Boston Vegetarian Society

Updated on Nov 24, 2023

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Tax ID no. 04-3082813 Area served Eastern Massachusetts Founded 1986		Registration no. 043082813 Method Popular Education Type of business Educational Charity

Focus Veganism, Vegetarianism Location P.O. Box 38-1071 Cambridge, MA 02238 Headquarters Massachusetts, United States Similar Toronto Vegetarian Association, Physicians Committee for Respo, In Defense of Animals, Friends of Animals, Animal Legal Defense

The Boston Vegetarian Society (BVS) began in 1986. In 1998, it was incorporated in Massachusetts as an educational non-profit. In July 1998, it was granted 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status by the IRS.

The BVS provides info on events and related organizations, hosts the annual Boston Vegetarian Food Festival (BVFF), holds cooking classes, and promotes vegetarianism through mass transit advertising, outreach at fairs and festivals, and monthly free educational seminars which since their beginning have attracted some of the best-informed and most popular leaders and voices in the vegetarian and vegan movement. BVS "seeks to make a better world for people, animals, and the earth through advancing a healthful vegetarian diet and a compassionate ethic." BVS provides education, encouragement, and community support for vegetarians and for anyone wishing to learn more about a healthy, environmentally friendly, and humane way of life. According to several member's reports and earlier versions of the BVS website:

BVS is an all-volunteer organization with membership open to anyone who supports its purposes.

BVS events are open to members and non-members.

When it was first incorporated, its voting membership was open to vegetarians and non-voting membership was open to non-vegetarians. However, around 2009, the BVS Board voted to confine voting membership to Board members so that it could maintain its IVU membership without presenting a two-tiered membership to supporters. IVU member societies are required to vest all executive (decision-making) authority exclusively in vegetarians, defined as lacto-ovo (or stricter) vegetarians. Verification is difficult in organizations with two-tiered membership based upon self-reported behaviour.

All Food at BVS is vegan and alcohol-free, according to the earliest documents (bylaws and articles of incorporation) of the Boston Vegetarian Society.

Boston Vegetarian Society and its programs are run by an all-volunteer Board. Members do not have voting rights.

Since 1996, the Boston Vegetarian Society has annually hosted the Boston Vegetarian Food Festival (BVFF) in October or November.

It was first held on May 5, 1996, at the Howard W. Johnson Athletics Center at MIT because MIT graduate students affiliated with the MIT Vegetarian Support Group (VSG) (as of 2010 renamed MIT Vegetarian Group) provided a substantial proportion of the initial organizing effort. In addition, in October of that year, they held a World Vegetarian Day celebration outdoors on the Boston Common.

The second BVFF, in October 1997, was held at Bunker Hill Community College. This combined as one combined event their indoor vegetarian food festival and the sense of the World Vegetarian Day event, since the combined event would be perpetually held around October or November.

Since 1998, it has been held at the Reggie Lewis Track and Athletic Center in the Roxbury Crossing section of Boston, across the street from Roxbury Community College and the Mosque for the Praising of Allah of the Islamic Society of Boston.

Well-known vegan and vegetarian speakers at Boston Vegetarian Society events

Others

Danielle Nierenberg

David J. Hunter, currently Dean for Academic Affairs and formerly Acting Dean at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Vincent Gregory Professor and Director of the Harvard Center for Cancer Prevention.

References

Boston Vegetarian Society Wikipedia

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