So, the new year is already in full force and you’ve likely started your new year’s resolution of cutting cheese out of your diet or turning your Meatless Mondays into Meatless Everyday. Heck, maybe you’re already vegan and your goal is to finally make that taco recipe from Terry Hope Romero’s Viva Vegan or spend some time volunteering at Maple Farm Sanctuary.

VegWorcester is setting our goals for the new year as well and we’re getting psyched to make some big announcements soon about our upcoming VegFest. It got us thinking; maybe we should briefly pause to reflect on the kick ass things that happened during the last 12 months in the microcosm of Worcester from a veg-head point of view. So, here goes…

In 2011…

• VegWorcester started the year off strong by hosting our second Mac Daddy Mac N’ Cheeze Cook-off, and the winner was WooDaddy Waffles!
• Duck Yao, the formerly underground vegan eatery made a comeback in Worcester, opening a small sit-in and take-out restaurant on Main Street in Worcester.
• VegWorcester members took trips to view veg-themed films such as Forks Over Knives in Boston and a showing of Bold Native at WPI in Worcester.
• In April, VegWorcester hosted the 2nd annual Worcester VegFest. We estimate that approximately 3,000 attendees came to the event at Worcester State University that included speakers Bruce Friedrich, Tracye McQuirter, Will Potter, and an awesome cooking demo by Terry Hope Romero. We had family-friendly performances, 40+ ethical and cruelty-free exhibitors, coverage in a variety of online/print/news media, and feedback was overwhelmingly positive.
• After a city-wide crackdown on curiously tasty vegan cupcakes (Okay, we’re exaggerating there,)VegWorcester’s vegan bake sale fundraiser was shut down. In response, we took it upon ourselves to legalize bake sales in the city of Worcester.
• VegWorcester started a more regular monthly general volunteer meeting where we discuss ideas for vegan outreach and invite anyone who is interested to join us and get involved.
• VegWorcester raised money with your help and created a snazzy updated Summer version of the Worcester Vegetarian Dining Guide. 5,000 copies were distributed over the summer around Worcester County. 5,000 more copies of a newly updated Fall version of the guide have also now been distributed in the thousands! …..Wow!
• Volunteers leafleted at local universities and events, and did a ton of tabling outreach at just about every summer and fall festival in out city including the 3th Annual Pet Rock Festival, Start on The Street: Spring Edition, 2011 Fall StART On The Street, King St. Block Party, Open Road Festival, 21st Century Worcester Pride, Main Street Celebrates, and more.
• As a community with many animal activists, we joined with other local groups and protested Ringling Circus, Fur as “fashion,” McDonalds cruelty, and other animal abuses.
• Local animal rights defenders such as Michael Budkie of SAEN and Alexis Fox of The Humane Society came to Worcester to educate about abuses in our own state and what we can do as a community to have the most impact.
• In the fall many of us enjoyed vegan “Thanks-living” celebrations such as the free SAVVY Vegan Thanksgiving at Clark University.
• Loving Hut celebrated 2 years of Loving Hut Buffet fundraisers, and continued to donate 10% of buffet profits to VegWorcester to support our outreach to help animals.
• Finally, to close out the year with a bang, VegWorcester hosted its 1st annual Holiday Vegan Cookie Swap complete with a vegan Santa. We had 24 entrants with bakers swapping over 1,500 vegan cookies!

If you’re interested in getting involved with VegWorcester or the 3rd annual Worcester VegFest, come to our General – Volunteer Meeting this Tuesday, January 17th @ WPI (Taylor Room – Campus Ctr) from 7pm~8:30pm and we’ll get you up to speed on what we have planned for 2012!

This summer we started by ordering 5000 copies of our 2011 Veg Dining Guide. Some awesome people pitched in to raise the money to get them printed. Here’s the good news, we already distributed all 5000 of them! We distributed all of them in only 3 months. 3 months! Last year we distributed 5000 copies over an entire year. So now we ordered 5000 more.

Based on feedback, we made a couple of small updates and ordered a new batch. The new edition fixed some small typos, updated our meeting place, and added some events listings.

Help us distribute them – Monday, Nov 21

The next step is to get these guides into the hands of Worcesterites. They aren’t doing any good sitting on a shelf. Want to volunteer to help hand them out? On Monday, November 21 at 9am a group of VegWorcester volunteers will be meeting at the Bean Counter on Highland street to do some leafleting at colleges. We’ll pick a couple of schools, break up into small teams and then spend a few  hours on campuses handing them out, along with some booklets from Vegan Outreach. After that we’ll restock our displays at the restaurants listed in the guide. We should be done by about 1pm.

Or if you can’t make it on Monday, but want a stack to distribute, drop me a line and we can get you a stack.

If you can join us on Monday or want to get a stack to distribute on your own, email drew@VegWorcester.com.

We met up at 9 and finished by 11. It didn’t take much time. The 5 of us split up into two groups: two people to Worcester State and three people to Clark. Our original plan was to hand out booklets at WPI, but we remembered that WPI has almost no classes on Wednesdays. Bummer. Next time. We handed out the Vegan Outreach booklets with the VegWorcester guide right on top. At Clark, a lot of people were excited when they saw the dining guide. In fact, a few people said no at first, but then gave it a second thought and came back to get the dining guide.

Clark wasn’t very busy today, but we caught 2 class changes. Apparently Worcester State was pretty hopping, though. The two pamphleteers actually ran out of booklets and had to run back to the car during one of the class changes. It’s great that we’re getting these into people’s hands, but we’re almost out of the Veg Worcester Dining Guides! Yikes! We need to do another 5k printing asap.

See some photos on flickr.
Big ups to the four other volunteers, Manda, Greg, Julia, and Erin.

