What metrics or key results do we use to measure impact?
We use qualitative indicators of impact to track our success. While these are dynamic, and we look for new measures over time, these indicators include the following.
Research. See our annual reports for a listing of publications as well as all our indicators of long-term impact, https://panworks.io/annual-report/.
Teaching. With many of our Fellows in the academy, we are one of the largest faculty of animal studies in the world, https://panworks.io/courses/.
Essays in our Medium column by our Fellows and guests. See: https://panworks.medium.com.
Popular essays in The Conversation and elsewhere. Some of these go viral, see: https://theconversation.com/australias-war-on-feral-cats-shaky-science-missing-ethics-47444.
Media influence through featured and background interviews. See https://www.hcn.org/articles/killing-one-owl-to-save-another/.
Social media. See our Bluesky (https://bsky.app/profile/panworks.bsky.social); and Flipboards (https://panworks.io/flipboard/)
PAN Thinks podcast. Deep conversations with a live audience. Episodes are in production for release in Fall 2025.
PAN University (PAN U). Professional development for fellows and training for the public. See our activities in the PAN U section of our website, https://panworks.io/panu/.
Cultivating ethical leadership. Developing and placing fellows into positions of responsibility. Witness the success of one of our Fellows, https://wawildlifefirst.org/our-people/fran-santiago-avila/.
What are our primary achievements to date?
PAN Works seeks long-term and enduring ethical, cultural, and policy change for the wellbeing of animals. We do this through the ethical reframing of animal public policy, ethical capacity building for individuals and society, and cultivating our Fellows to assume significant positions of public responsibility.
PAN Works has a history that predates its formal incorporation in 2022. We began as a cohesive network of scholars, evolved into an informal research lab, and eventually incorporated as a 501c3 nonprofit think tank.
In the first decade of the 2000s, we moved ethics from academic theory into policy practice by introducing ethical considerations into public policy discussions about wolf and predator conservation. During this period, we also trained public and social sector staff on the ethical and policy dimensions of human-animal interactions. These foundational activities shaped our subsequent work. See: https://www.animalsandsociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/lynn.pdf
In the 2010s, we conducted the first ethics review as part of a national environmental impact assessment and endangered species recovery plan for the northern spotted owl. This was originally conceived by the enabling National Environmental Policy Act but had never before been implemented. See: https://brill.com/view/journals/soan/26/2/article-p217_8.xml. In 2025, we condemned the US government’s perversion of that work to justify a massacre of half a million barred owls. See https://www.ecologicalcitizen.net/pdfs/epub-136.pdf. We are actively engaged in the legal effort to stop this massacre.
In 2019, we transformed the debate over outdoor cats, biodiversity, and public health, and continue to work against villainizing cats as an invasive species. Our initial publication, “A Moral Panic Over Cats,” quickly earned an award from the journal Conservation Biology as one of the top five articles in its ~40-year history. See: https://conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/cobi.13346, and https://brill.com/view/journals/soan/30/7/article-p798_7.xml. Work on outdoor cats, biodiversity, and public health is ongoing, with a book to be published by Princeton University Press in 2026 by one of our fellows, Barbara J. King, PhD. Follow-up work is planned.
In 2022, we launched the Compassionate Conservation Delphi project,the first empirical study to use qualitative and quantitative methods in investigating the actual practice of compassionate conservation. This multi-year investigation directly informs the ethics and science of conservation practice more broadly. The first of four planned publications is now available and has generated substantive discussions about the meaning and significance of animal wellbeing in conservation. Three additional manuscripts are in various stages of publication. See: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0006320725000394
In 2023, we published the first article featuring a new model for animal welfare — “Spheres of Well-being.” Conceived by Liv Baker, PhD (Chair of the Board of PAN Works), the Spheres of Well-being model expands upon the five freedoms, five domains, and positive welfare models, envisioning a more rigorous understanding of animal agency and well-being. Our article previewing the model is here: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781032153346-30/ethics-wellbeing-wild-lives-william-lynn-baker-liv-francisco-santiago-ávila-kristin-stewart. Baker’s book on Wild Animal Well-being with Springer Nature’s animal welfare series is forthcoming.
