{"id":17081,"date":"2021-03-12T10:00:46","date_gmt":"2021-03-12T15:00:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.vrg.org\/blog\/?p=17081"},"modified":"2021-03-04T11:35:18","modified_gmt":"2021-03-04T16:35:18","slug":"creating-a-vegan-world-laura-mcguiness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vrg.org\/blog\/2021\/03\/12\/creating-a-vegan-world-laura-mcguiness\/","title":{"rendered":"Creating A Vegan World \u2013 Laura McGuiness"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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By Amy Burger, VRG Intern<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Laura McGuiness calls her involvement with The Vegetarian\nResource Group \u201ca seminal moment\u201d in her life. She began volunteering with the\norganization at age 19, and has written several articles for its blog, website,\nand Vegetarian Journal <\/em>magazine about\ntopics like baking\nwith aquafaba<\/a>, cooking\nseitan-based dishes<\/a>, and starting\na school or community garden<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

  \n  Laura worked as an intern for\nthe VRG, which gave her the opportunity to travel to the Animal Rights National\nConference in 2013. In her blog\npost<\/a> about the experience, Laura wrote, \u201cthere was nothing more\nexciting than spending my weekend with hundreds of fellow animal rights\nadvocators who share my same vision\u2026I found it intriguing that so many\ndifferent people flew, drove, or rode to this one spot just to meet others and\nlearn about animal rights.\u201d While at the conference, Laura staffed the VRG\nbooth that showcased the group\u2019s work, including its many books, and allowed\nher to talk to other conference goers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

     Laura\u2019s\ninternship experience also allowed her to improve her writing abilities, a\nhands-on learning experience for her. She says, \u201cI learned how to write press\nreleases, how to fact check, [and] how to write for a particular audience.\u201d She\nalso did HTML coding for VRG, which she continues to help with today. The\ncoding, specifically creating tables, was a challenge. She says, \u201cI learned on\nthe job for the most part\u2026. I would sit at my desk trying to figure it out for\nhours, but now I\u2019m actually quite good at it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

     Laura knew that\nshe wanted to become a librarian eventually, so for one project, she worked to digitize\nissues of a historic publication, the American Vegetarian and Health Journal<\/em>, which dates to the mid-1800s. This\nproved to be an instructive challenge, as it required her to select a scanner,\nfind the appropriate software, and ensure that the documents would be\nsearchable for use, and today, viewers can read fully-digitized copies of the\npublication for free online at HathiTrust<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

     Laura later went\non to earn her bachelor\u2019s degree in English, and eventually got her master\u2019s\ndegree in library and information science. She says she \u201creally loved VRG as an\norganization because they were (and still are) very concerned with providing\ntruly factual information,\u201d something that\u2019s important to her, \u201cfrom an\ninformation professional standpoint.\u201d Today, Laura works in an archive at Los\nAlamos National Laboratory and dreams about \u201cone day doing a large\ndigitization\/metadata project for VRG.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

     Laura says of her\nexperience, \u201cNot only did I have the opportunity to learn a lot about writing\nand HTML, I learned a lot of practical skills,\u201d adding that she found the\norganization supportive of her goals, and saying her experience inspired her to\n\u201ccontinue to pay it forward.\u201d You can check out Laura\u2019s work online at vrg.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Amy Burger, VRG Intern Laura McGuiness calls her involvement with The Vegetarian Resource Group \u201ca seminal moment\u201d 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17081","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vrg.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17081","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vrg.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vrg.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vrg.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vrg.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17081"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.vrg.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17081\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17083,"href":"https:\/\/www.vrg.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17081\/revisions\/17083"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vrg.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17081"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vrg.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17081"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vrg.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17081"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}