Impact Stories

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.

What is your superpower? This is a favorite question of my colleague, Jon Stahl, and when he asks it, what he’s really talking about is value proposition. And not just some vague value proposition, like, “we protect the environment,” but more along the lines of what can you do for me today? Wonder Woman, for example, fights crime, but her superpowers? Invisible plane, “lasso of truth” and, hello, magic bracelets. I’m on board with the fighting crime part, but more likely to pay attention if I can get a ride in the invisible plane.

By enabling an open, diverse and free-flowing Web, the Internet -- under its founding principle of Net Neutrality – unleashed a tidal wave of civic participation.

Many of us in the Web of Change community have been riding that wave from the beginning. The social change organizations we work for and with all rely upon the level playing field of an open Internet to spread the word about their work, engage more people with their issues, and build genuine support at the grassroots level.
 
Net Neutrality is vital to ensuring that everyone has a voice on issues of public concern.

Right now, Washington is in the midst of a critical debate over whether the Internet in the U.S. will continue to serve as an essential vehicle for free speech, economic opportunity and civic engagement.