To see websites by Action Mill members, click here.

Turn Your Back on Bush

Launched as the final results were being tallied on the night of the 2004 presidential election, Turn Your Back on Bush began as a call for a symbolic direct action to challenge the President’s claim to a mandate on Inauguration Day. Soon after launching the site, we had interest from people wanting to organize their communities to participate across the country. Our work included recruiting and training state organizers who brought thousands of citizens from over 47 states and also developed their own media and fundraising efforts with our training and support. We also built alliances with other groups, like Iraq Veterans Against the War, so that we could help them amplify their voices at this critical time. We organized through the website, email, conference calls, text messaging systems, postcards and direct meetings with other groups, and trained a 15-person all-volunteer staff to coordinate the action. On inauguration day, 5000 people participated along the parade route, and simultaneous actions were held in Brussels, London and Mexico City. Coverage of the action started months before inauguration day, with articles about local organizers, coverage by the AP and CNN, and a mention on Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update. We embedded reporters on buses coming from around the country, and wound up with thousands of articles about participants in the weeks following the action. Jethro Heiko, one of our founders, provided commentary about inauguration day on the BBC, and The Onion parodied the action on the front page of the next week’s paper. Turn Your Back on Bush started with two people and a website, but the final action would not have been possible without the help of Abernathy and Associates, which managed our press relations and donated office space, SmartMeme, which helped us with strategic planning, messaging, and organizing, the hundreds of volunteers who took this idea and made it theirs, and especially our volunteer staff in DC. You can learn more about the Turn Your Back on Bush action at www.TurnYourBackonBush.org

America Stands Watch

America Stands Watch is an anti-war action designed to remove the barriers between the public and Congress by bringing citizens inside the House and Senate chambers on the day that the Congress reconvened after their summer break in 2007. Once inside, a signal was given by a group of Iraq war veterans, and the rest of the participants rose up together and stood watch over Congress to let them know that we expect them to take action to bring this war to and end. You can find more information at AmericaStandsWatch.org.

Enough Fear

The Enough Fear campaign is an international effort to prevent war between the US and Iran. We are collecting photos of Americans and Iranians on this website to demonstrate our solidarity in this cause. In late 2007, the Enough Fear campaign began holding a series of events in public spaces in the US where people are invited to use red, old-fashioned phones to talk directly to volunteers in Iran. This campaign has been covered extensively in both the US and Iran, and was the subject of a recent New Yorker article. For more information on this campaign go to EnoughFear.org.

Bring Them Home Now Tour

In August, 2005, Gold Star Families for Peace, Military Families Speak Out, Veterans for Peace and Iraq Veterans Against the War joined forces to sit vigil outside Bush’s ranch in Crawford Texas. It was a historic undertaking that many credit for undermining Bush’s second term agenda and bringing the War on Iraq home to the US in ways that were to that point unprecedented. In late August, the four groups decided to take their show on the road and toured 51 cities in 21 days traveling from Texas to Washington, DC via three different routes in order to share their stories with citizens around the country. The Bring Them Home Now Tour hired the Action Mill to help develop their website and provide organizing and strategic support. Our work enabled citizens and the media to follow the tour step by step without actually being on the bus.

HomeFromIraqNow.org

Following the Bring Them Home Now Tour, we jumped into a unique petition-drive to work to end the war through a Massachusetts ballot question. Our client, HomeFromIraqNow.org had a novel approach, but was also getting started late. We developed a dynamic website and an strategy do traditional, volunteer-based signature collection as well as tools for decentralized internet-based effort. We built a state-wide, county-by-country organizing plan that was successful in increasing the signature collection but ultimately, the campaign was unsuccessful in collecting the required signatures to get the question on the ballot.

ACE’s Boston Bus Marathon

Besides designing and developing the new ACE website the Action Mill helped ACE develop the Bus Marathon action. The Bus Marathon concept is an exciting and model effort to demonstrate transit inequity that is common in our cities.

Action Storm

The Action Mill is committed to keeping our ideas fresh and sharing what we are doing with our allies and supporters. We engage in weekly online brainstorming to build our creative action muscles. These action storms lead to ideas for actions and potential campaigns, ongoing efforts and work with clients and collaborators.

Don’t Think of a Donkey

To this point, the Don’t Think of a Donkey project has been an informal effort to provoke the world of philanthropy and progressive donor networks to evaluate existing approaches to funding social and political change and commit more dollars to community organizing, direct action and movement building. We hope in the future to expand this effort into a strategic effort that would include interviews with movement builders and organizers around the country to increase the understanding of the role that funding (or lack of funding) plays in our movements.