The Gateway to Compassion Challenge: Try Vegan in St. Louis

By Kyle Luzynski, founder and executive director of Project Animal Freedom · Updated September 3, 2026

St. Louis has been the Gateway City for as long as anyone can remember. The Arch points west. We’d like to point St. Louis somewhere else: toward compassion, and toward a city where vegan living is easy, delicious, and normal.

That’s the idea behind the Gateway to Compassion Challenge, VeganSTL’s free, year-round invitation to try vegan living in and around St. Louis. Sign up once and you get a Starter Kit, weekly tips in season, free online classes, a verified guide to the best vegan food in town, dozens of in-person events, and a community that wants you to succeed.

The Challenge runs on three seasons. STL Veganuary opens the year in January. STL VegWeek arrives with Earth Week in April. STL VegMonth closes the year in November, World Vegan Month. Go vegan for a month, a week, or a first step, whenever you’re ready.

No perfection required. If you slip up, you’re still welcome. Every step counts.

The Challenge at a glance

• What it is: a free, community-supported challenge to try vegan living in the St. Louis area, with local resources and real people at every step.

• Who it’s for: anyone in and around St. Louis who is vegan-curious, plant-based-adjacent, or already vegan and looking for community. Beginners are the whole point.

• When: three seasons a year (January, April, and November), plus year-round support in between.

• Cost: free, always. VeganSTL is run by Project Animal Freedom, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit.

• The goal: 2,056 sign-ups this November, on the way to a fully vegan Midwest by 2056.

How the Challenge works

Three steps. None of them hard.

1. Sign up (about 15 seconds)

Your name, your email, and one honest answer: how do you eat right now? That’s it. We’ll send the Starter Kit to your inbox and add you to season highlights whenever a challenge is running.

2. Pick your season, or start today

Most people join at the start of a season, when the classes, the meetups, and the momentum are all running at once. But the gateway doesn’t close on February 1. Join in June and you’ll get the Starter Kit now, an invitation when the next season opens, and everything on this site in the meantime.

3. Lean on St. Louis

This is where a local challenge beats a generic one. Generic challenges send you a PDF. We send you to lunch. The STL Vegan Guide tells you where to eat, our classes show you how, and our events and groups introduce you to people who have done exactly what you’re doing.

Take it your way

• Full season. Eat vegan for the whole season. The most rewarding version, and the most supported.

• Start smaller. Go vegan on weekdays, drop dairy, or make one meal a day vegan. Real progress at your own pace.

• Already vegan? Join anyway. Bring a friend, mentor a newcomer, show up to the meetups. Community is how new vegans become lifelong vegans.

Three seasons, one Challenge: STL Veganuary, STL VegWeek, and STL VegMonth

Each season has its own page, its own events, and its own personality. They share one Starter Kit, one community, and one purpose.

STL Veganuary (January)

Every January, people all over the world try vegan for the global Veganuary campaign. In January 2026, St. Louis got an independent local challenge of its own, and 768 St. Louisans took it.

STL Veganuary is the classic 31-day version: the Starter Kit, weekly highlights, free January classes (Vegan STL 101 and Vegan Meal Prep 101 in 2026), and socials, dinners, and restaurant meetups all month long, so the switch never feels lonely. Next edition: January 2027.

Learn more and sign up at STL Veganuary.

STL VegWeek (April)

What if Earth Day were a vegan day? For most of us, the plate is the biggest environmental decision we make all day, so every April we put it at the center of Earth Week.

STL VegWeek runs Monday through Sunday of the week Earth Day falls on. Expect a Vegan Earth Day Market, vegan restaurant meetups all week, and guides built for a seven-day trial. The first edition runs Monday, April 19 through Sunday, April 25, 2027, with Earth Day on Thursday, April 22.

Learn more at STL VegWeek.

STL VegMonth (November)

November is World Vegan Month, and STL VegMonth is the most ambitious campaign Project Animal Freedom has ever run. The first edition is November 2026.

Four free Thursday-night classes on Zoom take you from Veganism 101, paired with a screening of the documentary Dominion, through Vegan Living 101 and Vegan STL 101 to Vegan Activism 101. More than ten events fill the month: a Vegan Hip-Hop Party on World Vegan Day, Vegan Day at Randy’s Rescue Ranch, Vegan Karaoke Night, Vegan Gratitude Day, our third annual Vegan Thanksgiving Feast, and a March to End Animal Testing. Our goal for the season: 2,056 sign-ups.

