Impact Stories

Apollo Gonzales is the Netroots Campaign Manager for the Natural  Resources Defense Council. Apollo provides campaign strategy to over a dozen programs, on campaigns ranging from Mountaintop Removal Mining to Toxics  Reform.
He is tasked with the mission of  moving online advocates from  one click activism to super activism, and bringing traditionally siloed  institutional experts’ voices to the blogosphere.

Of the 300 plus people currently employed by my organization, well over half are Facebook users and there are 456 people who list my organization as an employer. That means that there are about 100 people who continue to associate themselves with the work they once did here. With the average Facebook user having 130 friends (I topped 500 sometime last year), the 1st degree network of my colleagues is about 20,000 people.

From her roots in Colorado as an organizer for Colorado NARAL, to her role as Fundraising Practice Manager at Mindshare Interactive Campaigns (now Verilion), to her leadership as Program and Political Director at the Women’s Campaign Forum, Shayna Englin has been on the cutting edge in producing innovative and effective plans, programs, and materials that yield results.

We can do some really cool stuff.

We can inspire people around the world to send us their ideas, and we can tag and organize those ideas and print them as post cards and turn them into video and add some kick-ass audio.

We can say something pithy in 140 characters, reduce it to 110 characters, then get people around the world to repeat it to a bunch of other people interested in 110-character pith.

In the coming weeks, we'll be sharing our Web of Change Six Questions series, which is designed to give you quick insight into the minds of our Anchor team. Today, we talk with David Averill and Karen Uffelman, both of Groundwire, who have brought their extraordinary fundraising leadership to the Web of Change team.

(1) Tell us a few things about you that aren’t widely known.
Dave: I have a really deep desire to build a cob house with others but no time to do it and whenever I need to distill change in my life I listen to Steve Winwood’s High Life or Peter Gabriel’s In Your Eyes. 

In the coming weeks, we'll be sharing our Web of Change Six Questions series, which is designed to give you quick insight into the minds of our Anchor team. Today, we talk with Nicholas Klassen, co-founder of Biro Creative, a pioneering online creative firm that advises movement-leading organizations from around the world working for sustainability and social change.

Tell us three things about you that aren’t widely known.

• I brew my own beer
• I once crossed back into Canada using a Toronto Maple Leafs hat and a hockey card in my wallet as proof of citizenship... no joke. (But that was pre-9-11. Don't try that now!)
• My favourite part of Web of Change is the oysters

Will you share your take on technology and social change? What specific trends are you paying attention to?

Making social change is tough business.

Social change is rooted in altering the structures of a social group or society. It happens when individuals or groups choose to go against social norms.

But by our very nature, people gravitate towards those norms, which makes our role as change makers ever more challenging.