Dear Amazing Avaazers,
It feels like everything is happening exponentially.
In the last 30 days, our community has grown by 2.5 million people. We were already the largest political web movement ever, and yet we're growing faster than anyone has seen before! We're taking more actions, winning more victories, donating more and generating thousands more media hits in one month than we used to in a year. It's thrilling, even a little scary, especially when we see that the pace is still accelerating…
Just to give a snapshot of the last few weeks —
- 5 million of us stood up to the ACTA and SOPA internet censorship bills, helping to put SOPA on ice, and putting ACTA under threat, with the President of the European Parliament and Germany, Poland and many other countries reconsidering their positions.
- we smuggled $1.8 million worth of medical supplies into Syria when no one else could, and raised $1.5 million more in donations, while our citizen journalists provided much of the world media's information and images.
- we generated thousands of news articles on 20 different campaigns.
- our sex trafficking hotline generated information that will result in a major set of arrests this week (can't say which country yet).
- we raised over 4 million dollars/euros/yen online to supercharge our work, and are growing our staff team like mad to keep up with the need.
- we ran over 40 campaigns, took over 10 million actions and told 25 million friends about campaigns we care about, on everything from deforestation in Brazil to the Murdoch scandal in the UK — and made a serious impact on many of these.
If all that wasn't enough, we're about to launch a couple of big projects (stay tuned) that will take our community to a whole NEW level!
It's a thrilling privilege to serve this amazing community, and while the challenges we face are growing, the surge of spirited people rising to meet these challenges is growing even faster and stronger. We've come together and built something special, and it's taking off. Let's shoot for the stars.
With hope and excitement,
Ricken, Stephanie, Wen, Emma, Wissam, Veronique, Heather and the entire Avaaz team
PS – here's some recent features on our community in the Economist, Times and Guardian. And here's a radio piece by NPR on our work in Syria, and an LA Times article on our Internet freedom campaign.
