Bay Area Vegetarians

We are happy to announce one of our favorite events of the year… what’s become an annual Bay Area Vegetarians event… camping in the Redwood forest of Butano State Park!

This is our favorite place to camp — it is only 60 miles south of SF, yet being in the Redwoods has such a peaceful, soothing quality to it, it feels like you are far away from the densely populated Bay Area. Redwoods are awesome.
Of Butano State Park, The Best in Tent Camping Northern California says :

“The trees are so tall, the forest so still that camping here is like pitching a tent in a cathedral. ”

These multi-day group trips are wonderful ways to connect with the local veg community, and start or continue both new & old friendships. For aspiring or experienced vegetarians, these trips are wonderful ways to explore vegetarian foods, participate in making delicious vegan meals, and just plain fun to hang out with like-minded folks in a beautiful and relaxing redwood setting.

What: Butano State Park Camping Trip
When: Friday Sept 10 to Sunday Sept 12
Where: Butano State Park (~ 60 miles south of SF)
Hosts: Tammy & Chris

Full details on the camping trip, photos of previous Butano Camping trips, etc. visit the Butano camping trip page

According to Native American lore, Butano means “a gathering place for friendly visits”. We definitely agree!

Visit our BAV Event Calendar for more events!

Cheers,
Tammy & Chris

Want to help save animals, the earth, and promote healthful living, all while having fun and earning points at the same time? Then volunteer with Bay Area Vegetarians and make your efforts count in the Advocacy Rewards Program!

The intent of the Advocacy Rewards Program is to recognize and thank individuals for their contributions and support of vegan advocacy events within Bay Area Vegetarians and our local community. Every BAV advocacy event will have a point value attached to it. You earn points by participating in the activity. You earn even more points by organizing the activity.

Learn more by visiting the Advocacy Rewards Program page

Our next monthly dinner at Shangri-La is in August. This is a wonderful mostly vegan Chinese Restaurant on Irving near 21st, and a favorite restaurant for Tammy and Chris.

It will be a 9-course vegan dinner for $15, which includes tax & gratuity. Reservations and advance payment are required to reserve a seat. It is limited to 16 people total and there are 14 openings remaining at this time.

You can read more about the monthly dinners held in Palo Alto, Oakland, and two locations in San Francisco, or specifically the Shangri-La dinner. The Shangri-La dinner is the only dinner organized as a fixed menu with prepayment. The other dinners are generally RSVPs appreciated, and walk-ins accomodated as space permits.

Come out and be a veg with us!

It was great to have such a huge turnout for our letter writing party on Thursday 7/22! We had 11 people there, writing letters on a variety of topics, including local restaurants protesting foie gras, urging our local legislators to vote humanely on pending animal legislation, and local SF Animal Care to support Commission Chin Chi’s proposal for feral cats.

We like having it at MaggieMudd’s, so we’ll keep that and the 3rd Thursday as the current location & date for now. So mark your calendars for the next one!

We were fortunate to be invited to be guests on Vegan TV this Wednesday. It was a pretty cool experience and we got to talk about the group and the upcoming screening of Peaceable Kingdom that we’re helping Tribe of Heart with.

Some photos from the evening.

Show is on cabel channel 29 in San Francisco each Wednesday evening at 10pm.

Thanks Gabe for letting us appear!

http://bayareaveg.org/newsletters/BAV-News-Jul2004.htm

Just wanted to follow-up with an update for Bay Area Vegetarians booth at SF Pride 2004 held last weekend. First, thanks again — without your support, this would not have been possible.

We had another awesome experience this year. Every year, our effort gets better in terms of its appeal and organization! (Really, it is all marketing; we are trying to ‘sell’ veganism.) You can see photos of our booth set-up and pictures of Pride overall in our photo gallery.

A couple of highlights of BAV at Pride 2004:
– On Saturday, a couple who visited our booth in 2003 as carnivores, returned in 2004 as vegans, thanks to information that they got from us .. ( stories like this just reinforces how important our outreach is)

– Thanks to our leafleting crew, we distributed 4 boxes of Why Vegan booklets (300 leaflets per box). That is 1200 potential vegetarians/vegans from Why Vegans alone! (We handed out a slew of other info, see the photo gallery link above)

We want to take a few moments to acknowledge & thank our donors and volunteers who made this possible! Donors that enabled us to purchase booth space at Pride: Karen, Michelle, Warren Jones, Nicole & Regina, Linda Phillips, Paul, Loretta, Bob Gotch, Priya Rath, Mat Thomas, Nancy Orr, Thava, George Gibbs, & Carla Din. We are also grateful to support from Sun Flour Baking for providing 600+ yummy vegan cookie samples for visitors. Donna’s Tamales also pitched in, with the ‘vegan’ stickers that we happily gave out to vegans who visited us. Thank you!

Volunteers: Tammy & Chris were the ‘anchors’ on both Saturday and Sunday; they did the set-up, tabled during the day, and did the takedown at the end. They also had lots of help!! On Saturday, they were joined by Priya, Val, George, Amy; leafleting: Brenda, Emily, Robin & her friend; for Sunday, Mat, Nicole, Warren, Carla, and Johanna; leafleting: Jen, Lisa & Warren. Thank you!!

We also want to give special thanks to Nicole and Priya for their help with the literature. PCRM, PETA, and Vegan Outreach were also very generous in providing literature.

There is always the risk when doing Thank You’s of forgetting someone, so if we have, please let us know. Additionally, we’d love to hear feedback from folks who volunteered that day — what were your impressions or thoughts? Do you have ideas to make our efforts even more effective? And, keep in mind, we are always looking for other good tabling opportunities…… especially free ones 🙂

We would like to thank you all for your individual contributions AND for joining us in making a difference. Every piece of literature we handed out at Pride planted a seed for compassion and good health, to all parts of the world, as we had visitors from Santa Cruz to San Francisco to Sacramento to South Africa to South Korea.