I bet you don't have to look hard to find abuse of power in your community.
It might be at your workplace. Your child's school. The park across the street. A factory. A supermarket. Or over in City Hall.
I started this newsletter to help you respond to such abuse with action. Whether it's gathering signatures, holding a protest, or organising a whole campaign.
But sometimes reading isn’t enough. Sometimes it’s all in the doing. And sometimes we need support to get the doing started.
So me and some colleagues at DiEM25 built a programme to provide it. Here's an explainer video in 60 seconds:
Our activism incubator is back
It's called Campaign Accelerator. We've run two successful cycles so far, and now we've opened a third. The deadline for applications is this Monday, November 1.
This isn't a training course. It’s work, on a live activism project. Yours.
Whether you're just thinking about tackling an issue, or you've already developed it... Campaign Accelerator is for you.
For each cycle, we'll choose the three most viable applications. If that's yours, we'll put the resources of DiEM25, the international progressive movement, behind it. Know-how, reach, contacts, the whole thing. To help you design and execute a local action on an issue you care about.
If it succeeds, it could have a real impact. Even in just a few weeks.
And if it doesn't, we'll learn from each other. So we can come back stronger in the future.
Always, proudly, in beta
Campaign Accelerator is an experiment. I don’t think anything like it exists.
Here's a detailed write-up I made of the programme, that explains our thinking behind it:
Introducing Campaign Accelerator
A new project I’m working on to support targeted, local, grassroots campaigns.
Mehran Khalili
Confronting power locally – across Europe
Since we started Campaign Accelerator, we’ve worked on projects to:
- Block the construction of Yet Another Mall in Porto
- Stop arms companies running schools in a region of the UK
- Ensure a sustainable development model for a beautiful area in Northern Greece
- Prevent a historical monument in Llubjana from becoming a closed private space for the rich
- Reunite a young Eritrean refugee family, stuck in legal limbo in Cairo, with their father in Germany
- Save a piece of Portugal’s natural beauty from private development
These projects made progress. But the last one made a real impact. I wrote about how we did it, and recorded a video presentation that takes you through the project.
Add your issue to the list
Here's what you need to apply for Campaign Accelerator:
- A fire in the belly to work on a local issue
- A DiEM25 membership. It takes a few minutes, and costs as low as 5 EUR. If you can’t afford the fee you can get an exemption. No questions asked.
That’s it.
Bonus question to get you started: What would you do, even if you knew you’d fail? Do that :).
The deadline: this Monday, November 1. And the link again to apply.