Learn more at STL VegMonth.

Between seasons

The gateway stays open. STL Vegan Market runs the second Sunday of every month from April through October. Our community circles meet year-round. New guides and features publish every month. Whenever you’re ready, we’re here.

What you get when you sign up

• The Starter Kit. Free downloads to get you through week one: what to eat, where to shop, and how to answer the questions you’ll get at dinner.

• Season highlights by email. About once a week during a challenge, a lighter touch the rest of the year. Unsubscribe anytime.

• The STL Vegan Guide. Our verified directory of vegan and vegan-friendly restaurants across the metro, plus deep dives into the best vegan pizza, the best vegan desserts, and Black-owned vegan restaurants in St. Louis.

• Free classes. Live, friendly, and online: nutrition basics, meal prep, local know-how, and how to speak up for animals.

• Events almost every week. Project Animal Freedom hosted 56 events in St. Louis in 2025 and is on track for more than 70 in 2026: potlucks, game nights, socials, marches, festivals, and a monthly market. See what’s coming up.

• Community circles and groups. The Uncaged Page book club, Plant Lovers Potluck, Vegan Game Night, and some of St. Louis’ largest online vegan communities, all listed under Groups.

• Support when it’s hard. New-vegan support groups, a mentor group on Zoom, and a human being at info@veganstl.com. Start with our resources page.

• The full picture. Documentaries worth your evening, from Dominion to The Game Changers, on Resources, and the complete case for vegan living on Why Veganism?

Why try vegan in St. Louis? The short version

The complete, sourced case lives on our Why Veganism? page. Here’s the short version.

For the animals. Worldwide, more than 80 billion land animals are killed for food every year, before anyone counts the fish (Our World in Data). Here in Missouri, which ranks third in the nation for beef cows (USDA, January 2026), those animals live down the highway, not in the abstract. Going vegan is the simplest way to stop paying for it.

For the planet. A 2023 study in Nature Food compared the real-world diets of more than 55,000 people and found that vegan diets carried roughly 75 percent lower greenhouse gas emissions, land use, and water pollution than diets high in meat (Scarborough et al., 2023). That’s the case for STL VegWeek in one sentence.

For your health. The British Dietetic Association affirms that well-planned plant-based diets, vegan diets included, can support healthy living at every age and life stage (BDA), and the American Heart Association links plant-forward eating to a lower risk of heart disease (AHA). The one non-negotiable: vegans need vitamin B12 from fortified foods or a supplement, as the National Institutes of Health notes. Our classes cover the rest.

For St. Louis. Every person who goes vegan here makes it easier for the next one: more demand, more restaurants, more vegan options across the region. That’s how a city changes.

The leaky bucket, and why community is the point

Here’s the part most vegan challenges skip. A landmark Faunalytics study of U.S. vegetarians and vegans found more than five former adherents for every current one, and 53 percent of former adherents had followed the diet for less than a year. The study was cross-sectional and correlational, so it can’t prove that community keeps people vegan. But the social pattern is hard to ignore: 49 percent of former vegetarians and vegans reported insufficient interaction with other vegetarians and vegans, compared with 25 percent of current adherents. Former adherents were also more likely to say the diet made them stick out from the crowd, 63 percent versus 41 percent.

That’s the leaky bucket. Persuading people to try vegan is the easy part. Keeping them is the work.

So the Gateway to Compassion Challenge is built around staying vegan, not just starting. Seasons give you a start date and a crowd to start with. Classes give you skills. The guide gives you dinner. Community circles, potlucks, game nights, socials, and support groups give you something no pamphlet can: people who will notice if you disappear. As we like to say, from community, all else follows.

Why trust VeganSTL with your vegan challenge?

We’re local, and we’re a nonprofit. VeganSTL is a division of Project Animal Freedom, an IRS-recognized 501(c)(3) nonprofit (EIN 83-3007847) organizing in St. Louis since 2018. We don’t sell products or subscriptions. We use your information to run the Challenge and stay in touch with you; see our Privacy Policy for details. Read more about VeganSTL.

