The site also takes on more personal causes; a growing number of petitions are launched to fight deportations or foreclosures. Kristiane Chappell’s is one that has taken off.
The California resident spent months battling First Mortgage Corp. to prevent the lender from foreclosing on her mother’s home after a spinal injury forced her mother to quit her job as a schoolteacher. Lawmakers and government agencies told Chappell they could not help her, so she decided to take her cause public by launching a petition on Change.org in November.
“The time is just ticking away until mom is once again at risk of losing her home,” Chappell wrote.
She sent the petition to friends, family members and co-workers and received a few hundred signatures in the first weeks. Then she e-mailed Change.org about featuring her campaign on the site.
The staff leapt on the cause, helping her tweak her petition letter to appeal to more people and craft a news release for local media. Within 11 days, the number of signatures jumped from 3,000 to 20,000. The petition now boasts more than 40,000 signatures.
During a strategy call on a recent morning, Chappell briefed Change.org organizer Jessica Kutch on her next big step: hand-delivering the petition to the chief executive of First Mortgage. Kutch offered to reach out to petition-signers who live near Chappell to create a bigger crowd at the event.
“Maybe he’ll want to come out looking like a good guy,” Chappell said of the chief executive. “I feel like it’s worth a try.”
‘Local manifestations’
Over the past year, Change.org has counted 800 victories on issues spanning human rights, education, animal cruelty and criminal justice. Rattray said many of the petitions are “local manifestations of big, national problems” — making it easier to build support and create change. Fixing the foreclosure crisis, for example, is an unwieldy and divisive issue; keeping a disabled schoolteacher in her home seems like a no-brainer.
Rattray is careful to distance the company from any political party, though issues such as gay rights lean to the left of the spectrum. Change.org said it will not provide paid campaigns for organizations that put their own profits over public good. It has separate staffs to work with paying sponsors and members who use the site for free. Sometimes, petitions started by the public conflict with those paid for by sponsors — and the company is okay with that.
“People who want to create positive social change don’t always agree on the best way to do that,” Communications Director Benjamin Joffe-Walt said. “We are very aware of that and are interested in all people finding a home on our platform.”
Rattray said the site’s brand of advocacy is post-partisan and its direction dictated entirely by the site’s users. But eventually, he hopes, the micro-level campaigns will coalesce into broader social change. He points to the civil rights movement of a generation ago, which started not with debate on Capitol Hill but with a woman on a bus or a sit-in at a lunch counter.
That’s the intangible that Rattray wants Change.org to capture, algorithmize and disseminate. This year, his goal is to go beyond winning campaigns.
“How do you go from moments to movements?” he asked.
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