The Radical Companionship Project was created and developed after a discussion between anti-oppression advocates about evolving our relationships with others through an anti-speciesist lens. The RCP is inspired by the book of the same name and focuses particularly on kinship with animals who are colonised into pethood (coined by Aiyana Goodfellow), as we saw there was a lack of conversation around how so-called ‘companion animals’ are oppressed by human supremacy.

We decided to focus on animals colonised into pethood since they are usually sharing the same space as humans and a personal relationship exists between the human and the ‘pet’. We want this theory to be applied practically, and perhaps if we can improve our relationships with animals who share our homes, we can gain a better understanding of nonhuman species altogether. At a basic level, Radical Companionship is simply a way of creating thoughtful interspecies relationships based on ideas of how to interact with each other in a way that evokes liberation-oriented principles.

No. The RadCom chat and Animal Caregivers Mutual Aid is welcome to anyone who is interested in anti-speciesism and Radical Companionship. If you are willing to be an active member, by partaking in mutual aid, directly assisting nonhuman animals, or being involved in radical discussions about how we can be better animal accomplices, then we welcome you into this space.
​We have a sign up form which can be completed by clicking here. This sign up form is for the safety of everyone involved in the project. We will then add you to both the group chat and mutual aid channel if approved.
No, we choose not to be on social media because we want to avoid passive activism. The Radical Companionship project is about engaging in futuristic discussions that centre interspecies relationships…not to build social gain or capital on social media platforms. Individual facilitators have no problem with social media and are active users ourselves, however, we don’t feel Instagram, Twitter and Facebook etc are the right platforms for this project…who the uses Facebook now anyways lol?!

We use Telegram as it’s a user friendly app and has the option to create ‘channels’ which we utilise for the mutual aid side of the Radical Companionship project. However, it’s important to note that Telegram is not user-to-user encrypted (except for secret chats which can only happen between two individuals). We advise using Tor browser and a VPN for general online safety and keeping any sensitive conversations offline completely.

 

Telegram Pros – Users can log in on multiple devices at the same time and are able to receive messages on all devices and remembers browser sessions. You can keep messages in the draft as well, and this draft will be synced to all your devices. It’s not owned by Facebook.

There is no expectation to be constantly involved in discussions or supporting mutual aid every day. We understand that people have jobs and are busy with their lives. However, this is not a platform to gain ‘woke’ points for joining a radical group!

Meaningful engagement is expected, and so is rest! Find your balance, whatever that is, and encourage others to do so. It’s okay to take a break, we’ll be here to help you back up once you’re well rested. Do what you can!

We will send out journaling questions every week as main discussion points based around the Radical Companionship theory. But we will NOT dictate how the conversation goes – please share videos, articles, podcasts and more that you feel are relevant to the topics. Everyone is equally important to the community 🙂

Radical Companionship is an upcoming theory book about evolving our relationships with others – especially nonhuman companions – through an anti-speciesist lens. To learn more, see here. see here.

 

RadCom is a telegram community group chat, where facilitators will drop journaling questions based on the Radical Companionship theory (and other texts) to encourage discussion amongst us “RadCommies” 🤪😂 as well as organise, create, learn, unlearn, share resources, look out for each other and generally attempt to become better animal accomplices! To learn more about RadCom, see here.

 

Animal Caregivers Mutual Aid is also on Telegram, but in the form of a channel – ACMA exists to support people caring for nonhumans with both financial and nonfinancial needs as people send in requests and offerings and facilitators post them to the channel. To learn more about Animal Caregivers Mutual Aid, see here.