Join us Aug 6 to celebrate our Leadership Academy grads!
On August 6, 2026, New Roots Institute celebrated the 2026 Leadership Academy cohort of student advocates who spent six weeks building the knowledge, skills, and relationships to take on factory farming.
The stories and reflections shared at the Leadership Academy Celebration showed what becomes possible when students are given real training, a strong community, and a clear sense of purpose. From personal growth to collective impact, here is a look at what this year’s cohort experienced and where they are headed.
Fellows explore the systems that sustain animal agriculture, strengthen their leadership and advocacy skills, and build relationships with peers and mentors across the movement.
This year's Leadership Academy brought together students from nearly 100 different high schools and colleges. Each fellow completed 70 hours of live sessions and at least 30 additional hours of independent study, building the fierce competence, critical thinking, and leadership capacity needed to challenge a system as embedded as factory farming.
The Celebration honored their growth while pointing to what comes next, including campus campaigns, community education, career pathways, and a growing network of student leaders working toward a more just and sustainable food system.
Some of the most memorable moments of the Celebration came directly from the fellows themselves.
Fellow Coumba Ndiaye shared what the program meant to her:
Throughout the Celebration, fellows and alumni emphasized that leadership is not only about speaking up. It is also about listening well, staying open to feedback, and learning how to work with people who may see the world differently.
Teaching Fellow Tracy Moore, a New Roots alum who returned this year to guide the current cohort, reflected on how much fellows had grown over the course of the summer, from feeling hesitant in early discussion groups to engaging in thoughtful, confident conversations with one another. She highlighted how fellows embodied core principles like caring accountability and inclusive collaboration, not because they were told to, but because they chose to.
Fellow Tia White captured that spirit in her remarks, sharing that her time in the program helped her enter conversations with curiosity, compassion, and humility rather than simply trying to prove a point.
She plans to put her new skills into practice by hosting a VegFest event featuring local food vendors and speakers on factory farming. Her goal is to create a fun, accessible space for students on her campus to explore plant-based food and food systems advocacy.
No student goes through this program alone. Behind every New Roots fellow is a network of organizations, mentors, and collaborators who invest in their growth.
This year's Leadership Academy hosted over 30 guest speakers from organizations including Project Drawdown, Food Systems Innovations, Nutrition Facts, and Hive.
As fellows move into campaign work through the Academic Year Fellowship, partner organizations provide subject matter expertise and coaching.
Many organizations in New Roots' broader network go on to hire fellows, collaborate with them, and help them find long-term paths to impact, such as Food Policy Pathways and Faunalytics.
Alumni, staff, supporters, partners, friends, and family joined the Celebration to cheer on this cohort, a reminder that the community invested in these fellows extends far beyond New Roots Institute.
The event also featured a special message from Maggie Baird, actor, singer-songwriter, founder of Support+Feed, and mom of vegan musician Billie Eilish, who thanked our fellows for their commitment to advocating for animals, people, and the planet.
By 2023, the estimated cumulative impact of all New Roots fellow campaigns had reduced demand for just over half a million animals in the food system.
By 2026, that number has grown to nearly 4.1 million animals, more than seven times where we were just three years ago. Because many fellow campaigns create lasting change, such as permanent menu updates and institutional policy shifts, the ripple effects of existing work alone are projected to reach approximately 22 million animals by 2036.
The trajectory is clear. What begins as one fellow, one campus, and one campaign compounds into something much larger over time.
New Roots alumni go on to work across sustainability, healthcare, public policy, plant-based foods, animal protection, and more. As of the Celebration, New Roots Institute has trained over 700 fellows, and collectively, they have logged over 200,000 hours working in roles to combat factory farming across 140+ different organizations.
Alum Sarahjeet Dosanjh reflected on how the Fellowship helped shape her career:
Her story highlights an important part of the New Roots model: the goal is not only to educate and train fellows, but to help them build the skills, relationships, and confidence to make advocacy part of a longer-term path.
During the Leadership Academy, Senior Educator Keith Allison led a session called Ink and Inspiration: The Power of Poetry, where fellows explored art as a tool for reflection, expression, healing, and inspiration.
As Keith shared during the Celebration, art can help bring people into conversations they might not otherwise be open to exploring.
The fellows contributed to a collaborative group piece titled We Won’t Look Away. The resulting poetry video was shared during the Celebration and quickly became one of the event’s most moving moments, with attendees filling the chat with encouragement, pride, and appreciation for the fellows’ words.
The piece offered a powerful reminder that advocacy can take many forms, including the creative work of helping people feel, reflect, and imagine something different.
The 2026 Leadership Academy cohort is now preparing to move into the Academic Year Fellowship, where fellows will design and run advocacy campaigns on their campuses and in their communities.
With coaching, mentorship, campaign advisors, and funding, fellows will put what they learned this summer into action.
The campaigns that come out of this cohort will add to the cumulative impact already reaching millions of people and reducing demand for millions of animals.
The movement to end animal factories needs the next generation. And based on everything shared at the 2026 Leadership Academy Celebration, the next generation is ready.
You can support fellows as they lead advocacy campaigns, sign up for New Roots updates, or nominate a student for next year’s Fellowship to help grow the movement to end factory farming.
New Roots Institute is a nonprofit empowering the next generation with knowledge and training to end factory farming. Through our leadership development programs, fellows take what they learn about the food system and put it into practice by launching campaigns that challenge industrial animal agriculture. We are strengthening the movement—spreading change from individuals to their communities, and expanding outward into wider systems-level change.
