Funding Proposal

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Welcome to the DawnWatch funding proposal. This document opens with an introduction to DawnWatch, including notes on the importance of mainstream media and some reasons that DawnWatch is especially worth supporting. Then we give a brief description of programs for which we currently seek funding. The second section deals with the DawnWatch Eco Media Center, for which we seek property, and the programs we intend to run there.

INTRODUCTION

For two decades DawnWatch has been entirely focused on shaping mainstream media. That’s because our aim is to reach and shape the mainstream of society. Major media is incomparably influential but surprisingly easy to influence.

Unique in its long-term focus exclusively on animals in major media, DawnWatch is also highly unusual in tone. It is, unabashedly, a vegan organization, but is inclusive rather than exclusive. DawnWatch welcomes the participation of anybody working on any aspect of animal liberation regardless of where they currently fall on the vegan continuum. We seek common ground and a way to move forward.

As the endorsements and figures shared below make clear, in the two decades since its inception as a list with fourteen passionate subscribers, DawnWatch has had a widely acknowledged profound effect. That’s thanks to the volunteer efforts of founder Karen Dawn and the participation of thousands of DawnWatch subscribers. Now, as a nascent 501c3, DawnWatch plans to increase that impact and expand its sphere of influence as outlined in this proposal.

Endorsements

DawnWatch is based on the simple but powerful idea that we can and should encourage the media to give better coverage of animal issues. With low overheard DawnWatch has a major impact. I am an enthusiastic supporter and hope you’ll join me in enabling its good work.

—– Peter Singer, author of Animal Liberation and founder of The Life You Can Save

DawnWatch helps me keep my finger on the pulse of what is happening for animals worldwide! Karen Dawn has a unique way of succinctly capturing salient information and presenting it so that is clear. And, I particularly love her annual turkey rescue and the positive media it attracts. Esther’s turkey brother Cornelius and I thank her for that!

— Krista Hiddema, President, Happily Ever Esther Farm Sanctuary- Home of Esther the Wonder Pig

Karen Dawn has her finger on the pulse of animals in mainstream media so that the rest of us don’t have to be as avidly focused on it. On numerous occasions information sent to the Good Food Institute by DawnWatch has led to the publication of our letters in influential publications such as the New York and Los Angeles Times. DawnWatch shares positive coverage and encourages us to reach out to the journalists responsible and to share their animal positive articles, ensuring that editors and writers will prioritize those kinds of stories. The earned media value of that is certainly into the millions of dollars. DawnWatch is worth its weight in gold.

— Bruce Friedrich – Executive Director, Good Food Institute

“Of all the figures in the U.S. animal protection movement, it is Karen Dawn whom I most look forward to reading, not just for the uncompromising directness of her message but for the clarity, warmth, and good humor with which she expresses it.”

— Nobel Prize for Literature awardee J.M. Coetzee

DawnWatch is my go-to source for perfectly curated information on animal rights and veganism, from news sources across the English speaking world.

As a writer and animal advocate, having DawnWatch share my published work and encourage responses immediately adds credibility with editors. And the call-to-action feature, suggesting that followers send Letters to the Editor, has directly led to continued public discussions of not only my work, but also the work of so many others speaking for animals.

— Writer and animal advocate Jessica Scott Reid.

DawnWatch encourages us to rally around the positive and provides a way in which we in the community that cares about animals and the environment can encourage others. I look forward to getting Dawnwatch alerts. I am very impressed with the work and the vigilance.

— Mark Thompson, host of The Mark Thompson Show, KGO San Francisco

DawnWatch broadens my activism by alerting me to stories in the media about animals and then encouraging me to respond to them. Even when my letters or comments aren’t published for the public to read, people in the media still learn how much people care about animals.
So DawnWatch gives me a powerful and effective way to help animals.

— Actorvist Alexandra Paul – Baywatch, Who Killed the Electric Car, Switch4Good

Although veganism may be one of the most promising steps for solving a number of social problems, I believe that our learning how to converse together in a cordial, respectful, constructive problem-solving manner is even more important. DawnWatch holds up a banner for that conversation.

— Randall Billington, Attorney

DawnWatch has given me the ability to reach beyond my local media market and share my views on animal liberation with millions and millions of people.
Thanks to DawnWatch I’ve been printed in the New York Times, the New York Times Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, USA Today, the Wall Street journal, the Rolling Stone, the Progressive, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Sacramento Bee, the Baltimore Sun, Canada’s National Post and more.
Karen Dawn’s insightful analysis and helpful reminders are invaluable. And her upbeat analysis of just how far we’ve come as a movement is inspirational.
Thanks DawnWatch, for helping me help animals!

