An Animal Rights/Vegan Activists' Strategies Article used with permission from All-Creatures.org

Lianna Levine Reisner shares her vision of an idyllic plant-based community and discusses the work being done by Plant Powered Metro New York to make that vision a reality. Learn more about PPMNY’s plant-based nutrition education programs and discover how you can help bring the movement to the mainstream in your community!

From Main Street to Mainstream: How Plant Powered Metro New York is Accelerating Community Change
From Lianna Levine Reisner, MSOD, VLCE, Main Street Vegan Academy, MainStreetVegan.com
August 2025

Images from Canva

Originally printed in the Main Street Vegan blog, www.mainstreetvegan.com. The writers are graduates of Main Street Vegan Academy and all hold the certification of vegan lifestyle coach and educator.

Imagine walking down Main Street and coming across a placard in front of a hair salon, publicizing tonight’s whole food, plant-based potluck. You walk a few steps down to the senior center and see a group of people through the glass participating in a lively cooking class—once again, only plants are on the table. Not so far after, you find a diner with a decal in its window indicating that meals made of whole plant foods are on the menu, and a quick perusal shows a few dishes you’d be excited to try. Across the street in an open lot, a farmers’ market is buzzing with activity, and a small group is following a tour guide in green apparel explaining how to use arugula and broccoli rabe. Just beyond, the sign on the church is publicizing a talk with a medical professional on diabetes reversal with plant-based nutrition, coming up on Wednesday. A colorful ad down the street (which has also appeared in your Instagram feed) shows happy people who claim to lower their blood pressure with a healthy plant-powered diet. The cinema marquee features a new food documentary and a talk-back with the producer later this month. A passerby remarks to the police officer on the corner how good he’s looking, to which the officer responds that he feels amazing after losing 40 pounds and getting his blood sugar back to normal after he participated in a plant-based Jumpstart program.

While this near-utopia sounds far-fetched, if we were to compress a few weeks of Plant Powered Metro New York (PPMNY) activity into one small town, this is what you might find. The idea is to turn Main Street into the mainstream. If we want to see health on every corner, we can—we have to bring it there.

Photo credit: Plant Powered Metro New York

Powering Positive Change

One of my business school professors, positive psychologist David Cooperrider, taught me that “words create worlds” (a quote often attributed to Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel)—and that images of the future are powerful drivers for change. At the same time, “actions speak louder than words.” My takeaway is that we need both the talk and imagery of positive change and the accompanying action to make it so.

It is through both of these axes—motivational words and positive action—that Plant Powered Metro New York has found success bringing plant-based nutrition education and empowerment into community spaces. We’ve gone out to hair salons, senior centers, churches, and farmers’ markets, connecting with the proprietors, programming directors, clergy members, and others who wield power to ask them the most basic questions: Would you like to be a partner in building a healthier community? Would you like to help your constituents learn about a way to eat that will transform their well-being?

Photo credit: Plant Powered Metro New York

We’ve also found that there are incredible, mission-aligned people already in organizations and companies who feel alone and want to see a bigger wave of change around them: The church fellowship that cares deeply about a plant-powered future even though the rest of the congregation isn’t there, the physician who has already adopted plant-based nutrition counseling and recognizes their patients will go home and struggle, the wellness director who needs something new and edgy (and that works!) to bring her community center, the senior center staff member who was just diagnosed with diabetes and now has both a personal and communal interest in learning more. These people are hiding behind many doors. These doors are waiting to be opened. Who will open them?

A Network of People Who Care

The way we’ve built Plant Powered Metro New York to work in communities—and to get a lot done in the short time we’ve been here (fewer than 7 years as of this writing)—is to build a network of people who care. Our network now includes 175 volunteers, community educators, program instructors, and chefs, plus 50+ mission-aligned healthcare professionals and community leaders from across the region. Some of these people found us because they were looking for community as “early adopters” of whole food, plant-based nutrition, while others threw their lot in with us after participating in our programs and realizing how transformative this lifestyle is.

Photo credit: Plant Powered Metro New York

Not everyone in our network is active all the time (if only!), but everyone is given the opportunity to act: Some people can open doors, some can teach, some can cook, some can build a program, some can serve as a peer mentor, some can advise, some can plan events, some can man a table at a vendor fair, some can analyze data, etc., etc. Talent abounds in our movement, if only we are capable of finding it, channeling it toward impact, and unleashing it as a force for good.

Moving Past Obstructions

Yes, sometimes we hit a wall: Organizations may already have a healthy take on nutrition that’s good enough for them, but it’s not rooted in the plant-based health paradigm. Companies may have traditionally-trained dietitians or nutritionists who find an all-plants nutrition organization “extreme.” Sometimes PPMNY doesn’t have the money to equitably pay a culinary educator for the tremendous time it takes to prepare and execute a food demo, no matter how much an organization really wants it. Crises get in the way of momentum. Projects and partnerships may come and go. But we keep going.

Plant Powered Metro New York’s Focus

PPMNY was founded as a nonprofit organization because we believe that everyone has a right to know that eating whole plant foods can heal them and build a resilient internal terrain. Our day-to-day work has two focal points:

1. Building a movement through the development and stewardship of our network and the many community partnerships needed for wide-scale change, and


2. Delivering quality, evidence-based nutrition education and supportive programming for people from all backgrounds to learn and make sustainable behavior change.

Within the second area, we break our community-facing work into four parts:

1. Building awareness in community settings that eating plants is the ticket to health. This is the positive talk and imagery that people need to consider a different future.


2. Providing low-commitment educational experiences for people to explore what a whole food, plant-based lifestyle is all about. This is how we build readiness for change.


3. Empowering people to make change through deeper learning, like in a multi-session series of nutrition and cooking classes, or through our dietary change programs, the Plant Powered Jumpstart in English and Reto Salud a Base de Plantas in Spanish. (These are virtual, so anyone across the hemisphere can join in.)


4. Building community through peer-to-peer mentorship and social opportunities that connect people who are putting plants first.

It may sound like a lot—because it is—but we can’t be wholly successful in one area without the other. Each leg of our stool holds it up. I believe that, over time, when properly resourced, PPMNY’s model will build an ecosystem in our communities that can push our movement into the mainstream. We have also taken preliminary steps to share our best practices with other communities beyond the New York Metro area that are interested in emulating our approach. In the future, we will build on-the-ground community leadership that will drive our movement faster and farther.

Image credit: Plant Powered Metro New York

Returning to Main Street

Can you envision the scene above as your Main Street? Set aside your skepticism for a moment. What would this look like in your community? We invite you to join us on this worthy endeavor, whether as an ally, volunteer, funder, or spokesperson. Step into your leadership because, deep down, we all have a power that’s waiting to be activated for change.

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Lianna Levine Reisner is a co-founder and the Network Director of Plant Powered Metro New York. She earned a Masters in Positive Organization Development & Change from Case Western Reserve University, received a certificate in Plant-Based Nutrition from the T. Colin Campbell Center for Nutrition Studies, and went on to understand the world of veganism through Main Street Vegan Academy. She is on the faculty of the Food Revolution Network’s Coaching Certification program. Based in Manhattan, Lianna is a mother of three and a big believer in the power of positive talk and action to build the future we seek.

Photo credit: Plant Powered Metro New York

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Posted on All-Creatures.org: August 27, 2025
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