3 minute read
Athens is Vegan
Vegan Life NGO is a Greek non-profit organization founded in 2016 with the mission to spread the vegan way of life in Greece through events, campaigns, and other activities.
Vegan Life NGO became mostly known for organizing Vegan Life Festivals, which quickly became the largest Vegan gatherings in Greece, and a real institution across the vegan community. Vegan Life Festivals promote the vegan lifestyle through a large exhibition of Vegan products and services, lectures from experts such as scientists, athletes and activists, workshops by vegan chefs and food bloggers, children’s activities, film screenings and art exhibitions.
During the pandemic, many of the activities had to be put on hold, but nonetheless Vegan Life NGO relentlessly looked to find ways to continue reaching a broad audience to inform and ‘sensitize’ about veganism. That is how “My Vegan Life”, the first ever Vegan TV show of Greece was created! With one-hour long weekly episodes, Vegan Life NGO brought the vegan lifestyle message into many homes, accessing even people who would not easily visit a vegan event.
Once the restrictive measures for the pandemic were partially lifted, our team started again to dynamically organize our events. In October 2021, the Vegan Life Festival of Athens took place, which exceeded 38,000 people in attendance in only 2 days, making it one of the largest Vegan festivals in the world!
In April 2022, the first Vegan Life Market took place, which was the first exclusively Vegan exhibition of products and services in Athens. In addition, in May 2022 the Vegan Life Festival in Thessaloniki was held in collaboration with the Municipality.
While organizing and holding all the above events, this year, Vegan Life NGO intensified the organization of activist demonstrations and ‘sensitization’ events in the streets of Athens and Thessaloniki. In April more than 100 activists demonstrated against the ritual slaughter of lambs during the Orthodox Easter in the main square of Athens right in front of Parliament, while in June, on the occasion of World Environment Day, we demonstrated the detrimental effects that the animal exploitation industries have on the planet.
Importantly, besides organizing its own projects, Vegan Life NGO participates in dozens of educational seminars and events held by other organizations throughout Greece in order to spread veganism to the general public.
It has already been a busy year and we will continue to work towards our goal: to see how amazing the world will be when completely vegan!