— Activist Stewart David

I could not do the work I do for animals if it weren’t for DawnWatch. I look for the alerts all the time and they brighten my day! DawnWatch is doing phenomenal work and all animal lovers should honor and support it.

— Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, Ph.D. – Author of Dogs Never Lie About Love and When Elephants Weep

THE IMPORTANCE OF MAINSTREAM MEDIA

These days, more and more people get their news from their friends on social media, and Google feeds us the articles it knows we want to see. That makes DawnWatch’s focus on mainstream media more important than ever.

Because DawnWatch monitors and shares only mainstream media stories, we give people an accurate picture of the role that animals currently play in the greater public dialogue, a picture generally not visible from within our social media bubbles.

That makes us profoundly different from other great services, which share animal-friendly stories largely produced by animal focused venues for animal-friendly audiences. By sharing mainstream stories directly, rather than crafting our own version of them, we do all we can to add to rather than siphon off the “shares” on social media, and other positive feedback that mainstream media members receive for positive animal coverage; we thereby encourage more of that kind of coverage.

We harness the power of the media in various ways: via alerts that inspire feedback from activists, via our fantastically well covered annual turkey rescue, and with op-eds and articles in highly influential mainstream media such as the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post.

For example, as this funding proposal was being completed, the small but highly influential Progressive Magazine ran in its Oct/Nov 2019 issue, a four page spread penned by DawnWatch president Karen Dawn, titled, “Beyond the Slaughterhouse: Producing real meat without killing animals.”

DawnWatch has been expanding its coverage to include some prominent online media, yet we continue our strategic primary focus on influencing traditional print and broadcast. That’s because online stories have more targeted delivery and thereby often only reach the already converted. Conversely, the stories that are printed by mainstream papers and magazines, or that go out on traditional broadcast and cable waves, reach the wider public.

The older, voting public is one of the segments most likely to view news offline.

DawnWatch is currently working on expanding its reach further into local markets, because that’s where activists can easily get published. However, we are not relinquishing our focus on the world’s most influential papers and stations.

The New York Times influences media everywhere, the Washington Post influences legislators, the Los Angeles Times influences the profoundly influential entertainment industry, the Wall Street Journal influences the markets and Fox News influences the White House. When we color the content of those outlets we change the world.

Four Feasons to Fund DawnWatch

1) Funding DawnWatch funds Forklift Activism

.That term, which comes to us from Yogi Bhawan, means meeting people where they are in order to lift them up.

It means we support meat reduction campaigns. Since studies have shown that people who change their eating habits gradually are far more likely to change them permanently, it is not only more inviting but also more effective to encourage people to take things at their own pace.

It means we are happy to lure people towards animal advocacy via their concern for their own health and that of the planet. We know that once people are not consuming animals three times a day they will find it easier to look at the ethical issues around that consumption.

It means that while we recognize that the suffering of animals used for human food is without parallel, we also strongly encourage positive media coverage of the most charismatic animals, including traditional pets. That coverage can serve as a gateway, for journalists and the audience, to a wider interest in all animal suffering. Yet in encouraging the coverage we are careful never to suggest that popular animals matter more than others. It is a fine balancing act and we are up to the task.

It means supporting coverage of welfare efforts with which all reasonable people can get on board, both out of compassion for those whose suffering will at least be mitigated and as steps on the path to eventual animal liberation. It has been demonstrated that when animal abuse on farms is covered in the media, it not only leads to arrests and calls for change – meat consumption drops in the market where the media has aired. That’s a win all round.

Fundamentally, it means serving up truth in a flavor that people can swallow.

In case you missed the endorsement shared above, from Nobel Prize laureate JM Coetzee:

Uncompromising directness delivered with clarity, warmth and good humor –we hope that sets the tone for everything DawnWatch does, for it describes forklift activism at its best!

2) Funding DawnWatch funds decades of media experience

. There’s a reason ABC-7 has covered the DawnWatch turkey rescue ten years in a row. Karen Dawn knows how to build relationships with media. With jobs straight out of college in the media, a stint on Los Angeles radio, numerous national and international radio and television appearances, op-eds and articles published in the world’s leading papers and magazines, and twenty years of running DawnWatch, we have, in Karen Dawn, a seasoned media activist, who knows as much as anybody in the world about animals in the media.

