Daily Calls Start Weds. Dec. 28! Time To Ramp This Shift Up

Announcing 39 Event Sign-Ups On Possibly The Worst Day Of The Year For Announcements

It may be the worst possible moment of the year to make a big announcement, but we’re planning to do unprecedented, unusual stuff anyway. We’ll all need to, in this unprecedented time in this country.

Shift the Country is announcing the start of daily Shift-Building & Brainstorming Zoom Calls, beginning Wednesday, December 28. Times will vary daily to catch different time zones and schedules.

We’ve got 39 daily Zoom calls scheduled already — that gets us from next week to early February. Join in when it works. Every call will build on what we got done or talked about the day before.

These are basically working calls with whoever shows up… and places for connection, community, and coalition-building. We're brainstorming, putting ideas together, figuring out how to make them work, and going about doing that. Join us.

The idea here is to work together to build this new work to help us all navigate instability, to revitalize the democracy, and to change our country’s trajectory.

We want to take everything that’s already been done and built to get this democracy this far — and take it all to whole new levels. All the organizing, all the ideas, all the groups… all the everything. We need more, and we can grow it.

We can energize a coalition of the majority of Democrats, independent voters, and ex-Republicans into a more coordinated, larger movement and phenomenon like those that have successfully countered authoritarianism in other countries.

We can collectively counter fascism, hatred, bigotry, intolerance, and extremism while we’re at it. 

We can advocate and fight differently for the country we wish to see in the world; for the shift we want to see.

The Shift the Country approach is based on these 5 Things we can to do change our trajectory:

• Thing 1:  Connect With People.

• Thing 2:  Do More With Community & Coalitions.

• Thing 3:  Involve Businesses Through Partnerships & Pressure.

• Thing 4:  Champion Vision, Values, & Moral Courage.

• Thing 5:  Drive the Narrative, Create a Buzz, & Spread It Everywhere.

Daily calls will involve work on any or all of these areas… figuring out how we can grow this shift, building coalitions, and working outward from whatever we start.

Lots of political, activism, and organizing work comes pre-set, with easy steps. I’d argue that we’ve come a long way with that… but that we need to evolve and do new stuff. Bring new pressure. Raise more ruckus. Create more kerfuffle. Drive more of the narrative.

We can do all that and more — but it’s not going to be clean, easy, or neat… with nice, easy, comfortable steps.

We’re going to need to chart new territory, make shift up, get creative, fuse stuff together, evolve our ideas, leverage technology, leverage our connections, do more with coalitions and community, get more attention, get louder, share more stories, show more courage, and so on. It’s going to be messy, organic, wild, and unpredictable… but also super cool.

We will need your brain, and the brains of any of the awesome people you can bring into this work. Share this post. Bring folks into this work. Sign up to volunteer. Subscribe to this Substack if you haven’t.

We need big ideas and big synergy. We need teamwork and collaboration and flexibility. It’s time for big vision. We can’t just work against hate and bigotry and going backwards. We also need to chart a brilliant future that zillions of Americans can get on board with.

Politics as usual is deadlocked and atrophied. The culture war and the growing extremist movement that is the current Republican party are bringing unprecedented threats to humans and to this democracy.

The thing is… the majority of us want the democracy. We have democracy to protect and enable the vulnerable and oppressed from the strong, the powerful, the wealthy, and the lawless. We need to fight differently to keep it. We haven’t been, but we can. That’s what Shift the Country intends to do with these events.

Join us.

Oh — and this shift can’t grow on oxygen. We’re kicking of a $10,000 fundraising push. We need cash to make this work — for people and tech to run it, and for us to run ads to grow it and bring more people in. Donate on the website or donate on our shiny new ActBlue account. Paid subscriptions to our Substack also help.

Keep the faith — in each other, and in this democracy. We’ve held it together so far. Now we take it to the next level.

We absolutely can… so let’s get going.