Over the past 30+ years, Wayne Pacelle has become the animal protection movement’s leading strategist and practitioner of high-impact reform. He’s led the way to secure unprecedented corporate and public policy reforms, put animals into the national debate and making it mainstream, pioneering the use of the ballot initiatives to drive major change in policy, working to enact national policies on subjects from animal testing to animal fighting to factory farming, creating and growing a string of high-powered animal-protection organizations to build capacity for the next set of fights, and putting animal welfare into the center of mainstream thought in America and extended its reach with personnel in more than 50 other countries across the world.

He currently serves as President of the Center for a Humane Economy (CHE), a Washington D.C-based global animal welfare organization that focuses on influencing the conduct of corporations to forge a humane economic order and one that respects the intrinsic value and interconnectedness of all life forms.  He also serves as President of Animal Wellness Action (AWA), a Washington D.C.-based 501(c)(4) political organization with a mission of helping animals by promoting legal standards forbidding cruelty by enacting and enforcing good public policies and by endorsing like-minded candidates for political office.

Prior to founding the Center for a Humane Economy and Animal Wellness Action, Wayne was the President and CEO of The Humane Society of the United States, tripling the budget and net assets of the organization. He founded the Humane Society Legislative Fund and prior to that, he was executive director of The Fund for Animals. The Non-Profit Times named him seven times as one of the nation’s top 50 non-profit executives, and in 2005, he was named executive of the year. He wrote two New York Times bestselling books: The Bond: Our Kinship with Animals and Our Call to Defend Them and The Humane Economy: How Innovators and Enlightened Consumers Are Transforming the Lives of Animals. Wayne has led efforts to pass 1,500 state laws for animals, more than 100 federal laws and amendments, 30 ballot initiatives and 500 corporate agreements. He is a graduate of Yale University.