People have Facebook and LinkedIn to manage their social and professional lives. Now more than ever, people need a place to manage their political lives.

Our Mission:

Fix our broken political process by dramatically increasing volunteer engagement.

Our Vision:

A nation-wide movement of progressive volunteers working to fight for our rights, advocate for issues and completely revitalize our campaign process from the ground up.

Our Plan:

Provide a simple solution that could help solve some of our biggest systemic problems.

FOR INDIVIDUALS: UpRise will be a social network platform they can use to organize their political lives: to find, sign up for and instigate real-world actions on behalf of candidates and issues.

FOR CANDIDATES AND CAUSES: UpRise will provide a place to recruit new volunteers and the volunteer coordination tools they need to create effective and highly professional campaigns.

The Progressive Movement: Overcoming Systemic Barriers

By creating a secure place where the individual volunteer is the focus, we can help solve major problems that have held back the progressive movement and caused us to lose campaign after campaign.

We think we can’t run effective campaigns without big money and a big advertising budget.

In the past, running a “grassroots” campaign meant running a disorganized and unprofessional one. With UpRise, people will be able to run professional quality campaigns based on volunteer participation and word-of-mouth outreach, which are cheaper and far more effective than broadcast advertising.

Dependence on donors makes it hard for elected officials to enact progressive laws.

We may not be able to stop the flow of big money into politics, but we can free our candidates from being dependent on it by giving them a viable alternative — and we can do it without passing new laws or overturning court decisions.

Our campaign process is too top-down and controlled by people with a financial stake in keeping them expensive.

UpRise will help local candidates, campaigns and party committees build a stronger and more skilled volunteer base. Instead of cookie-cutter campaigns, candidates can be themselves and run campaigns that fit their communities and are more responsive to feedback.

We are plagued by infighting over resources, strategic approaches and issue priorities.

In UpRise, the individual volunteer makes their own decisions. Different groups can offer different options and volunteers will choose as they see fit. Everybody gets help. By putting the volunteer first, we all win.

UpRise is a Social Purpose Corporation founded by artificial intelligence pioneer, Nelson Morgan and political strategist and volunteer advocate, Antonia Scatton.

A Social Purpose Corporation is bound by its charter to serve its stated social purpose as opposed to creating profit for its shareholders. We chose this form over the traditional non-profit, as traditional non-profits, PACs and other associations are legally barred from interacting directly with political campaigns. As an SPC, we can legally interact with campaigns.

Image by Jonathan Eyler-Werve (Women’s March, January 21 2017, Chicago) [CC BY 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons