JamesÖz 🔸

Karma: 5,515

Currently grantmaking in animal advocacy, at Mobius. I was previously doing social movement and protest-related research at Social Change Lab, an EA-aligned research organisation I’ve founded.

Previously, I completed the 2021 Charity Entrepreneurship Incubation Program. Before that, I was in the Strategy team at Extinction Rebellion UK, working on movement building for animal advocacy and climate change.

My blog (often EA related content)

Feel free to reach out on james.ozden [at] hotmail.com or see a bit more about me here

Winning is underrated in grassroots movements

JamesÖz 🔸10 Mar 2025 22:24 UTC

43 points

5 comments5 min readEA link

JamesÖz 🔸 22 Feb 2025 6:30 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Lorenzo Buonanno🔸’s comment on: Request for Guidance: Reaching Out to Charities Before Publishing Reviews and Our Concerns
Yep fair enough! That was one bit I wasn’t sure about and can definitely see the downsides of sharing too early. I guess the trade-off I was considering was Vetted Causes’ time spent on the evaluation but definitely think an advance finished version with two weeks notice would be something most groups would be happy with.

JamesÖz 🔸 21 Feb 2025 19:24 UTC
5 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Hypotheses on how we can mobilise people for animal welfare
Love that you wrote this up and shared Emre! I definitely think we need more people having this kind of discourse publicly so appreciate you contributing.
I wanted to share some mostly anecdotal things from my experience in AR and XR in what seems to have worked for building deep/committed engagement from volunteers & activists:
- I definitely resonate with the importance of social connections for building engagement. I thought XR and AR did this very well with things like: spending time together in an office, hanging out after work, shared housing^[1], encouraging people to get to know each other more deeply (e.g. via check-ins, emotional sharing, etc) and more. I think this really builds the commitment of activists to not just the mission but also to not letting their friends in the movement down. We’re doing more in-person things with UK Voters for Animals and definitely think focusing on in-person organising is where you build the greatest depth (and lots of people crave it now!).
  - Some useful books on the importance of social activities for organising
    How Organisations develop activists by Hahrie Hahn—also a very good review on the EA Forum here.
    The Making of Pro-life activists by Ziad Munson. There are some especially interesting things from the pro-life movement e.g. apparently 50% of people who join initially don’t believe in pro-life as an issue but they attend social events and essentially become conditioned over time via social norms. Similar to the NRA, the key thing is making fun, enjoyable events which bring people and the advocacy follows on from that naturally once they develop a stronger view on the issue.
- It’s touched on by the book by Hahrie Han but something that I think XR was also really good at was building commitment & empowering people by giving them significant responsibility. For example, when I first joined XR, my first role was to help build XR in 4 countries, which is an insane responsibility to give someone who just joined and is 22 years old. But I found this very inspiring and tried to step up to the plate to deliver. Lots of other people did similar things and it really is inspiring when people believe in you.
  - I think this is a huge difference from the very understandable method of activism which says “we need to make it as easy as possible for people to engage” and only sends people 1-click campaigns to contact companies, etc, without giving them any meaningful responsibility.
  - I really do think the animal movement could do with a bit more of this “empowerment” mindset rather than just giving people very small discrete tasks.
- On your point of single-issue organisations: I actually don’t perceive this as an issue and think it might be more damaging if we try to take a position on all things. If we do, I think we could risk becoming very politically homogenous (even more so than we already are!). When I think of some other successful movement organisations (e.g. XR, ActUp!, SNCC), there wasn’t necessarily a coherent worldview shared by all members and these organisations didn’t (I think) discuss lots of issues outside of their core focus.
1. ^
  Which also has a bunch of downsides but more on that another time..

