Someone has to make them.
The Campaigner’s Edge is a free online course led by The Humane League on corporate campaigning: getting the world’s largest food companies to change how they treat farmed animals. Learn it from the people who’ve done it, and find out if this is your fight.
Runs 28 September – 30 November 2026 · Applications close 24 September
Learn campaigns from people who do it for a living
A handful of food companies control most of what ends up on supermarket shelves and restaurant menus worldwide. When one of them commits to going cage-free, hens that would have spent their lives unable to turn around or stretch a wing get to walk, perch and nest — millions of them, from a single decision. Faster than almost any other lever the movement has.
Corporate campaigning uses public pressure to move a company that won’t move on its own.
Corporate Engagement
Getting in the room, making the case, and negotiating toward a commitment.
Public Pressure
Rallying public attention, running creative and digital tactics, and grassroots organising — turning up the pressure until a company can’t afford to ignore the issue.
This course teaches both and when to switch between them.
The kind of training you’d normally only get after being hired into a campaigns team — except you can start now, for free, and find out if it’s your path first. It’s free because we need stronger advocates in the fight to end factory farming.
Here’s what you walk away holding:
Campaign materials you built targeting a real company, ready to show an employer or use in your own advocacy.
From The Humane League and Animal Advocacy Careers.
If your profile is one of the strongest fits, AAC can help: personalised 1:1 career advising and referrals to organisations hiring.
The cohort you go through it with, the facilitators, and a foot in the door of the animal advocacy movement.
The campaign work you do here plugs into live efforts already moving companies, so what you build actually counts.
Maybe you want a job in campaigns and you’re working toward it. Maybe you’re not sure yet, and you want to find out. Or maybe you just want to be more effective in your own activism — running your own actions, organising people where you are. The course works for all three, and you don’t need a background in any of it to get started.
See if this sounds like you:
You want to be more effective in how you take action for animals.
When someone says no, you start working out the next approach.
You know how to get people to show up, and keep showing up, online or on the ground.
You’ve had to bring a decision maker around to your side, and you didn’t give up at the first no.
You’re not sure if this work is for you, and you’d like ten weeks to find out.
Not sure campaigning is for you? That’s what the ten weeks are for.
You don’t need to be certain, but you do need to be willing to show up and do the work. If that’s you, whether you’re already set on this or still figuring it out, apply.
Most people running these campaigns didn’t start out as campaigners.
Most came from outside the movement entirely, and some had never run a campaign before they were hired. They were recruited for skills they already had: stakeholder management, research, storytelling, persuasion, getting a project across the line. Campaigning allowed them to use these skills to improve the lives of farmed animals.
By the end of ten weeks, you’ll have run the core moves of a corporate campaign on a real company. You’ll be able to:
Find its supply chain, its public promises, and the gap between them.
Over a corporate decision, and where the company is vulnerable.
Open contact with a company and make the case.
When a company says no: creative tactics, digital pressure, escalation.
Recruit and coordinate a group around a real campaign action.
By week ten, you’re not studying campaigns — you’re running one.
The Big Picture
Where corporate power sits, and where it’s vulnerable.
You’ll pick a real food company and take it apart: find its CEO and head of sustainability, dig into its latest annual report for the gap between PR and practice, and map who actually influences the decision — investors, customers, board.
By week three you’ll understand how a small group can move a billion-dollar company.
The craft of applying pressure.
The heart of the course. You’ll draft a real outreach email to your target company (and send it, if you choose), write an escalation plan for when they go quiet, design a creative disruption tactic, and produce a short exposure video or graphic.
This is where research turns into the moves that make a company act
The Action Lab
From strategy to the street.
Campaigns are won by people showing up. You’ll recruit a handful of people to take a real 30-minute action, coordinate and execute a live pressure point, then pull the whole ten weeks into a campaigner portfolio. Your work plugs into a live global campaign running in parallel.
This is where you find out, by doing it, whether this is your work.
How the course works
Live sessions plus hands-on work each week. You learn by doing it.
The companies won’t move on their own, and the animals in their supply chains can’t wait for someone else to do it. If you’re ready for that, we’d love to have you.
Meet a Few of Your Facilitators
Most of them came into this from somewhere else: a vet clinic, a food business, a consulting firm, a bakery. Between them, they’ve moved REWE, 7-Eleven, Ahold Delhaize, Kewpie and LDC to get millions of animals out of cages. Now they’ll teach you how it’s done.
