Rally for Volunteers: Adopt a Uni Day

This message is posted on behalf of the Vegetarian Society (Singapore).

The Vegetarian Society (Singapore) is now looking for volunteers to participate in the first “Adopt a Uni” Day on Wednesday, 21 March 2012. It is a program in which volunteers hand out pamphlets to students in universities throughout Singapore to raise awareness about issues surrounding where our food comes from. The pamphlet you will be giving out will be an edited, localized variant of this: http://www.veganoutreach.org/cc.pdf.

“Adopt a Uni” Day is designed to be as flexible as possible. We are looking for both vegetarian and non-vegetarian volunteers – rope your friends in if you feel shy about doing it alone! And you are welcome to volunteer as much of your time as you want – be it half an hour, 1 hour, or 3 hours – on this special day – it is completely up to you. Although it is definitely more convenient for a student to leaflet at his or her school, you don’t have to be a university student to volunteer either – perhaps you are teaching in a university, or you want to leaflet outside a university near where you live.

You can choose to volunteer at a local university, such as NUS (Kent Ridge campus and Bukit Timah campus), NTU, SMU, UniSIM, and SIT. We are also looking for volunteers at foreign universities, such as James Cook University Singapore, University of Chicago GSB, NYU Tisch School of the Arts, etc.

Pamphleting is a simple yet extremely effective outreach activity – By investing just some of your time on 21 March, you can help to educate and inform many students about factory farms, slaughterhouses and animal agriculture and therefore potentially transform their lives. As Erik Marcus (publisher of Vegan.com) wrote in The Ultimate Vegan Guide, “[a]t a busy campus, it’s easy to pass out a couple hundred booklets an hour. That’s 200 people, for each hour invested, who would not receive this information if it were not for you. The results of this outreach effort are inspiring – astonishing, even... Nothing feels better than coming home after a couple of hours spent leafletting, knowing that you’ve just gotten hundreds of people to think about eating more compassionately.”

The pamphlets will be given to you for free. But VSS can only afford to finance the printing of the pamphlets because of donations from people who care about the animals, the environment and public health. Therefore, if you can donate – even if it is just a minimal sum – please do, but if you can’t we will try to provide you with what we can.

If you want to volunteer but have certain concerns – for example, you might feel shy about leafleting to strangers – you don’t have to worry. For all registered volunteers, there will be a briefing at 2pm on Saturday, 17 March 2012 where you will be allocated your pamphlets, you can network with like-minded individuals. We will tell you about the general leafleting strategy (e.g. when and where to leaflet) and give you effective leafleting tips (e.g. what to say, good responses to questions) and answer any questions you might have. If you really feel inhibited about talking to strangers, trust me - that feeling will go away after you give your first pamphlet away. :)

****** IF YOU ARE INTERESTED TO PARTICIPATE: PLEASE SIGN UP ******

by Friday 16 March 2012 by emailing ashley(at)vss.sg with the Subject: Adopt a Uni Registration and the following information:

1. Name:

2. University you would like to leaflet for:

3. Are you a student in that university?: Yes/No

4. Are you vegetarian or vegan? :Yes/No

5. Estimated duration you can leaflet for: (e.g. 1 hour)

6. Can you attend the briefing at 2pm on Saturday, 17 March?: Yes/No

Upon receiving your email sign-up, we will then send you a confirmation email to confirm your participation in Adopt a Uni Day.

We are looking forward to meeting you and working together to create a more compassionate society in Singapore.

(“Adopt a Uni” Day is modelled after Vegan Outreach’s Adopt a College program in the United States.)