WANT TO GET STARTED NOW? Check out our new TAKE ACTION page on Substack! It's got a Big Shift Guide, Idea Lists, and everything else you or a group need to get going.
WANT TO LEARN MORE FIRST? We can reach and energize Americans with engagement, partnerships, and pressure to get people talking, making change, making news, and voting. We do this by combining these 5 Things:
- Thing 1: Building connection.
- Thing 2: Doing more with community & coalitions.
- Thing 3: Involving businesses through partnerships & pressure.
- Thing 4: Championing vision, values, & moral courage.
- Thing 5: Raising a ruckus, creating a buzz, driving the narrative, & sharing it all widely.
Shift the Country has the audacious, achievable idea that we can collectively change our country’s trajectory. We need a big pivot – for the 2024 election, and so we can better handle our formidable future after the 2024 election. Together we can catalyze widespread public pressure to move the US toward healthier democracy and away from far-right extremism.
We can get government, institutions, infrastructure, and our economy to better serve all the people of this multi-racial, multi-ethnic democracy – so let’s make that happen. We can demand and create more agile, adaptable, resilient, sustainable, inclusive, and equitable systems so we all have greater chances to survive, prosper, flourish, and thrive in this time of great challenges to the planet, to humanity, and to the US. Together we can grow a coalition of Democrats, independents, and others to leverage the power of the US majority. Together we can empower Americans to vote in overwhelming majorities to overcome structures that protect minority party power so that our democracy works better for the actual majority of us. Together we can be courageous and take creative action to shift the zeitgeist, the conscience, the character, and the reality of this country.
Read or download the entire website as a PDF for more on the design & intention of this work.
Get Involved!
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Invite us to speak! Help grow this shift! If you know of people or groups who can do neat things with the ideas here, please help us get connected. We can do talks, calls, zooms, & training to get the word out. Invite us to speak or to do a workshop. Email [email protected], call (515) 375-9027, or book an appointment to talk as soon as possible. The 2024 election is coming fast.
Get your friends, family, or groups involved...
- Use the TAKE ACTION Substack page with the Big Shift Guide & the Idea Lists – with practical stuff for implementing this shift.
- Volunteer directly with Shift the Country.
- Join twice weekly volunteer Zoom meetings Tuesday evenings & Friday afternoons.
- Join our Community Rising Facebook group.
- Reference the separate Big Shift Framework PDF document of this website for more on the overall approach here.
- Share & amplify this work to help it grow.
- Help expand this work by actively talking about it; by recruiting others; by sharing posts; by engaging with the social media on Facebook, Substack, LinkedIn, and Post; or by connecting this nonprofit with coalitions/groups/influencers and/or big funders.
It’s all connection, community, and collaboration to grow this work using the 5 Thing approach. Together we’ll push to engage with other groups, to join and build coalitions, to do outreach to get more people engaged, and to keep growing more action and attention. Bring your brain and your persistence and help shape what this shift becomes. Shift the Country will help catalyze, nurture, coach, cheer-lead, foment, promote, support, grow, and incite this work at every level as we have the volunteers, capacity, and funding to do so — so give us a holler.
Donate To Help Grow This Shift
This big idea needs cash! The scale, scope, impact, and reach here depend on people willing to invest in this very, very unique work. Contributions to this nonprofit fund day-to-day operations, technology, staff, and advertising capabilities to grow this in serious, aggressive ways to ramp up for the 2024 election season.
Donate here:
- Donate on this website... one time or monthly
- Donate via ActBlue: https://secure.actblue.com/donate/shiftthecountrynow
- Donate via Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/ShiftTheCountry?fan_landing=true
- Substack: Get a paid subscription
- Donate through an Eventbrite event registration
- Donate by mail, payable to: Shift the Country, PO Box 1093, Ames, Iowa 50014
- Most people and organizations are legally able to donate.
- Donations are not tax deductible.
- Shift the Country is a 501(c)(4) nonprofit.
- Organizational fundraising progress is shown for all platforms on the ActBlue page.
Donors considering donations over $5,000 may prefer to send them by mail to the address above, or to reach out to us directly at [email protected] or (202) 556-0317.
This Work Is Designed To Spread Through Media & Social Networks
This shift is messy, synergistic, risky, systems-oriented, & human. The Shift the Country approach is set up to catalyze the spread of action, civic engagement, and public pressure through social networks and media networks both in-real-life (IRL) and online. We can expand permeation and reach into social networks to influence, engage, and inspire voters through volunteering, stories, inspiration, caring, humanity, outrage, advocacy, supportive activities, and a thousand other things including just talking to people we know. The more people we reach, the more fuss we create, the more real-world impact we have… the more we’ll inspire more engagement, more alliances, more voting, more coverage, and deeper change. Then we keep going. We amplify what’s out there, we do more, we share more, we get more courageous, we reach more people, and we make more change.
When we flood all the zones with everything everywhere all at once – the overall volume will create public pressure. At least some of the things we collectively do and share will go viral through exponential spread and amplify the impact, influence, and reach even further. As we ramp up involvement and engagement, we are better able to make change at every level and make very real shift happen. Local or regional areas with heavy activity may be able to make faster or deeper kinds of change. Influencer involvement, news coverage, groups spending ad money on social media, and other amplifying factors can help amp things up even more. The potential for a phenomenon is huge. We can drive amazing stuff. Provoking large-scale action is risky and messy – but so is fascism, so is ignoring climate change, so is watching hate and ignorance spread, so is ignoring history and science, etc. We have options that we haven’t yet tried for this fight. Let’s take those options and go all out.
"Light up the darkness." - Bob Marley
This entire website is also available as a printable PDF via this file.