JamesÖz 🔸 21 Feb 2025 17:23 UTC
42 points
14 ∶ 0
on: Request for Guidance: Reaching Out to Charities Before Publishing Reviews and Our Concerns
IMO the risks you state are much less severe relative to missing key information about a specific charity (as likely happened with your Sinergia work) and therefore misleading people. This also makes people less likely to take your claims seriously in all future reviews.
Risk 2: Unconscious biases from interacting with charity staff.
When we evaluate a charity, we want to evaluate them based on their work, not based on how much we like their employees. Accordingly, we do not want to acquire unconscious biases.
If anyone has solutions to this problem, please let us know below, as it would make us more open to showing reviews to charities before releasing them. We would also like to acknowledge that we may be misunderstanding what people are suggesting when they say they’d like us to show our reviews to the charities before publishing them. If this simply entails sending them an email and nothing more, we are more open to that than having meetings with charity employees to discuss their review.
To clarify, yes I think most people think you should just share a Google Doc of your review and give the organisation time to leave comments about factual inaccuracies or other relevant context. I don’t think anyone is suggesting you meet with organisations and discuss things via a call. If anything, it’s best to share your review relatively early so you don’t spend 100s of hours, as you claim you did with Sinergia, down some rabbit hole which may just be a lack of understanding or context-specific issues.

Strategic Animal Funding Circle—Round 2 is now live!

JamesÖz 🔸17 Feb 2025 12:09 UTC

30 points

0 comments1 min readEA link

JamesÖz 🔸 16 Feb 2025 14:57 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Joanna Michalska’s comment on: Take action to help insects: UK government consultation [5-10 minutes]
You can fill out the consultation although I’m not sure if your views will be considered the same as a UK resident. Doesn’t hurt to try though!

JamesÖz 🔸 15 Feb 2025 22:24 UTC
6 points
23 ∶ 0
on: Take action to help insects: UK government consultation [5-10 minutes]
Also, we’re trying to gauge roughly how many are filling this out so please agree vote this comment if you’ve done the consultation—thank you!

Take action to help insects: UK government consultation [5-10 minutes]

JamesÖz 🔸15 Feb 2025 17:27 UTC

108 points

8 comments3 min readEA link

JamesÖz 🔸 24 Jan 2025 0:14 UTC
10 points
6 ∶ 0
in reply to: calebp’s comment on: Animal Welfare Fund: Payout recommendations from October to December 2024
I would find this compelling but I think there are pretty strong social incentives to not disagree publicly with the fund managers so you either need a mechanism to get around that or need someone who is very happy to disagree publicly and incur social/reputational costs

JamesÖz 🔸 22 Dec 2024 19:21 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 0
on: The “Progressive Pledge”
Love this! I actually read this on the GWWC website a couple of weeks ago and increased my pledge from 10 → 16.5% as a result. Thank you for the inspiration & your generosity!

JamesÖz 🔸 13 Nov 2024 12:34 UTC
6 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: PabloAMC 🔸’s comment on: Announcing our 2024 Charity Recommendations
Yes they do some but the Research Grants Program is on the order of $2-6M and GFI’s overall budget is around $42M, so only about 10% of their budget goes towards direct research. I would say a much bigger focus of their work is corporate, investor and policymaker engagement.

JamesÖz 🔸 13 Nov 2024 9:09 UTC
8 points
5 ∶ 0
in reply to: PabloAMC 🔸’s comment on: Announcing our 2024 Charity Recommendations
FWIW I would consider GFI as doing outreach and advocacy, just applied to the area of alternative proteins.

JamesÖz 🔸 12 Nov 2024 4:05 UTC
2 points
1 ∶ 0
on: 2024 Animal Advocacy Strategy Forum: Event summary and survey results
Very interesting—thanks for the write-up! Any chance you could share the following information on what these five projects actually are? Feel free to DM if imporant to keep private.
“As a result, five projects to address key challenges faced by the movement were launched, four of which were active as of September 2024 (one was on hold).”

