News Archive

Cool bake sale fliers from Spokane, Washington and Northampton, Massachusetts

Two vegan bake sales today: Exeter, UK and Tempe, AZ!

Compassion for Animals, which is organizing (for lack of a better term) the Worldwide Vegan Bake Sale (WVBS), has created a simple bifold flier, aimed at non-vegans, and especially non-vegetarians, about reasons to go vegan. It only scratches the surface of the subject, and attempts to introduce vegetarianism and veganism—and explain the diference between the two—in a friendly, conversational style. It focuses on ethical issues, though it does briefly mention environmental and health aspects of an animal-free diet.

We wanted to ask each customer at our bake sales if we could give them some information about what our group does, and we decided we needed a flier with a vegan message that was small and unobtrusive, and emphasized the cruelty and suffering in the dairy and egg industries, since dairy and eggs are the two most common non-vegan ingredients in baked goods. That's how we ended up writing the flier. We'll probably tweak it over time, but we liked this first cut enough to pass it out at our bake sale last Saturday.

Except for the logo at the beginning of the flier and the footer at the end, the flier says nothing about Compassion for Animals. We kept it very non-group-specific and put it online as a Word document, so that others could use it, and replace the header and footer with their own materials if desired. We only ask that if you change any other text, please remove the Compassion for Animals logo and text from the document.

The flier isn't tied to the WVBS, or to bake sales, although it does make a passing reference to vegan desserts. (We'll have a WVBS handout down the road.)

To use the flier, print page one onto a piece of paper, then print page two on the other side of that paper, then fold the paper in half. You may need to tweak margins and possibly one or two page breaks. The flier may not be perfect, but perhaps it will be useful. You can download it here.

Amazing vegan food and outreach and fundraising have been going on all over this weekend! Stay tuned for more news on that. In the meantime, however, there are activities every day this week, starting tomorrow (Monday).

Lots of stuff sold; lots of outreach, fun, and deliciousness! Reports and pictures later...

More creative bake sale posters and fliers:

Although most of the news items on this page—like the bake sales themselves—are fun and upbeat, there is a serious side to all this. Vegan bake sales help show the world that we don't need to exploit animals to have a hugely satisfying, delicious variety of baked goods and desserts. We don't need to suffocate or grind up newborn chicks, as is done at hen hatcheries throughout the egg industry. We don't need to steal baby calves from their mothers and deprive them of their mothers' milk—the standard practice on dairy farms. (Watch this video for more on dairy.)

There are abundant cruelty-free options to provide moisture, binding, taste, and texture in baked goods. Let's strive for a world where we enjoy favorites like chocolate chip cookies and blueberry muffins, as well as creative dishes like cherry-chocolate danishes and orange-cranberry scones, but with compassion for all, avoiding harm and the infliction of suffering to animals as much as possible. On an individual basis, it is very easy to make that choice today! And in doing so, we—all of us—can, in effect, have our cake and eat it too.

In less than TWO DAYS, we'll kick off 84 bake sales in eight days!
From Australia to Arizona!

Less than FOUR DAYS until the mega-bake sale week!

Better late than never! Here are some banners with the URL in them. The second two say "We're participating" instead of "I'm participating," which may work better for groups.

Check out these cool bake sale posters!

Three "early bird" bake sales this weekend!

Shout-out to our friends at Compassion Over Killing (COK). COK is holding a bake sale in Takoma Park, Maryland, they've promoted the Worldwide Vegan Bake Sale in their excellent VegDC.com, VegBaltimore.com, VegPortland.com, and VegAustin.com sites (each of which is a guide to local veg-friendly restaurants and other establishments), and they were a liason for the recent VegNews.com interview about the WVBS. COK has a string of successful campaigns for animals and recently won a 2009 Do-Gooder award for its "Side of Truth" TV commercial.

We'd like to give a huge shout-out to Farm Sanctuary, reknown for its farmed animal sanctuaries in New York and California, and its steadfast efforts for “a world where the violence that animal agriculture inflicts upon people, animals and the environment has ended, and where instead we exercise values of compassion.”

Farm Sanctuary is holding a bake sale in New York City, on the Upper West Side, on Saturday June 27, and in Chico, California on Thursday June 25. In Ithaca, New York, on June 27, friends and colleagues will hold a bake sale to raise funds for former Farm Sanctuary employee Chuck Pappas, who was diagnosed with a brain tumor earlier this year. You can read about Chuck's story here.

We hope you can make it out to one (or more!) of these bake sales, to enjoy delicious vegan baked goods and support these very worthy causes.

We'll be giving Worldwide Vegan Bake Sale updates every Wednesday in June, at or near 12:35pm, on Brain food from the heartland, the excellent radio show hosted by Louie Free.

Louie has been very generous with giving us time on his show, and has been an enthusiastic supporter of the WVBS since it was first starting. We really appreciate it! Therefore, it is our pleasure to present him with a Worldwide Vegan Bake Sale Certificate of Awesomeness and Appreciation!

