The Flock Speaks: A Seed Grant for Chicken Compassion

Liz Wheeler has spent years listening to animals that most people never think twice about. As the founder of Secondhand Stories, a chicken sanctuary nestled in Lombardy, Ontario, she built her life around the belief that farmed animals deserve the same attention, empathy, and storytelling as any beloved companion. What she needed was a way to bring that conviction to a wider audience, to crack open the carefully maintained myths of industrial chicken farming and replace them with something harder to ignore: the truth.

A seed grant from The Pollination Project gave her exactly that opportunity.

With philanthropic support from TPP’s Daily Grant Program, Wheeler launched What The Flock Fridays (WTFF), a 13-week online educational campaign on Instagram and Facebook designed to challenge widespread misconceptions about how chickens are raised and killed in Canada. The initiative paired myth-busting, research-backed content with weekly giveaways featuring vegan egg replacers, plant-based recipe books, and animal advocacy titles, turning passive scrollers into active participants in a conversation about chicken welfare and conscious consumption.

“It’s sad to see how many companies try to mask their cruelty,” one campaign participant wrote, capturing precisely the kind of awakening Wheeler had set out to provoke.

Before the TPP grant, Secondhand Stories was doing meaningful work within a limited reach. The funding changed the scale of what was possible. Wheeler used the grant to purchase giveaway prizes including books such as Not A Nugget and Maggie the Chicken, vegan pantry staples like Bob’s Red Mill Egg Replacer and Kala Namak Salt, and gift cards to vegan retailers Vegan Supply Co. and Keepin’ It Vegan, all chosen to lower the practical barriers between awareness and action. Shipping costs to send prizes across Canada and internationally were also covered, ensuring the campaign’s generosity reached beyond Wheeler’s immediate community.

The results were striking. Across 13 posts, the campaign accumulated 49,027 combined likes on Facebook and Instagram, a 48% increase in overall engagement compared to the pre-campaign baseline established in September 2025. Secondhand Stories gained 61 new followers directly attributable to the WTFF series, ending what Wheeler described as a months-long period of audience stagnation.

More significant than the numbers, however, was what happened in people’s kitchens and grocery carts.

Wheeler employed a rigorous mixed-method evaluation strategy to measure real behavioral change, not just engagement metrics. Before the campaign launched, she surveyed 114 active followers via Instagram Stories. The results confirmed that her audience was not an echo chamber: 23% identified as omnivores, 17% as flexitarians, and 34% reported eating chicken or eggs daily or weekly. These were the habits she was determined to disrupt.

By the campaign’s close, the exit data told a different story. The survey recorded a 10% decrease in self-identified omnivores and an 18% increase in vegetarians, suggesting meaningful movement along what Wheeler calls “the compassion spectrum.” Daily consumption of eggs and chicken dropped by 9%. Most powerfully, 48% of active participants explicitly reported eating fewer animal products as a direct result of the WTFF content, and 57% tried a new vegan recipe during the campaign period.

“The educational seeds we planted took root,” Wheeler reflected in her grant follow-up report. The campaign did not simply raise awareness. It provided the practical tools and motivation necessary for people to make compassionate lifestyle choices.

The path was not without obstacles. Midway through the campaign, Wheeler’s family experienced a devastating loss. She paused the series for two weeks to grieve, before returning to complete all 13 posts on schedule. Her commitment to the project in the face of personal hardship speaks to the depth of her conviction.

The campaign also ran headlong into the structural hostility social media platforms can show toward animal advocacy content. The very first post generated over 14,000 views, 42 shares, and immediate follower growth, a remarkable debut. But when Wheeler attempted to amplify that momentum through paid promotion, Meta’s automated systems flagged the educational content as “Political and Social Issues,” rejecting multiple boosting requests and cutting off access to unengaged audiences. The downward trend in views that followed underscored a truth that grassroots advocates know well: organic community sharing remains the most powerful and the most precarious engine of change.

The experience, Wheeler noted, highlighted “the volatility of paid advocacy on social platforms and the importance of our organic community sharing the content.”

Every piece of content created for What The Flock Fridays now lives in a permanent, evergreen resource library on the Secondhand Stories website, freely accessible long after the campaign concluded. The myth-busting fact sheets, vegan recipes, and educational graphics continue to reach new visitors, compounding the impact of a single grant investment over time.

Wheeler has chosen to evolve her content strategy going forward, pivoting toward immersive storytelling that foregrounds the individual personalities and complex behaviors of the sanctuary’s resident chickens. Rather than leading with statistics, she will lead with lives, letting the animals themselves make the case for compassion. The WTFF resource library will serve as a permanent foundation to support and contextualize those stories whenever a rescue narrative captures public attention.

The Pollination Project’s model of small, trust-based seed grants to individual changemakers is precisely what made this campaign possible. No large institution, no lengthy approval process, no requirement to already be significant before being treated as significant. Just a grant, a vision, and the freedom to act.

For the chickens that never appear in sanctuary photos, for the millions living inside industrial systems that prefer invisibility, Liz Wheeler is making sure the story gets told.

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