My friend Koji is 3 years younger than me — 3 years, 3 months and 8 days to be exact, because this is the week of his 24th birthday — but he is without a doubt one of the people I most want to be like when I grow up. He’s crazy intelligent, the kind of smarts that allow a person to succeed at pretty much anything. But a month after graduating with a math degree from Swarthmore College, he isn’t cashing in with a Wall Street job, or even taking a break to travel the world. He’s jumping straight into a career at Mercy for Animals, finding the most effective ways to end what may be the single biggest source of man-made suffering in history: the abuse of billions of animals on factory farms.

It’s hard to express how important this cause is — I, for one, believe that when future generations look back on the mind-boggling scale of suffering in today’s industrial agriculture operations, it will be with the same horror we now feel about the history of human slavery. Right now, though, I want to focus on the birthday boy. If we want a better world, we need more of our best and brightest to follow Koji’s example and dedicate their talents to the greater good. And that won’t happen unless we actively cheer them on.

Koji has chosen (again, smart kid) to work for one of Animal Charity Evaluators' Standout Charities — the select group of nonprofits professionally-rated as doing the most good for animals per dollar received. That means all we have to do to show him our support on his birthday is something we should probably be doing anyway: putting just a little of our spare resources towards ending an enormous, and yet enormously-solvable, crisis in our world.

I hope you’ll join me in doing so, and in sharing this before the end of the month (the sooner the better, before Koji finds out about all this) with others that might want to do the same. Let’s make sure we reach enough people that:
1) Koji starts crying when he hears about all this support, and I can get that on video.
2) The next young potential hero out there hears about Koji, and is maybe inspired to follow his lead.

(P.S. If you need a little extra animal-love motivation, I'll send anyone who signs up for a recurring donation - even just $1 - regular videos of our new rescue puppy getting her head stuck in peanut butter jars until you tell me to stop. Just leave a comment letting me know you're in 😊)