Having her run a smaller but adequately funded organization which is available to all of the larger groups will be more helpful to the movement than having her aligned with any single one of them.

3) Funding DawnWatch funds all animal advocacy groups indirectly

.Our daily news searches include the names of other groups so that we can alert activists to respond to media about them. We have a long list of leaders of other groups who have had letters published, and have therefore advanced the animal cause while getting their group’s name out into the world, based on alerts they have received from DawnWatch.

In a recently received note, Farm Sanctuary’s media relations specialist, Meredith Turner-Smith, who always lets us know when she has garnered coverage for Gene Baur, told us “The support from your network is vital to our efforts.”

Our turkey rescue videos often include footage taken by other groups and we make sure the group’s name is displayed prominently on every frame of their footage and therefore on newscasts when it is included as B roll.

DawnWatch events bring activists together with animal friendly media, forging invaluable relationships. We are delighted to facilitate connections between animal advocates and the animal-friendly reporters who receive our awards.

4) Funding DawnWatch funds a strong and relatable female leader – and our movement needs more of them!

#MeToo had a profound effect on the animal advocacy world. While the investigations focused on inappropriately sexualized workplace behavior, most important for animals are the larger issues of which that behavior was indicative. People seen as sex objects do not move to positions of power in the workplace.

That’s important for our constituents, animals, because statistics show that women are more likely than men to be vegetarian or vegan and in favor of animal rights. Thus a patriarchal society is bad for animals, and the animal advocacy movement should be actively working against the patriarchal system rather than reflecting it within our organizations.

Membership in organizations and conference attendance, which generally reflects the most committed, suggest that our movement is 75-80 percent women, but that has not been proportionally reflected in its leadership. While leaders were surely attempting to promote based on merit without attention to gender, studies have shown that societal bias makes that impossible.

For example:

Orchestras were 90 percent men until blind auditions, behind screens, became the norm. A paper by the National Bureaus of Economic Research reports that the screen enhances, “by several-fold, the likelihood a female contestant will be the winner in the final round.”

Many of the same women who previously failed auditions suddenly made the cut when behind a screen.

We cannot conduct auditions for animal advocacy leadership positions behind gender-hiding screens but we can assume that our historical imbalance stems from the same unconscious bias we see in orchestras, and we can work against it by going out of our way to appoint and/or fund female leaders.

We have, in Karen Dawn, a warm and relatable media personality with plenty of animal advocacy experience and the qualities of a good leader. Backing her is a good bet for animals.

DawnWatch Programs

1) DawnWatch Media Alerts

Our alerts inform animal advocates of animal

friendly media coverage so that they can respond with letters to the editor, emails to stations, and comments on websites. Feedback to media is an easy, powerful, and incredibly cost-effective way to shape coverage.

Here’s an example of the how the alerts work:

In August 2019, Time Magazine ran an article on a scientist’s quest to open an octopus farm.

Instead of printing letters to the editor, Time Magazine grabs lines from various letters and comments and works them into a column near the front of the magazine called, “What you said about…”

The week after DawnWatch sent out the alert about the octopus story, the “What you said about” column covered only two stories from the previous week: the cover story and the octopus farm story. The column cited five readers, all DawnWatch subscribers, who contributed lines noting that it is “horrifying” to consider growing the intelligent animals “like crops” as we try to “dodge the effects of overfishing.”

Studies have shown that the letters page is one of the most widely read pages of major newspapers. If that kind of advertising for our cause had been purchased in Time Magazine, it would have cost tens of thousands of dollars.

Thanks to DawnWatch, thoughtful letters on behalf of animals are sent regularly to all major media, and we see at least one published per alert.

DawnWatch alerts now cover mostly the world’s most influential media, but we plan to expand our reach, so that subscribers are sent more local media stories, where their responses have the most significant impact.

Cost for the program, is the salary of a full time researcher – $60,000 plus
professional search engine subscriptions. Total: $65,000

2) The DawnWatch annual turkey rescue and Turkey Pardon Party

Every year since 2008, Karen Dawn has taken in two turkeys who were destined for the Thanksgiving dinner table, cuddled them into loving pets, and spent Thanksgiving doing media with them. When the mainstream viewing public sees its favorite reporters cuddling turkeys on Thanksgiving, and learns from them that the birds behave much like cats and dogs, societal attitudes change.

