - every day. While we had brought back Vegan Street for the age of social media, VeganStreet.com was still very much a static site of the last century. We have slowly but surely been overhauling the site to make it much cleaner, more streamlined and, most important, revamped so that the memes, recipes, essays, interviews, guides and more that we create can be easily shared via cell phones. Second, we are in the process of adding search terms for these thousands of pieces of content so it is easy to retrieve from the site through a simple search. We are thrilled that VeganStreet.com, in its new iteration, is really able to work for us better in spreading the vegan message.
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HERE ARE A FEW MORE WAYS TO CONNECT WITH VEGAN STREETveganstreet.com is one of the INTERNET'S first vegan websites. We have been creating community-building vegan content to the world since 1998. |
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