JamesÖz 🔸 8 Nov 2024 18:42 UTC
78 points
9 ∶ 3
on: Bad omens for US farmed animal policy work?
There are also reasons why this might be the most animal-friendly US administration ever:
- Tulsi Gabbard, involved with Trump’s transition team, is an ethical vegan/vegetarian
- RFK Jr, also involved in Trump’s transition team, hates Big Ag and factory farming, and might end up in the USDA.
- Vivek Ramaswamy is getting more and more interested in animal welfare
- (more tenuous) JD Vance’s wife is vegetarian and he’s spoken positively about vegetarianism.
- Sid Miller, tipped to be head of the USDA, is outspoken against the EATS Act, even writing an op-ed on why we should uphold things like Prop 12 and Question 2.
Basically, this is a great example of the importance of working in a bipartisan way. If the animal movement had been more focused on building political allies on both sides of the aisle, this could actually be some of the best opportunity to pass anti-factory farming legislation.
What links here?
- Bad omens for US farmed animal policy work? by Tyler Johnston (6 Nov 2024 21:03 UTC; 130 points)

JamesÖz 🔸 7 Nov 2024 17:34 UTC
8 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Advisors for Smaller Major Donors?
I work as a grantmaker for a larger donor but as part of my role, I offer pro-bono advising to people giving $50k+ to animal welfare. If anyone is interested in this, feel free to message me via the Forum and happy to help!

(I’ve also advised donors giving $2-10M so feel free to reach out if you want to give at higher amounts too.)

JamesÖz 🔸 24 Oct 2024 4:52 UTC
16 points
2 ∶ 0
in reply to: Toby_Ord’s comment on: The default trajectory for animal welfare means vastly more suffering
Thanks for the kind words Toby! Yes, sadly the trends are not particularly positive at all.
There actually is some useful OWID data on hens and sadly it’s not particularly positive on a global level (they estimate at least 3 billion in cages but I’ve heard this is likely an under-estimate and it’s closer to 4-5 billion).
That said, there is certainly progress in the US and Western Europe, covered in this Vox article. The US cage-free percentage is around 42% now and I believe all cage-free progress across US and Europe equates to around 300 million hens out of cages relative to a couple of decades ago—a huge victory for animals and the animal advocacy movement as you note.
In terms of the Kuznets curve, that’s definitely interesting and I agree it’s worth considering if there is some element of progress in economically developed countries which will hopefully be matched as other countries develop. I think this is fairly clear for things like getting rid of some of the worst farming practices e.g. battery cages or gestation crates for pigs which has seen considerable success across the US and Europe. However, it’s less clear on the meat consumption side of things as only Germany has seen a notable decline in meat consumption in the past 30 or 40 years (although we have seen a levelling off in the US and Europe which is some positive sign). That said, there is more chicken being eaten in most of these countries which likely means more animals farmed and killed overall. As such, I’m not convinced we have signs of a Kuznets curve for total animal suffering as it’s quite likely the improvements we’ve made in outlawing some of the worst practices like battery cages are offset by increased chicken consumption.

JamesÖz 🔸 16 Oct 2024 23:15 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 1
in reply to: RobertM’s comment on: The default trajectory for animal welfare means vastly more suffering
Not necessarily as severe as hitting a wall for the next few decades but in brief:
- I don’t think agriculture is one industry that will be transformed that rapidly (e.g. on the order of months or years) due to AI, mainly because:
  - There are lots of traditions and cultural things around food so I don’t imagine people will want to dramatically change how they eat over the next decade or two
  - Agriculture involves human feedback loops (e.g. consumers trying products and giving feedback) which makes it hard to accelerate exponentially with AI progress (unlike predicting protein folding via AI or writing code)
- Any advancements in AI are likely to benefit the animal agriculture industry just as much, if not more, as animal advocates
  - Given the animal ag industry is orders of magnitude richer than us, I assume they will have more capacity to try to integrate AI into their work e.g. intensifying factory farming (see this blog for more info). This further locks in the trends mentioned above
  - We will use AI for alt protein innovation but again, this has long feedback loops due to needing human taste tests and product development, so I just don’t think we’ll get dramatically better products that quickly