We do this at scale. Project Animal Freedom hosted 56 events in St. Louis in 2025 and is on track for more than 70 in 2026. In 2025, our campaigns and communications generated approximately 860,000 in estimated local reach. In 2026 so far, our channels have drawn more than 2 million digital views and website visits, with an estimated local reach of 400,000+ people across the St. Louis area (local reach is overlap-adjusted across platforms). More than 23,000 people follow us across our St. Louis-focused social platforms.

We’ve run this play before. In January 2026, 768 St. Louisans took our first STL Veganuary challenge. STL VegMonth 2026 scales that model up. STL VegWeek 2027 adds a third season.

We eat here. The STL Vegan Guide is researched and maintained by St. Louis vegans who eat at the places we list, and it’s kept accurate under our Editorial Standards.

We measure honestly. Every sign-up tells us how they eat today. After each season, we ask one follow-up question and report the results as a share of respondents, alongside the response rate. If the Challenge works, we’ll show you. If part of it doesn’t, we’ll fix it.

Who’s writing this. I’m Kyle Luzynski, founder and executive director of Project Animal Freedom. I’ve been vegan since 2008 and have helped organize vegan events in St. Louis since 2018. I’m not the point; the animals are. But you deserve to know who’s behind the page.

Why 2,056?

Why not 2,000, or 2,500? Because Project Animal Freedom has one long-term goal: a fully vegan Midwest by 2056. Every number we chase is a down payment on that one. This November, 2,056 St. Louisans signing up to try vegan is the next installment.

Veganism is a numbers game. Every person who walks through the gateway makes it easier for the person behind them: more demand, more restaurants, more friends to eat with, more voices for animals. We’re going to change this region one heart, one mind, and one stomach at a time. Yours could be next.

Help St. Louis take the Challenge

You don’t have to be new to veganism to be part of this.

• Share it. Send this page to one person who has been curious. Post it. Bring it up at dinner.

• Volunteer. Table at events, host a meetup, welcome newcomers, help us reach the next thousand people. Start at Volunteer.

• Fund a sign-up. Our planning math works out to about $7 for every St. Louisan who takes the Challenge. A gift of any size helps us reach the next one. Give at Donate.

• Partner with us. Own a vegan or vegan-friendly restaurant or business? Offer a Challenge special, host a meetup, or share the sign-up with your customers. Email info@veganstl.com.

• Press and media. Reach us through our contact page.

Frequently asked questions

Is the Gateway to Compassion Challenge free?

Yes. Always. No upsells, no premium tier. It’s funded by donors and run by a nonprofit.

What if I slip up?

Then you’re human. A slip doesn’t disqualify you, and even if you drift away, the next season is another open door. Every vegan meal counts on its own.

Do I have to live in St. Louis?

No. The classes are online and the resources are for everyone. But the Challenge is built for the St. Louis metro on both sides of the river, and the events, the guide, and the community are where it comes alive.

Can I start outside a season?

Yes. Sign up any day. You’ll get the Starter Kit right away and an invitation when the next season opens.

Is this the same as the global Veganuary?

STL Veganuary is VeganSTL’s independent local January challenge, inspired by the global Veganuary campaign. The Gateway to Compassion Challenge goes further, with two more seasons and year-round local support.

What does “vegan” mean for the Challenge?

For the Challenge, it means eating no animal products: no meat, fish, dairy, eggs, or honey. Many participants go on to extend that to clothing and other choices, and we can help with that too, but food is where everyone starts.

How many emails will I get?

Typically about one a week during active Challenge seasons, plus occasional updates between seasons. Unsubscribe anytime. We use your information to administer the Challenge and communicate with you; see our Privacy Policy for details.

Walk through the gateway

You’ve read this far. That’s the curious part of you talking, and it’s the part we built this for. Sign up. Pick a season. Try one restaurant from the guide this week. Come say hi at an event. That’s the whole plan.

Their freedom is our freedom. Until every animal is free.

Keep exploring

• Start Here: new to vegan St. Louis? Begin on this page.

• STL Vegan Guide: where to eat, verified.

• Events: what’s coming up this week.

• Groups: community circles, Facebook groups, and meetups.

• Resources: documentaries, support groups, and tools.

• Why Veganism? and Why Animal Rights?: the full case.

• Subscribe: stay updated on everything above.