Meet Mike Norman: Web of Change 2011 Fellow

Michael Norman is a kick-boxing, MBA-having, community-organizing visionary working to help the progressive movement tap a vast well of consumer power to convince businesses of all sizes to help make the world a better place.

After working for an NGO in Costa Rica focused on using Corporate Social Responsibility as a human development strategy, Mike came home to Boston, where he launched a program serving youth from public housing projects. In his work with youth from families facing dire financial circumstances, he recognized a pattern he'd seen in Costa Rica: every individual is a consumer, and consumers bound together as a like-minded community have incomparable power over business decisions.

Mike took his consumer power epiphany with him to MIT, where he earned his MBA and completed coursework for a degree in City Planning. After graduating from MIT, Mike founded SoChange - an organization dedicated to helping consumers recognize the power of their everyday buying decisions, and use them in concert with dozens, hundreds, or hundreds of thousands of others' buying decisions, to create the largest source of untapped progressive power that we have to influence corporate behavior.

Mike's ready to help us bridge the online/grassroots divide this year:

There's still a huge disconnect between digital organizing and grassroots organizing. We need a conversation about what a deep engagement ladder looks like.