The DawnWatch Turkey Rescue has been covered by the Associated Press, ABC News Now, CNN’s Headline News Network, Fox Business News, the Los Angeles Times on multiple occasions, the Santa Monica Observer, the Palisades Post, Origin Magazine, and has been featured on NBC and ABC Los Angeles New on Thanksgiving Day.

The local ABC channel has covered the story every one of the last ten years on Thanksgiving Day, reaching approximately 250,000 families at a time. Here is an example of that coverage:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxGRnH_dnus

This program will be easier to conduct reliably when DawnWatch has its own property, but we can rent a property and fencing every year with the full cost being $25,000

3) DawnWatch Media Awards Gala

In honor of the Gretchen Wyler and her Genesis Awards, the event will celebrate members of the media who have done animal friendly work, for the purpose of inspiring them to do more.

Karen Dawn sat on the Genesis Awards voting committee for a decade. Through her involvement she got to know numerous animal-friendly actors and became known for her celebrity studded parties and events. Fully immersed in animal friendly mainstream media, she is the most obvious successor for Gretchen in this realm.

As with the Turkey Party, we hope to own the venue for the awards eventually- a huge tent would be gorgeous, but meanwhile we could have venue rental covered by the cost of tickets. The main expense will be an event planner. Total cost $50,000.

4) Social Media and Web Presence

The DawnWatch Facebook page was launched in 2016, and therefore has only 3000 followers. Nevertheless, the posts on it get “likes” and “forwards” in comparable numbers to pages that have hundreds of thousands of followers. Our posts and tone attract visitors who are curious but not yet committed to our cause, and the numerous forwards of animal friendly major media stories encourages journalists to write and produce more of them.

Take, for example, our post that taught people about “Wildlife Services” and commended the local Alabama station for its thoughtful coverage of a goose slaughter; it was forwarded from our page 750 times, reaching many thousands of viewers, with no financial push behind it. Imagine the impact we could have if we had money to put behind the posts that clearly have legs.

A full time website and social media person would give DawnWatch a leading presence on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. We would allocate four fifths (four days per week) of our web expert’s salary to this: $56,000, and $12,000 for advertising. Total equals $68,000.

5) Thanking the Monkey: Rethinking the way we Treat Animals, 2^nd edition

In 2008, Karen Dawn’s first book, Thanking the Monkey: Rethinking the way we Treat Animals, was given a Publisher’s Weekly starred review (which goes to one or two out of about fifty each week) and made the Washington Post list of ‘The Best Books, CDs, Comics, DVDs and Video Games of 2008’.It made the Amazon top 100 list of all books, and was the number one selling Animal Rights book for many weeks. It had a profound effect on many future movement leaders – such as Amy Kerwin who heads Primates Unlimited in Wisconsin.

Numerous teachers have used it as a text. Interest in the subject of animal rights is now such that a new edition is likely be a popular text book in high school social studies classes or for the first year of college.

Karen is currently negotiating with Harper Collins to get the rights back and bring the book over to Lantern in order to release a second edition. It will need updating, and Karen would like to oversee a researcher who goes through it section by section updating information, with Karen rewriting sections accordingly. That is likely to be a six month task.

Expected legal fees: $10,000, Research fees: $20,000, Writing $7,000. Total to get Thanking the Monkey 2^nd edition rereleased in 2021: $37,000

6) Karen Dawn of DawnWatch’s Blog

People appreciate that DawnWatch usually shares animal news with little editorializing. Nevertheless it is clear that DawnWatch subscribers also greatly appreciate it when Karen Dawn offers her own nuanced take on complicated issues. A weekly blog that does that should be one of DawnWatch’s new projects. Annual cost $13,000 ($250 per blog)

7) DawnWatch Podcast

While these days everybody and (more importantly) their dog has a radio show, few hosts have Karen Dawn’s skill, experience and access to guests. In 2004, Karen Dawn hosted a sixteen week season titled Watchdog Radio, on the Los Angeles public radio station KPFK. Guests included Gloria Steinem, JM Coetzee, Elayne Boosler, Moby, Wendi Malick and Peter Singer.

Though focused on animal issues, we envision that the DawnWatch podcast will be similar in tone to Rich Roll’s, which focuses on a world of issues including plant-based eating. But whereas in 2019 eighteen of Rich’s seventy guests were women, the DawnWatch podcast line-up will demonstrate gender parity.

We expect our web/socialmedia person to produce the podcast one day per week. Cost $14,000 per year.