In 2025, we transformed the National Wolf Conversation, with Bill Lynn, PhD (Founder and President of PAN Works) serving as its wolf trustee. Animal trustees have a fiduciary duty to advance the well-being of the animals they represent irrespective of the personal, professional, or organizational interests that often taint stakeholder processes. This marked the first time the US government formally incorporated an animal trustee, in this case giving wolves a direct voice in a stakeholder process affecting them. See: https://wolfconversation.com
With a growing roster of fellows, cultivating their individual capacities is key to our work. Policy is people, and we seek to develop professionals with moral insight to assume positions of leadership in the public, private, and nonprofit sectors affecting the well-being of animals. In addition to the direct influence they bring to their organizations and social circles, this also has a leavening effect by organically introducing ethical thought and practice into other organizations. Project Coyote, Wildlife for All, and Washington Wildlife First have overtly adopted an ethical posture as a result of our fellows in their ranks.
Why do we use qualitative indicators?
Many organizations use quantitative impact measures — webpage views, social media hits, podcast audience, funds raised, year-over-year growth, segment analysis, etc. — and define their impact in these terms. Others focus on legislation that is passed, delayed, or denied, new and improved regulations, and other immediate governance issues . All of this is important, and we applaud those who do this kind of work and the success these measures track in their advocacy campaigns and communication strategies.
Nonetheless, these indices of impact are not suitable for our mission.
We seek enduring moral and political change for the well-being of animals. This is a project decades in the making and can only be measured by cultural and institutional change. So we use qualitative indicators of our impact that reflect a longer-term perspective.
The tension between qualitative and quantitative measures is common for think tanks who typically do not run campaigns with discrete outcomes amenable to conventional quantification. Rather, our influence operates at a foundational level, shaping the moral vision that inspires social change, the ethical framings that underlie all public policy, and the value systems that drive public policy disputes. This is vital work that builds momentum over time, often gradually at first, until a paradigm shift reaches an inflection point.
Who do we partner with?
Because we desire to build an ecosystem of influence based on ethics and values, we have and will continue to build collaborations in the public, private, and social sectors.
Currently, we are most active in the social sector with animal protection groups focused on wildlife. We also have fellows with expertise in companion animals, animals in laboratories, and farmed animals, so we are eager to build collaborations in these spaces too.
Because our fellows are situated across the globe and represent varied academic disciplines and non-academic professions, our collaborations have a strong interdisciplinary and international character. Our collaborations often involve academic and advocacy institutions.
For example, our Compassionate Conservation Delphi involves PAN Works fellows from Deakin University (Australia), Clark University (US), and Sarah Lawrence College (US). Similarly, our work on animal trustees involves fellows from Clark University, Canisius University, Sarah Lawrence College, and Washington Wildlife First. Our field course on rewilding Asian Elephants is undertaken in collaboration with Mahouts Elephant Foundation.
We also collaborate with organizations that have missions that may be in tension with our own, but with whom productive conversations and activity are possible. For instance, while conservation biology as a discipline takes an instrumentalist approach to wild lives, we have cooperated with the Society for Conservation Biology on continuing education for good governance and animal protection. As it turns out, many conservation biologists resonate with our efforts for animal ethics, compassionate conservation, and multispecies justice. PAN Works is continuing its collaboration with SCBNA on a series of ethics and wildlife training seminars planned for 2026.
These relationships are also visible through the guests we feature on our podcast, PAN Thinks, and our Medium editorial column. For instance, several fellows of PAN Works were instrumental in the background research for Brandon Keim’s book, Meet the Neighbours. This book focuses on animal minds and personhood, and what that means for human-wildlife relationships. Brandon was a recent guest on our podcast to talk about the book. The last year of livestream episodes are now in production, to be released in the fall of 2025 on Apple Podcast and YouTube.
If you are interested in collaborating with PAN Works on a project to transform ethics and policy for the benefit of animals, please be in contact with us.