The Humane League has spent two decades moving the food industry. A snapshot:
In 2005, over 98% of US egg-laying hens were confined. Today nearly half are cage-free - the lowest share of caged hens on record.
Including McDonald's, Starbucks, Burger King, Nestlé and PepsiCo, to commit to better welfare in their supply chains.
Companies don't just pledge and stall. The vast majority of welfare commitments past their deadline have been met in full.
THL founded the Open Wing Alliance, now 80+ organisations across ~70 countries - several of your facilitators among them.
your fight?
Signing up takes five minutes, and once you do, you’re in. Everyone who applies gets a place; what matters is that you show up and do the work. If you’re ready for that, we’d love to have you.
Runs 28 September – 30 November 2026 · Applications close 24 September
No. Most people running corporate campaigns for farmed animals came from outside the movement, and many had never run a campaign before. If you’ve got transferable skills (communications, marketing, research, project management, stakeholder wrangling, organising) and you care about animals, you’re the kind of person this course is built for.
Everyone who applies. There’s no admissions test. The course itself is the filter: it’s hands-on, and the people who finish are the ones who put the work in. If you’re not sure you’re ready, that’s the reason the course exists. Sign up and discover if this work fits you.
Yes, the course is completely free.
One live session a week (about an hour, Monday evenings Europe time), plus a hands-on task between sessions: roughly 2-3 hours a week, for 10 weeks. It’s designed to be doable alongside a full-time job.
A one-off conflict is fine. We don’t share recordings with the group by default, but if you have to miss a session, email us and we’ll sort out a way to catch you up. If you already know you can’t do Monday evenings most weeks, this cohort probably isn’t the right fit.
In the final weeks, your coursework plugs into a live global campaign The Humane League is running in October-November. You’ll also take a small, real action of your own, that can be digital (a coordinated online push) or in person (something street-level). The point is to move from theory into practice, so you leave knowing what campaigning feels like in the actual job.
The course peaks in real-world action, and the hands-on part is where a lot of the value is. So yes, expect to step beyond the desk. If public action isn’t for you, that’s genuinely useful to discover, and the earlier weeks will still teach you how corporate campaigns are built and won.
Not on its own. It’ll give you a real foundation and a good sense of whether this work fits you. It’s a strong first step for your campaigning career, and the hands-on experience is something you can point to with employers. What it won’t do is turn you into a seasoned campaigner overnight. That part only comes from doing the work.
A certificate of completion from The Humane League and Animal Advocacy Careers, and a portfolio of real campaign work you can show an employer. If you finish and submit a strong portfolio, Animal Advocacy Careers can help you take the next step: personalised career advising and referrals to organisations hiring.
Corporate campaigners from The Humane League and Open Wing Alliance partner organisations: people who’ve run and won real campaigns against some of the world’s biggest food companies. Each week is hosted by Léo Le Ster with a different expert co-host.
The Humane League designs and delivers the course. Animal Advocacy Careers handles recruitment and supports your next steps afterward
Online, wherever you are, though live sessions are timed for Europe and the Americas. Most campaigns jobs are currently in Europe and North America, but a job isn’t the only reason to take this. Wherever you are, the course teaches you how to run real pressure campaigns and organise people effectively, whether that leads to a role, a group you start yourself, or the first steps toward launching something bigger where you live.
We don’t know yet. This is the first one, and we’ll decide on future cohorts based on how it goes. If the timing works for you now, it’s worth signing up now.
Because this course is designed to be highly interactive and relies on live collaboration with your peers, we highly encourage you to attend live. While we don’t strictly monitor attendance, we recommend missing no more than one or two sessions.
If you already know you are completely unavailable on Monday evenings, this particular cohort likely isn’t the right fit. However, if you just have a one-off conflict, let us know and we can help you catch up.
Yes, but we don’t share recordings with the group by default. The course works because people show up live and collaborate, and we want to protect that. If you have an unavoidable conflict and have to miss a session, email us and we’ll make an exception so you don’t fall behind.
To protect the privacy of the group and maintain a comfortable environment for open discussion, we ask that you do not use AI meeting assistants or transcription bots. Any AI bots that join the call will be blocked or removed from the session.
Probably not. Because this is a foundational course, it is built around the basics of campaign work. With your current background and expertise, you are already past this stage! We recommend dedicating your time to more advanced training and development opportunities instead.
