By Amy Burger, VRG Intern

Laura McGuiness calls her involvement with The Vegetarian Resource Group “a seminal moment” in her life. She began volunteering with the organization at age 19, and has written several articles for its blog, website, and Vegetarian Journal magazine about topics like baking with aquafaba, cooking seitan-based dishes, and starting a school or community garden.

     Laura worked as an intern for the VRG, which gave her the opportunity to travel to the Animal Rights National Conference in 2013. In her blog post about the experience, Laura wrote, “there was nothing more exciting than spending my weekend with hundreds of fellow animal rights advocators who share my same vision…I found it intriguing that so many different people flew, drove, or rode to this one spot just to meet others and learn about animal rights.” While at the conference, Laura staffed the VRG booth that showcased the group’s work, including its many books, and allowed her to talk to other conference goers.

     Laura’s internship experience also allowed her to improve her writing abilities, a hands-on learning experience for her. She says, “I learned how to write press releases, how to fact check, [and] how to write for a particular audience.” She also did HTML coding for VRG, which she continues to help with today. The coding, specifically creating tables, was a challenge. She says, “I learned on the job for the most part…. I would sit at my desk trying to figure it out for hours, but now I’m actually quite good at it.”

     Laura knew that she wanted to become a librarian eventually, so for one project, she worked to digitize issues of a historic publication, the American Vegetarian and Health Journal, which dates to the mid-1800s. This proved to be an instructive challenge, as it required her to select a scanner, find the appropriate software, and ensure that the documents would be searchable for use, and today, viewers can read fully-digitized copies of the publication for free online at HathiTrust.

     Laura later went on to earn her bachelor’s degree in English, and eventually got her master’s degree in library and information science. She says she “really loved VRG as an organization because they were (and still are) very concerned with providing truly factual information,” something that’s important to her, “from an information professional standpoint.” Today, Laura works in an archive at Los Alamos National Laboratory and dreams about “one day doing a large digitization/metadata project for VRG.”

     Laura says of her experience, “Not only did I have the opportunity to learn a lot about writing and HTML, I learned a lot of practical skills,” adding that she found the organization supportive of her goals, and saying her experience inspired her to “continue to pay it forward.” You can check out Laura’s work online at vrg.org.