Let's Make Change

Let’s Make Change is devoted to solving some of our toughest common challenges by catalyzing real social change. From helping inform communities about important issues, to creating new ways of getting people online involved in offline activism, we aim to make a measurable difference in the world by combining cutting edge technology and business processes with the wisdom and experience of committed change makers and community leaders. Part design studio, hacker space, advocacy organization and think tank, we bring together people across sectors to create open, web-based tools and strategies that help people create the world that they want to live in.

We live in a time of enormous social and environmental problems, yet traditional institutions are failing to adequately respond. Our problems are so acute that it will take fundamental change and the participation of a large part of the population to solve them. Encouragingly, an overwhelming majority of people want to see this nation and society head on a different path. But we need better ways to effectively mobilize like minded individuals to take transformative action.

The internet provides the infrastructure with which we can build and marshal scalable, grassroots solutions to issues like our declining democracy, growing ecological crisis, and economic insecurity. In order to harness this opportunity, we need to bring together people who understand the tools, and those who understand the problems, to drive creative innovation and fundamental change.

Let’s Make Change is open source, user-centered and entrepreneurial. We bring these strategies and cultures to the challenge of generating new ideas, tools, partnerships and networks that create more resilient and adaptive organizations, communities, governments, economies, and ecosystems. As part of living this strategy, Let’s Make Change has a hybridized structure - we have a core team and focus, but also collaborate on and incubate outside projects, we work on supporter-funded projects as well as paying gigs in the public interest.

We aim to be a hub that nurtures the strategies that will allow humanity to respond effectively to the dramatic changes that are reshaping the social and ecological landscape. The internet and new technologies have the potential to be a powerful part of our adaptive responses to these shifts and accompanying crises. Let’s Make Change is dedicated to making that potential into reality.

In order to accomplish this, we focus on four change-making strategies:**

Building

• We act as an R&D shop for technology-based social change experiments, building projects internally, then developing and releasing the most promising products. We use the same practices - user-centered design, open source projects, and agile development - that are responsible for so much of the recent innovation in the technology industry.

Innovating

• Bring together people with diverse knowledge to share ideas and work on creative projects is the best recipe for innovation. We engage experts and practitioners from across the public and private sectors to work together to forge new ways to attack old problems.

Investigating

• The number of projects using the web for social good are growing by leaps and bounds, but our understanding of what works and why is barely advancing at all. In order to improve outcomes and best inform the efforts of others, we will evaluate and publicize the results of projects that use technology and design to improve social and environmental conditions.

Incubating

• As we learn more about being successful in this space we plan to help others launch new tech products and organizations focused on social change. By providing a support structure similar to start-up incubators in the tech space, we will lower the barriers to entry for innovative ideas and help foster sustainable organizations leveraging technology for real change.

Let’s Make Change

If this all sounds great to you, let's make change together! We’re just getting started, but we want to hear from anyone who shares our excitement about experimenting with new ways to use the web to make serious world saving change! This whole project is open source and all contributions are welcome:)

Are you a social or environmental advocate who’s using innovative tech that could create more change agents? Do you hack on software during the week and hack society on the weekend? Are you a designer who’s found ways to apply your skills to building community? Are you an academic or grad student studying the newest social innovations? Are you a journalist who is telling stories in new ways to keep communities informed? Are you an artist connecting with audiences to show them something important about making a better world? Would you like to be any of these things?

The problems we face aren't waiting and neither can we. Get in touch and let's make change!