GetCourageNow is a free, mobile friendly, open source, volunteer recruitment app that aims to help climate justice campaigns to organize and commit strikers on a mass scale.
We use simple recruitment strategies, along with proven psychological motivators, to increase participation rates in climate actions within partnering organizations. We do this because we care about the fate of our planet and all beings that call it home.
The key principles behind GetCourageNow are:
Solution and Efficiency Focussed: Based on the research of Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan, we believe that mass civil resistance in support of climate justice is now the best option we have of saving the planet. It would require far fewer people and be far less challenging than totally overthrowing and replacing existing governments that are doing the damage. However this would require more advanced organizing technology to recruit, commit, cleverly organize, and support the numbers needed to succeed, that’s where we come in.
One-Stop Shop: GetCourageNow makes it easy for anyone seeking a progressive solution to find the campaign and action or role that best fits their capacities, skills, limitations, and other preferences. Based on Sound Tactics and Advanced Tech: All the components of our app have been carefully thought out by our talented team to give users the best experience and increase the success of climate actions.
Free: Anyone can use these services to get involved and help save the planet. Secure: GetCourageNow will serve as a platform for advancing TLS security best practices. All users data and communication through the app will be stored securely within the app, keeping your info safe from the bad guys.
Open: The automatic issuance and renewal protocol will be published as an open standard that others can adopt. Cooperative: We work with campaign partners to ensure the best possible outcomes for climate actions, activists, and their supporters.
See HOW WINWISLEY WORKS for more info.
More about how the GetCourageNow idea came about:
Gary Krane, the co-founder and chief psychologist of GetCourageNow came up with the first part of the idea in 2016 while was watching Bill McKibben (founder of 350.org) , Michael Brune (ED of Sierra Club) and actor, Daryl Hannah get arrested at the White House protesting the XL pipeline. He thought, “I wish I had been there. So, where is the next opportunity to do direct action to stop this horrific pipeline?”
He started searching online to find the next action he could join. Ninety frustrating and unproductive minutes later he thought “we need an easy one-stop-shop where people can quickly find a campaign about what angers them most, get the most important details about that campaign, and give them the choice of how they can best help.”
He came up with the kickstarter applied to organizing or “crowdacting” idea shortly after talking to one of the top people at the SierraClub, national office, in SF, who when asked, “What’s it going to take to stop this catastrophic trajectory?, ” the Sierra Club exec responded, “With the forces arrayed against us in the oil industry and extrapolating from the Civil Rights movement, the anti Viet Nam war movement and other movements, probably nothing less than one million people willing to risk arrest to stop the construction of these pipelines, and at least double that willing to do conventional organizing.” To recruit those kinds of numbers, and as an experienced organizer and also PhD psychologist, he realized that “fear of wasting my time if we lose,” was one of the key barriers and that a “Kickstarter” solution could possibly address:
Drawing on his PhD training in psychology and his user testing work as the lead cofounder and CEO of CoupleWise.com, he confirmed that the key barrier organizations face in recruiting much larger numbers is the fear most potential volunteers have of losing—that their commitment of time and energy (and/or getting arrested) will be for naught. This lead to the epiphany that the concept behind Kickstarter could be applied to action, not just money! A crowdfunding-type platform like Kickstarter could be used to recruit all kinds of action resources, from risking arrest doing nonviolent direct action, to joining a city or state or even nation wide strike as well as knocking on several hundred doors on a weekend to get a progressive elected, if the user was given the power to make a conditional commitment—to say, for example that they would be willing to join in this or that courageous action if and only X or y or Z numbers of others were willing to do the same.