Our Inspiration

In 2018, a woman named Katie Fahey in Grand Rapids Michigan, with a career working in recycling and zero experience in politics, posted on Facebook “I want to end gerrymandering in Michigan. Who wants to help? 😁” The response was overwhelming.

Regular people, almost none of whom had even worked on campaigns before, figured out together how to run a ballot initiative to end gerrymandering in Michigan. 

They looked around at how redistricting was done in states across the country and realized that no one was doing it well. They approached numerous establishment groups and funders and didn’t get support. They were told they didn’t know what they were doing, and should just adopt a model from another state. 

But these regular Michiganders said, “Well we live here, and we don’t like the way things are working, and we want a model that WORKS for our state!” So they wrote a policy, they went out and formed local and state-wide teams across Michigan, and together 4,000 volunteers gathered over 400,000 signatures without paying for a single one. Ultimately, yes, they needed to raise money, but when they had 4,000 volunteers, they said “Look, if each one of us starts a fundraising page and each one of us raises $10 from 10 friends each, we can hit our fundraising goal by the end of the weekend.” And they did it.

We face the same odds.

We take the same approach as Katie and her fellow activists in Michigan did.