8) Op-eds and Articles

Since 2003, Karen Dawn has been using mainstream media to speak for animals with opinion pieces published in leading publications such as the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post and UK Guardian and magazine articles in The Progressive. Those pieces are invaluable but pitching them is time consuming, and we need a PR person to do it. Budget $70,000.

9) DawnWatch Presence at Animal Conferences

Karen Dawn’s inviting and persuasive message needs to be heard not just out in the world but also within our movement, influencing our actions. While conference organizers attempt to avoid “pay to play,” there is little doubt that sponsors get preferential speaking gigs and booth presence. In funding DawnWatch’s ability to sponsor conferences, donors get a triple whammy, helping a) DawnWatch b) the organization running the conference, and c) the rest of the movement that will benefit from DawnWatch’s message. Cost for conference sponsorships and travel expenses: $25,000

10) Media Training for Activists and Organizations

When Nathan Runkle (now Milo Runkle) saw the outtakes of Josh Garrett’s promotional piece for his 2013 record breaking hike of the Pacific Crest Trail, he realized Josh needed training before he could do media interviews on behalf of Mercy for Animals. He asked Karen Dawn to step in. Josh Garrett says:

“Karen Dawn was a fantastic coach who taught me how to laser in on the juicy stuff and use every moment of the time I had on camera to get my message across.”

After Karen Dawn spoke about using the media to help animals at the 2019 “Mainstreaming the Animal Protection Movement,” two members of Danish Parliament in attendance asked if she did webinars. What a great idea!

Karen is particularly excited at the possibility of training our movement’s female leaders into confident and engaging interviewees who are always on point.

It would be great, for starters, to have a long weekend of media training once a year, which could, of course, be streamed for distant participants. Cost to organize and conduct: $5,000

PROGRAM EXPENSES	Cost ($)
DawnWatch Media Alerts	65,000
Turkey Rescue and Party	25,000
DawnWatch Media Awards	50,000
Web and social media presence	68,000
Thanking the Monkey, 2^nd edition	30,000
Karen Dawn of DawnWatch’s blog	13,000
DawnWatch podcast	14,000
Op-eds and letters	70,000
Presence at Animal Advocacy Conferences	25,000
Media Training	3,000
OTHER EXPENSES
Executive Director salary	60,000
Executive Director health insurance	10,000
Fundraising	67,000
TOTAL:	500,000

Plus – annual cost of upkeep of the DawnWatch Eco Media Center, detailed below: $60,000

DawnWatch Eco Media Center

Some of our most exciting plans require somewhere to carry them out. We are currently looking for property in the Santa Barbara area, a hotspot of wealth and celebrity influence that can only help animals.

We are planning a ground breaking, self sustaining center, built from salvaged materials – probably shipping containers. It will be solar powered, with water recycling stations and desalinators, all with an aim towards Zero Impact on the earth. The center will provide a community space that helps cement the connection between environmentalism and diet.

We will provide a loving home for one or two animals of the most commonly eaten species – definitely including rescued fish. The eco media center will not be a sanctuary, however, because sanctuary guidelines suggest that animals should not be on display. Our beloved nonhuman family members will be on display in the media and with the human public as much as is possible without their being unduly stressed by the interactions.

As described below, the animals will be available for use by industries such as the entertainment industry, and the clean meat industry as cell donors, in ways that cause them no harm but will potentially save millions or even billions of their species.

DawnWatch EcoMedia Center Programs

1) Venue for DawnWatch and Eco Community Events

– including the Turkey Pardon Party, DawnWatch media Awards, DawnWatch Documondays, and for other private and public eco events, not related to DawnWatch but within the eco community. What a perfect sustainable wedding spot!

According to a profile in VegNews: “If the first thing that pops to mind when you hear ‘animal rights’ isn’t a celebrity-studded party with phenomenal food and a general air of complete fabulousness, perhaps you haven’t met Karen Dawn.”

Having our own property will make it easy to put on fabulous events at little cost. Once the initial outlay is made for a huge tent, we can use it year after year as a gorgeous awards event space, like the tent used for the Indie Spirt Film Awards held on Santa Monica Beach every year. We do not have to waste money on hotels to celebrate in style. And nor will anybody else in our community once we have this space!

2) DawnWatch DocuMondays

Held on the first Monday of every month, we plan to make DawnWatch DocuMondays a local community joy. We will avoid screening strictly vegan films that attract only vegan people. In keeping with our environmental mission we plan to make our first screening Zero Impact Man, with the evening hosted by Ed Begley Jnr. We’ll follow every screening with a Q&A that includes the filmmaker, a celebrity passionate about the issue being discussed, and an expert in the field being covered.

The vegan pitch will be in the form of the nonhuman hosts wandering around the outdoor film venue (the joys of Southern California) and the nut based cheeses provided by Miyoko and Punk Rawk, which we will serve with wines provided by sustainable sponsors.

If we own the property, at $10 per person the events will be self-sustaining. We can house out of town guests in our shipping container cottages, though in Santa Barbara, many celebrities are already here and most are only a 90-minute ride, via volunteer pick-up, away.

3) Hollywood certification and animals:

The “No animals were harmed” tag at the end of motion pictures is no longer trusted. Certification does not cover training prior to appearances on set, even though it is in training, or as a result of housing conditions off camera, that most of the harm is done. Our aim is to replace the current, broken, certification program.

The advent of CGI is providing a wonderful alternative which we encourage, but just as DawnWatch is quite comfortable with the use of happy, well cared for and beloved dogs in films, we would be delighted to provide beloved stars of other species for animal-friendly productions. The stars would never be without the direct supervision of one of their known and trusted caretakers and ideally would be filmed right where they live. And if the credits say that a movie stars Bessie the Cow, compliments of the DawnWatch Eco Media Center, that will mean a lot more than the AHA’s tag, “No animals were harmed…”

It may be worth pointing out here that DawnWatch envisages a world where animals are liberated from human use – not just treated kindly as we use them for our entertainment. But we expect that world to evolve as our respect for other species grows, and we will be pleased when we see animals who were previously viewed as “livestock” viewed and treated as we now treat our pets. We think changing the use of domesticated animals in entertainment, rather than attempting to eliminate that use right now, is likely to be a more helpful step towards our end goal.

4) Cultured Meat Donors

The cultured meat industry, which Karen Dawn covered in some depth in a recent Progressive Magazine article, could hold the key to the end of the livestock industry. Some animal advocates worry that it still involves the use of animals but we are sure that if those animals are alive, utterly pampered, beloved and clearly happy at the DawnWatch Eco Media Center, all reasonable concerns would be allayed. One of the leading cultured meat companies has approached Karen Dawn about allowing DawnWatch animals to be used for tissue donors for clean meat. They want to get going on this quickly, and we would be delighted to oblige and ensure positive media coverage of the process.

5) Cultured Meat Cat Sanctuary

We might be most excited about what cultured meat means for the pet food industry. In the US, dogs and cats eat about twenty five percent of animal derived calories consumed. (See Karen Dawn’ Los Angeles Times op-ed on that.) Cats are obligate carnivores who are often fed fish, or fed animals who have been fed fish, so those landlocked pets are destroying our oceans. Cats can survive on plantbased food supplemented with taurine, but we think that would be a hard sell for the general public. Our cat sanctuary will model cultured meat as the best way forward, while also modeling cat fencing, which keeps feline residents safe while keeping birds safe from them. It should be a fabulous media draw, educating the public about the devastating impact of cats on our oceans and wildlife, while making it clear that killing them is not the best solution.

6) Focus on Fish

We plan to do with every species what Karen Dawn has already done with turkeys, introducing them to reporters from every media channel. And because our oceans are in such crisis and so many people these days say they “only eat fish” that’s where we will start. Just as reporters have learned that turkeys are cuddly animals, like cats and dogs, they will learn that a dip in a swimming pool (converted 40ft shipping container) is a lot more fun with some fish friends, rescued from the live fish industry. We are consulting with our friend Culum Brown, the world’s foremost expert on fish, in order to learn what species are most likely to do best in a captive environment interacting with humans.

7) Mindfulness Center

Karen Dawn is a certified yoga instructor and a serious Dharma student. The property will provide a community space for yoga and meditation with the company of fellow earthlings in the spirit of ahimsa and asteya.

8) Commercial Kitchen

The vegan food market is booming, but there are surprisingly few vegan commercial kitchens – none in Santa Barbara that we know of. The DawnWatch Eco Media center wants to have one – solar powered, using desalinated water, environmentally friendly to a groundbreaking degree, which vegan companies can use in return for a small share of profits. Eventually we would like to use that kitchen as part of an outdoor casual café, counter service only – grab your beer and your food number– then take both onto our beautiful property and enjoy them in the company of our nonhuman hosts.

**Cost of founding* the Eco Center:**

Initial planning	$50,000
Real estate commissions on donated land:	$250,000
Design and building cost	$200,000
TOTAL:	$500,000