The Mary T. and Frank L. Hoffman Family Foundation

Tams Nicholson, Executive Director

Tams Nicholson is a Christian ethical vegan leader, teacher, writer, and animal advocate whose work explores what it means to extend the love, mercy, and nonviolence of Christ to all of God’s creatures.

An ethical vegan since 2008, Tams understands veganism as far more than a diet or lifestyle. For her, it is a lived expression of Christian discipleship—a response to the sacredness of God’s creation and a commitment to continually examine the ways our choices either participate in suffering or help bring greater compassion, healing, and peace into the world.

She is the Executive Director of All-Creatures.org and has a rich history in both non-profit leadership and the business world. Her background includes a proven record of success in start-ups and revitalizing organizations, advocacy, empowering successful volunteer and employee teams, nurturing youth and underserved voices, creating positive public relations, grant writing, fundraising, cultivating relationships, designing successful community change strategies, and more.

She spent a decade in the private sector in different locations throughout the United States working in operations, IT, training, leadership, and media, before having a life-changing experience as a volunteer that inspired her to leave the corporate world and dedicate the rest of her career to lifting others up in the non-profit sector. Since then, she has held non-profit leadership roles in disaster services, drug prevention, and the vegan animal rights movement.

One of her passions is teaching and empowering others. She loves to gently invite Christians to look deeply at Scripture, tradition, culture, and the assumptions we have inherited about animals. Rather than approaching faith-based veganism primarily through rules or condemnation, she encourages people to examine their own hearts, ask difficult questions, challenge beliefs that may keep them from greater compassion, and discern how God is calling them into a more loving relationship with creation.

Tams serves as Executive Director of All-Creatures.org of the Mary T. & Frank L. Hoffman Family Foundation, an organization with a long history of bringing together faith, animal advocacy, and veganism. Her professional and personal ministries merge to include advocacy through teaching, writing, prayer, interviews, community building, and creating resources that encourage Christians and other people of faith to recognize animals not as things for human use, but as fellow creatures whose lives have value to themselves and to their Creator.

Her vision of faith-based veganism looks both backward and forward: toward the peace of God's original creation and toward the biblical truth of the forthcoming Peaceable Kingdom and renewed creation. Between those two visions lies the Christian life today—and the question of how faithfully we are willing to embody Christ's radical love in the world as it is now.

Ms. Nicholson holds a B.S. in Psychology from Regent University and is a former SURP scholar. She has studied at the Master’s-level in biblical theology with an emphasis in liberation theology at Regent University and ministry coursework focused on care of creation through Loyola University’s LIMEX program. She is a professed Third Order Franciscan and a 2022 graduate of Fr. Richard Rohr’s Living School at the Center for Action and Contemplation. Her additional training includes leadership, somatic attachment therapy, instructional technology, drug prevention, advocacy, and disaster services.