This weekend we’re going to be reppin for the animals again!  This time we’ll be at 21st Century Worcester Pride on Saturday Sept 17th from 12pm-6pm at Worcester City Hall/Common, and at 2011 StART On The Street on Sunday Sept 18th  from 11am-5pm along Park Ave.

Stop by our table at either event and grab your copy of the 2011 Worcester Vegetarian Dining Guide, a sweet “Go Veg” pin ($1) or a VegWorcester tote-bag! ($5) We’ll also have books for sale, a mailing list sign-up sheet and as usual- tons of information about how to help animals. Word has it, our favorite (vegan) ice cream truck will also be making appearances this weekend- Don’t miss it!

VegWorcester has been busy this year and we thought we’d share some of the projects we’ve been workin on…

WINTER/SPRING 2011: Last winter we had a small awesome group putting together the entire 2011 WorcesterVegFest. Our group met weekly, organizing everything to do with a kick-ass vegan festival for about 3,000 people. We had several fundraising events, including the wildly popular Mac Daddy Vegan Mac n Cheeze Cook-off. A bunch of volunteers stepped up to help as the event crept closer. VegFest was a lot of work but a huge success with tons of positive feedback and we surely made an impact on the city.  After the VegFest, VegWorcester members kept meeting weekly and talked about using the VegFest momentum to focus our ideas into action! Oh yeah, and we legalized bake sales in Worcester.

SUMMER 2011: We started a monthly general meeting as a way to connect our super volunteers and also as a way to get fresh ideas from the vegetarian community around us. We focused our efforts on creating and editing the 2011 Worcester Veg Dining Guide and fundraising for the summer printing. We raised $500 thanks to our friends and supporters who gave generously to get the word out about veg eats in our city!  At our monthly meetings, we decided to combine various outreach methods into one tool, (the guide.) Our plan: By leafleting the dining guide along with outreach pamphlets (like these), we’d promote & support local veg-friendly businesses,  inform people about animal cruelty horrors like factory farming, provide ideas for vegan meals, and spread the word about our group. In August we printed 5,000 copies and started distribution of the dining guide!  We also took part in veg-related movie showings and other Worcester events like the monthly Loving Hut buffet fundraisers.

UPCOMING FALL 2011 FOCUS: VegWorcester is gearing up for some major fall festival outreach, college campus outreach, and a second printing of the dining guide. Its gonna be sweet. We’re also planning events like veg movie showings, potlucks, a tasty holiday cookie swap, and even getting ready to start brainstorming for next year’s VegFest! Yes, we said it. But more about all that soon!

WANT TO HELP?  LOVE BEING VEG? ARE YOU AWESOME? Join us September 20th for our monthly general meeting! Keep up to date with events by joining our email list, subscribing to our blog, and “liking” our Facebook page. Thank you for the continued community support and for all the amazing work our volunteers are doing to get the word out about compassion for ALL animals.

We were giving out why-vegan-style booklets made by Vegan Outreach. There are 3 dedicated dudes who are doing multiple stops on this tour (Nick, John & David, you rock), and there were three of us from Mass who were just joining for the day. Between the 6 of us, we handed out 11,000 booklets total. Eleven thousand. That’s nuts.

Of course, not all of those people are going to read the booklet. Many will throw it away or leave it under the seat in their car. But if just half of them read it, that’s still a huge number of people who are learning about factory farming.

Animal liberation is a big goal. There is no single action that anyone can take to get us there. Leafleting about veganism is one way that we can break down this big challenge into smaller, more manageable, tasks.

Think about it this way: Imagine that a measly 2% of the kids to whom we gave booklets decide to make a change in their lives and go vegan. That would mean there are now 220 new vegans as a result of our leafleting tonight.

That is a huge deal.

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VegWorcester will have a table at stART on the Street this year. We’ll have the usual free leaflets and stickers, but there’s more! To celebrate Like No Udder coming to Worcester, we’ve partnered with the owner to offer a  free topping to VegWorcester supporters. How do you get it? Just stop by the VegWorcester table at stART on the Street and pick up a sweet button. Pin that little guy on your lapel and walk over to the Like No Udder truck and get your free topping. (She’ll explain what’s fair game.) Super simple!

We’re giving away free “Go Veg” buttons at the booth, but we’ll also have some other sweet designs for $1 each. Check out some of the designs:

And A Bake Sale!

To celebrate our tremendous victory legalizing bake sales in the City of Worcester, we’re also going to have a little vegan bake sale at our stART table. A couple of rad volunteers are baking up a lot of goodies. Come pick up the cupcakes that you missed when the City shut down our last bake sale.

Thanks to Erin & Manda for baking! Thanks, Brian, for suggesting a bake sale.

VegWorcester is getting an early start on Worldwide Vegan Bake Sale week!

We’ll be hosting a vegan bake sale table during weekly Trivia Night @ Moynihan’s Pub (877 Main St. Worcester, MA) this coming Wednesday night, April 6th from 9pm~12am. Proceeds from sales of vegan goodies will support the 2011 Worcester VegFest! We’ll have homemade vegan cupcakes, cookies, pie, and more! Since our event is at a pub, it is 21+!

Moynihan’s Trivia Night is “A weekly night of merriment for all those who like to dig through their brains for useless and truly trivial knowledge! –Compete in teams of up to six, answering questions concerning a smorgasbord of topics.” Come early for the bake sale,  then join in on the trivia or have a drink with your friends! We will have VegFest flyers for you as well!

For more details, or if you’d like to bake vegan goodies, email: manda@vegworcester.com

RSVP to the Vegan Bake Sale Facebook Invite!

(previous post: http://vegworcester.com/2010/12/03/join-the-marc-fur-protest-in-worcester-this-sunday)