EA - Healthier Hens Y1 update including challenges so far and a call for funding by lukasj10

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Healthier Hens Y1 update including challenges so far and a call for funding, published by lukasj10 on October 18, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Key points Our mission and approach remain largely unchanged Our organizational capacity is growing We spent most of our Y1 budget on staff, research and travel We have made slight, pilot country-informed adjustments to our strategy We will ramp up our program work in Y2 We are finding it rather difficult to fundraise, Y2 budget ($230k) is still not fully covered Healthier Hens (HH) received funding from Charity Entrepreneurship, EA Funds and individual donors until now. We need more funding to keep investigating promising dietary interventions to improve the welfare of cage-free hens and engaging cage-free egg farming stakeholders to adopt these interventions. You can donate here. Our mission and approach Our mission remains to improve the welfare of egg-laying hens kept commercially cage-free. To achieve that, we are investigating promising dietary interventions to reduce the incidence of bone health issues to mitigate hen pain and suffering and engaging cage-free egg farming stakeholders (including farmers, feed mills and regulators) to implement these interventions. Please read our introductory and 6M update posts to learn more about the background of HH. Capacity, staff and organizational growth We used Y1 to grow in capacity. The corresponding activities involved setting up an advisory board – including African farmed animal welfare (FAW) movement, animal welfare and keel bone damage experts – joining an international FAW association focused on egg-laying hen welfare, visiting egg farms and feed producers in Kenya, and running initial animal welfare workshops. This has permitted us to be well aware of ongoing cage-free campaigns and existing hen welfare interventions, learn what practical obstacles the industry faces, and what knowledge/capacity gaps must be addressed to facilitate our program work in improving hen welfare. After choosing our pilot country of operations, our main task was to hire a full-time Country Manager to facilitate our efforts on the ground. Our team has also seen two Research Interns joining our efforts to build knowledge capacity on how hen nutrition relates to welfare issues we are seeing on farms. Looking forward, we will recruit Data Collection and Operation Interns in Kenya, remote Research Interns and a hen welfare/nutrition specialist during Y2, which should bring the total of paid HH staff up to 8. We had a total operational budget of $159k for Y1. Its break-down can be seen below. The majority of our funds were used for Co-founder and staff salaries, research (feed trial in Switzerland) and travel expenses (mainly related to, initially, country scoping and on-the-ground Kenya activities). Y2 will see more of our budget accounting for non Co-founder staff expenses and program expenses. The total estimated Y2 budget is currently at $230k, with $50k raised so far. Strategic updates Our country selection process took a significant part of Y1 to carry out (read more about it here). We are building up knowledge and networks within the local cage-free egg production and feed manufacturing industries via co-founder country visits and the work led by our Country Manager. The need to build reputation and establish actively connected networks within the different communities became apparent as a necessity to initiate pilot work. This is why we are ramping up the farmer training portion of our work while the other research activities are ongoing. The workshops enable us to achieve the following goals in our target counties: Gauge farmer welfare awareness and identify gaps crucial for ensuring hen bone development, health and integrity. Build relationships with the county level Veterinary Dir...