In 2014, through her work as a humane educator with HEART, Claire Howe was invited to facilitate animal rights clubs at two local high schools in Portland, Oregon. A few years later, Claire and a group of club members attended the Animal Rights Conference in LA and were disheartened to see an utter dearth of resources for teen activists. Right then and there, they decided to start something. They spent the next year advocating for animal liberation in Portland as “Youth for the Voiceless”.

By 2018, they’d made some key realizations. One: that animals are not in fact voiceless; we just aren’t listening. And two: that not nearly enough attention was being paid to animal agriculture as a major contributor to the climate crisis. Youth for the Voiceless thus evolved into The Raven Corps and became the first youth organization in the US to advocate for a plant-based diet as a climate change mitigator.

While plant-based advocacy is important, the Ravens continued to expand their understanding of Veganism as a philosophy, political stance, and lifestyle rooted liberation, making connections between the commodification of human-beings, fellow animals, and our natural world. And they increasingly recognized the need for a more systemic approach, targeting the root causes of oppression. Not just the symptoms. So in 2020, the organization evolved yet again, into a consistent anti-oppression youth activist organization that rejects a single-issue approach to Veganism and meaningfully embraces a “liberation-for-all” ethos.

We’ve come a long way. We’ll continue to evolve. We’ll always believe a better world is possible. And we will never stop fighting for it.