On the Road as an Activist (Pt 1)

On May 5th 2015, I received a call letting me know I had landed my ultimate dream job of being a Tour Operator for Farm Animal Rights Movement, 10 Billion Lives Tour. Some of you may be familiar with this program and other not, so I’ll sketch a quick outline.

The 10 Billion Lives Tour is a Pay-Per-View model that requires 2 activists to live and travel in a van to college campuses 5 days a week for 3-4 months. $1 cash is offered to college students as incentive to watch a 4-minute video on animal agriculture that shows the horrific conditions and slaughter of animals raised for food in the United States.

I did 2.5 months on the Summer Tour, talking to thousands of people about animal agriculture, and trying to get people to take responsibility of their own choices by shifting to a more plant-based diet. I took a break for 1.5 months before jumping back on tour for another 2.5 months, finishing tour in December 2015, and reaching over 15,000 people in total.

Tour was a challenging, but a very fulfilling time in my life where I had to learn to live in close quarters with a stranger (twice over) in a van, lift heavy items daily, drive and park a 21 foot sprinter, deal with security, faculty and police, talk to approximately 100-200 people a day about a very hard topic, and look for a new place to sleep at night. This of course just covers the surface, as there was a lot more on a daily basis that had to be done, not to mention the juggling of my design clients at the same time.

When you take on a challenge that puts you out of your comfort zone, you never know what you’re going to discover along the way, or how different you’re going to come out on the other side. I had no idea what lessons I would learn, or what new things I would discover about myself and others, but I knew it would be life changing, and it was.

Why do I bring this tour up?
- Because I learned a lot about how to communicate with people effectively, and that influences the way I design.
- Because understanding what moves people, and inspires them to make changes has greatly affected the way I approach my work and my activism.
- Because I seek to inspire, to share and to learn.

I adopted valuable lessons about communication, activism, and humanity. Some of these lessons were inspiring and some of them disappointing, but I would soon find out how to cope with the disappointment and use the inspiring to inspire others.

I will share some of the things that I learned along the way and how they’ve helped me grow in my next blog post.

Check http://www.10billiontour.org to find out more about the tour itself, and http://www.10billionlives.org to watch the 4-minute video that has inspired thousands of people to live more compassionately.