Transparency

Plans for the future  

Strategic focus for 2025

In 2025, we are focusing on building Hive into a truly global community. Our priority is clear: expanding our reach, particularly in underserved regions such as Asia and Latin America. Our ultimate goal is to facilitate a holistic, supportive, and impactful global network for farmed animal advocates.

To achieve this priority, we will continue to grow our presence as a farmed animal advocacy hub, introducing ambassadors for underserved regions and establishing new strategic partnerships. We will continue refining and developing our core programs, including Hive Events, Hive Highlights, Hive Resources and of course, the Hive Slack. To ensure that we can robustly, reliably and cost-effectively achieve our goals, we will strengthen our volunteer system, and optimize our organizational structure and culture.

Decision-making process  

All our decisions, big and small, are made with our values in mind. Decisions on our team are made by those closest to the problem and with most knowledge and experience on it. For example, our Communications Lead can make decisions about how to best reach our audience, and our Slack Admins can make decisions about moderation according to the policies we’ve created. 

Our Executive Director provides oversight to the team members’ decision-making to ensure that our decisions remain in line with our values and strategy. If one of our team members isn’t confident about a certain decision, they consult with the other team members and our advisors. Decisions about our strategic focus are normally made jointly by our Executive Director and Managing Director with input from our team members and advisors. 

Hive’s annual strategy takes into consideration our mission as well as insights from the prior year. The annual strategy is initiated together at a team brainstorming session, then later expanded and refined by the leadership team with feedback from advisors and the entire team. Program-specific strategy is generally determined by the team members running the program and is overseen by the team’s supervisor, in most cases the Managing Director.

When deciding which programs to run, we rely on the data collected by our measurement, evaluation, and learning (MEL) efforts. Every year, we conduct a thorough program analysis, which relies on information and insights from our annual community survey, user interviews, and other collected data. We publish this analysis in our Year in Review document, which contains our impact, progress, lessons learned and provisional plans for the next year. This document is made available on our website and is proactively shared with our Board of Directors, donors, funders, advisors, stakeholders, and team members.

Our governance  

Hive is led by our Executive Director, Sofia Balderson, and our Managing Director, Kevin Xia. Our Board of Directors currently consists of Cameron King - President (Hive’s former Co-Founder and Co-Founder at Animal Advocacy Africa), Constance Li - Secretary (Hive’s former Co-founder and Founder of sentient futures, formerly AI for Animals) and Sofia Balderson - Treasurer. We are planning to expand our Board as we grow. 

Hive Community Inc is a 501(c)3 tax-exempt organization in the US, meaning that we are an independent nonpofit and can accept tax-deductible donations in the US.

To ensure compliance and smooth operations, we have hired Clockwork Operations as our operations contractors. Their experienced team takes care of our bookkeeping and policies. 

We send a quarterly update to our donors, supporters, and stakeholders that reports on recent achievements, challenges, and any significant upcoming plans. 

We have recruited an excellent team of advisors to help guide us in areas where we may need a deeper understanding. They are all experts in their field and have extensive experience and knowledge. Whenever our leadership team are uncertain about an aspect of managing the project, such as management or theory of change, we consult with our advisors to ensure that our work is up to the movement-level standard.

Our Privacy Policy

For information on how we handle personal data, please see our Privacy Policy here.