Jill Klinger, Board President 

Currently living in Portland, OR, Jill grew up in Colorado. After college and a short stint in Utah, she relocated to Bozeman where she found employment with Wayfare Foods where she organized lots of vegan potlucks. It was also through a colleague at Wayfare that she learned about The Last Best Place for Animals. 

“The reason I wanted to work at Wayfare as well as at my current job with Yogi Tea is my interest in the focus on sustainable food, which is really important to me. I feel really lucky to be able to work for Wayfare and Yogi and try to build some skills to help make the whole food system more sustainable and that, of course, depends very much on not using animal agriculture.”

Jill describes her road to veganism as “a really long, slow transition.” She spent her senior year in high school as an exchange student in Argentina where she lived with a host family that owned a ranch. In that meat-heavy culture, she found herself closer to the food system than she had ever been before – seeing the animals up close, observing transport trucks full of pigs, and seeing the butcher shops with whole carcasses hanging up. “It was eye-opening for me - so different than the way we buy our meat in the US.”

She says she didn’t change her lifestyle immediately, but that experience was enough to make her start questioning more and more things.  In college, she engaged in lots of research and slowly learned about sustainability, animal rights, human rights, and even the effects farm factories have on the communities around them in regard to people’s health.  

“Everything I learned was painting such a clear picture until eventually it just became so clear that really the only option to live in alignment with my values and the things that I had learned was to be fully vegan.”

“That too,” she says, “wasn’t straightforward.”  Jill found herself reluctant to fully commit. Her new value system was juxtaposed to having been raised in a meat-and-potatoes family. She says she was flexitarian, vegetarian, vegan - all the things – researching the minutia of each issue and changing her habits one by one.  “It’s just painfully clear when social awareness creeps into your life.”

While the current focus of the sanctuary is on its immediate needs for regular, consistent volunteers to help with basic animal care in addition to just some baseline funds, Jill says, “I would like to see the sanctuary become well-known in the region. It’s one of only three or four farm animal sanctuaries in the state, so I would like it to serve as a touch point for folks to turn to when they know of an animal that needs rescue or sanctuary. I would like for them to know that it’s an island of hope, safety, and compassion. 

My experience in Argentina afforded me the opportunity to see animals as more than a commodity, and I realized that it is possible to reduce the harm you create in your own life by learning about the various issues of animal welfare, farming, and veganism. My dream is for the sanctuary to serve as a place where people can experience deeper connection with animals and become educated on the harms of animal agriculture, so they can begin their own journeys of harm reduction.

Favorite resident?  “I love them all!”