Although the "official" start of the 2009 Worldwide Vegan Bake Sale is June 20, there are a couple of AWESOME vegan bake sales getting things started early. The first one is this weekend — Saturday May 30, 2009, 1 to 5 PM, in Toronto, at Panacea Eco Shop! The event is called Milkshake Madness, and will feature a fantastic selection of vegan milkshakes and goodies, including:

• Mint Chocolate Chip milkshakes
• Peanut Butter Banana milkshakes
• Pina Colada milkshakes
• Gluten-free brownies, cookies, and cupcakes
• Candy apples
• Jelly Donut and Boston Cream cupcakes
• And Much More!

All vegan, all delicious. More info is at the link above. If you're anywhere in the Toronto area tomorrow, Panacea Eco Shop is the place to be!

Big thanks to The Humane Society of the United States for promoting the Worldwide Vegan Bake Sale!

It seems like half a dozen bake sales associated with the Worldwide Vegan Bake Sale (WVBS) have formed from discussions on the Post Punk Kitchen (PPK) Forums, hosted by award-winning cookbook author (and celebrated impresario) Isa Chandra Moskowitz. When the WVBS was just getting started, the thing it needed most was participants, and the PPK came through big time. Therefore, we'd like to present the PPK with a Worldwide Vegan Bake Sale Certificate of Awesomeness and Appreciation.

Four weeks to go! What awesome things are you baking?

We'll be on the Thursday May 21 broadcast of Vegan Radio. You can listen live at www.valleyfreeradio.org. The show runs from 7pm to 8pm Eastern time, and we'll be on sometime in the middle. By Saturday May 23, the podcast version of the show will be on www.veganradio.com. Vegan Radio is co-hosted by Derek Goodwin, creator of The Vegan Bus and Veganica.

Major shout-out to FARM (Farm Animal Rights Movement) for featuring the Worldwide Vegan Bake Sale in a recent issue of its excellent Meatout Mondays newsletter. Each edition of the newsletter features simple and tasty vegan recipes, plus information and inspiration to “improve your health, protect the environment, reduce global hunger, and save animals.”

1. We made the Who's Participating page more legible. Check out where the bake sales are near you.
2. The Links page finally has some links on it. We started with sources of vegan-related literature that you may want to put on your bake sale table.
3. We need to put little dates on these news items—will do soon.
4. Bake sales start in five weeks!

We're on ! You can follow our sweet tweets at http://twitter.com/wwveganbakesale.

We're on the May 9 Toronto Vegetarian Association (TVA) podcast!

TVA has been a great supporter of the Worldwide Vegan Bake Sale (WVBS). They were the first group to publicly promote the event, back on February 21st when the WVBS was unknown. Not only that, but TVA is also a participant—they'll be having a patio bake sale on June 20th. We'd like to give some love to TVA by presenting them with the Worldwide Vegan Bake Sale Certificate of Awesomeness and Appreciation.

(Note: We've got some more love-backs and shout-outs coming up, to various groups that have really helped this project.)

Here are some thinner banners that are more suitable for sidebars. Thanks to Mandee from Cupcake Kitteh for this excellent suggestion.

We'll be on Twitter soon. We'll start tweeting in a few days, and add a Twitter link to the web site's pages.

Crunch Time: If you're participating or seriously thinking about it, you may want to make choosing and reserving your bake sale venue the top priority—if you don't already have a venue. We've got some ideas here. Once you've got your location, the rest is relatively easy—and fun!

Many thanks to steadfast animal advocate and author Erik Marcus for mentioning the Worldwide Vegan Bake Sale on Vegan.com.

We were back on Louie Free's unique and stupendous radio show, Brain food from the heartland, on Friday, April 17 with an update on the Worldwide Vegan Bake Sale. The special guest was retired firefighter and VegFund co-founder JC Corcoran.

The Worldwide Vegan Bake Sale gets a blurb on the currrent show from Go Vegan Radio with Bob Linden. We hope to be on the program down the road to talk about the bake sale. Actually, there may be a little more to it than that. Watch this space for details...

One more banner—reflecting the site header.

Here's another banner; this one's more colorful.

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We have some banners and soon we'll have more. Here are three for starters: a general one and two "exclusive" banners for participants. Display them proudly on your web site! We're up for suggestions on new banners, too.

VegFund.org has generously offered to consider providing funding for groups that participate in the Worldwide Vegan Bake Sale by holding "bake sale feed-ins," to introduce non-vegan crowds to vegan baked goods. Here's how it works:

Good venues for bake sales include community centers, public squares, and shopping centers where bake sales have been held before. You can do a search for "bake sale" and your community to get an idea of bake-sale-friendly places in your area. Also, it's never too early to start thinking about which stupendous creations you'll feature and which literature or other non-food items you want to offer at your table. See our bake sale tips for other bake sale planning advice.

Related gala event, emanating from Pittsburgh, PA:

We promoted the Worldwide Vegan Bake Sale on Friday, February 27, 2009, for over an hour (!) on Louie Free's excellent radio show, Brain food from the heartland.

We stretched out the dates!

The WVBS is discussed on the
21 February 2009
Toronto Vegetarian Association Podcast