I want to talk about how people around the
world are starting social movements in fundamentally
different ways than we used to.
Earlier today we talked about the tragedies
that are happening in townships in Cape Town,
South Africa on a weekly basis.
A few years ago there was a woman who was
walking down the street in Cape Town and she
gets grabbed and thrown into a shack and raped
and almost killed.
And the reason is she's a lesbian woman and
the man was trying to turn her straight.
This happens several times a week in Cape
Town alone.
It's been happening for decades, but this
time it was different, and the reason it was
different is this woman, Ndumie Funda, who
is friends with that woman, whose own partner
had been raped in the same way, and she decided
to stand up.
She did this very curious thing.
She went to an Internet cafe in Cape Town
and started a petition on Change.org asking
the minister of justice of South Africa to
take the issue seriously.
What happened next was amazing.
Over 100,000 people from 150 countries took
action in the first few days, national media
exposure, then international.
The public television station took the minister
of justice on TV, interrogated him.
Ndumie then took the people who joined the
campaign, mobilized offline, all organized
in front of Parliament, and after weeks of
campaigning, after decades ignoring the issue,
the minister of justice of South Africa appointed
a national taskforce to investigate and to
stop the incidents of corruptive rape in that
country.
Amazing story, but injustice overcome.
And Ndumie represents what may be one of the
most structurally disempowered people on earth.
She's an impoverished, black, lesbian woman
in a township in South Africa and she ran
what is one of the most effective campaigns
in her country this decade.
Incredible.
Historically it's been extremely difficult
to organize with other people around common
interests.
Huge amounts of time, resources, and because
of those barriers it strictly limited the
number of social movements that could be born.
But we live in a very different time.
She started a campaign online and mobilized
millions of people together of a like mind.
What's exciting about this is it's leading
to hundreds of thousands of campaigns.
Ndumie's story is inspiring.
What's more incredible, the number of campaigns
that are being launched every single day.
From women in Saudi Arabia fighting for the
right to drive, there are people in India
fighting local corruption and winning every
single day.
It's not just there's an increasing number
of campaigns; they look different than what
we're used to in two important ways.
First is because there's sort of individuals
instead of organizations, they're rooted in
personal stories.
They tend to transcend abstract ideas and
issues and resonate in very intimate, personal
ways.
Ndumie, the power of her campaign was largely
a function of that personal story, and we
see this every single day.
One of my favorite examples of this over the
past year, some of you may remember, Bank
of America passes a new policy for a five-dollar
fee per month to use their own bank card,
last fall.
A lot of people were frustrated, but they
were chaotic, disorganized.
And it was this woman, Molly Katchpole, a
part-time nanny with two jobs facing a financial
hardship, that starts a petition on Change.org
asking Bank of America to end the five-dollar
fee, and 300,000 people joined her the next
few weeks.
She's all over the media, she's on ABC, CNN,
NBC.
She then organizes people offline, people
pulling money out of Bank of America.
And after weeks of being a permanent fixture
in public media, Bank of America decides to
eliminate the five-dollar fee, as do all other
national banks considering them.
There are lots of public interest groups trying
to do something similar, but the story of
Molly is what resonated with large groups
of people.
It's way it spread virally online, it's why
it got media exposure and that's why it helped
a recent college graduate change a policy
of one of the largest banks in the country.
So the second thing we're noticing that's
especially unique and different from traditional
movements is that rather than being big national
campaigns, they're often small, particular
and specific and by virtue of that winnable.
And one of my favorite examples of this, this
is Abby Goldstein.
Abby is an eighth grader in Graysville, Illinois.
And Abby for an eighth grade project decided
she wanted to eliminate plastic in town, so
she starts by asking her city council to pass
a tax on plastic bags.
And in a brilliant move of marketing, the
plastics industry literally passes a state-based
law to make it illegal to pass a tax on plastic
bags in municipalities.
A brilliant move.
But Abby wasn't deterred.
She had seen people like Molly before.
She starts a campaign asking the governor
of her state to veto the bill.
She had 100,000 people join her and after
being on all the media and CNN, four Saturdays
ago the governor of her state calls her on
her home phone line, home phone line, and
says, "I thank you for your inspiring campaign
and I'm going to veto the bill."
Incredible.
You might think this is a small specific example
that's going to end up with less plastic in
a specific city in America, but the story
doesn't end there because her campaign has
inspired kids across the country to start
their own campaigns around plastic bags, starting
from one to dozens to soon hundreds.
And that dynamic, the dynamic of starting
specific small campaigns that inspire many
others that lead to bigger change is what
we're seeing is so exciting.
It's happening for almost every national issue.
President Clinton was talking earlier today
about this tragedy where tens of thousands
of people, undocumented students in America,
who often come to the country when they're
young, don't even know they're not documented
until they graduate from college and apply
for federal student loans and are getting
deported from this country.
So a big effort around national policy to
change this, but it's also happening very
locally because classmates of those kids are
starting individual petitions asking their
own individual friends to stop being deported,
and it's winning every single day.
One and then dozens and now hundreds.
And this is how social movements and people-powered
change starts, from the ground up, and from
13-year-olds.
The impact this is having that I'm most excited
about, it's not just direct change that it's
making, it's changing culture.
One of the biggest impediments to social change
is people's belief that they can't make a
difference because every single example they've
seen in the past demonstrates that tragic
reality, but that is now one example after
example, changing people's minds of what may
be possible.
When Ndumie started her campaign two years
ago, when a thousand petitions started a month
on Change.org and about a million users, and
now it's more than 25,000 campaigns every
month, more than 25,000 users and increasing
at accelerating rates.
The reason is every victory that happens spawns
and inspires more victories, many of those
win, inspire more, and a virtuous cycle of
civic participation.
My favorite example perhaps for today is this
amazing campaign where about a few months
ago these three 16-year-old girls from Montclair,
New Jersey.
And they see in civic class there hasn't been
a female moderator of a presidential debate
in 20 years.
For vice presidential, but not presidential.
And they're outraged and instead of writing
a paper about it they see Molly and start
a campaign and they ask the Presidential Debate
Commission to accept a female moderator for
the first time in 20 years.
And what happens after is amazing and almost
now predictable.
100,000 people join.
It appears that many other people are similarly
outraged.
They go down to D.C., they protest in front
of the Debate Commission and two weeks later
the Presidential Debate Commission asks the
first woman in 20 years to moderate a presidential
debate, Candy Crowley on CNN tonight, because
of these girls.
Inspiring, inspiring campaign.
So what does the world look like when that's
possible?
It means that everyday people have more power
than ever before in all of history.
It means that governments and companies now
have to think twice because they recognize
that people have the tools and the power to
hold them accountable.
It means that anyone anywhere can start a
movement.
And that's a world that I want to live in.
And I < hope you do too because it's here
and <it's only just beginning.
