Building the Evolver Social Movement as Membership Organization

Here's my initial blog post soliciting comment on the idea of developing a paid membership, along with maintaining free access to the site.

Last year, we launched the Evolver Regionals and the monthly event program, Evolver Spores. As many as 40 or 50 towns and cities have held Evolver events in the short time since this began, and some have developed sizable communities.We have discovered a real hunger among people to come together and begin to form local communities that express an alternative culture, based on ecological values and an interest in advancing consciousness. The main thing that has held back the development of this movement has been lack of funds. Perhaps naively, we have been pursuing investment through the traditional channels, hoping we would find investors who understood the importance, and ultimate value, of this project. Our most recent attempt in this regard led to an unfortunate episode which has gained much comment and attention.

While we will continue to pursue investment as necessary, we realize that the time has come to make a direct appeal to the community. If enough people are willing to pay modest membership dues, we will no longer be forced to wait to implement and execute our strategies. We plan to expand the Evolver Regionals and develop the Evolver Social Movement as a counter-force to the current corporate culture. At the same time, we will produce and disseminate media that supports a new paradigm of engagement.

We believe that the current political system has shown itself to be incapable of real reform. We are witnessing the slow motion collapse of our society, our political and financial system. The inertia of the government has been revealed by the failure of “Brand Obama.” Despite so much hope and hype, the current adminstration has failed to make a major impact in disastrous US policies, to stop the wars, to check corporate power, to address the injustices of the financial system, to confront the issue of climate change, and so on. If the government has failed us, the only available alternative is that people organize themselves outside of the political system – that we build a “people’s democracy” in opposition to the corporate plutocracy that currently holds power.

Any large group of people sharing the same ideas and intentions represents a political force. In a time of crisis and turbulence, a relatively small number of people who are unified can have a very significant effect on the direction of society. We are in such a crisis, one that we expect to get far deeper in the next few years. As this crisis deepens, there exists a tremendous opportunity to bring about a transformation of values and ideas, culture and consciousness.

The intention of the Evolver Social Movement is to work toward an orchestrated uprising of the human spirit against those forces that seek to control and imprison it. The basic principles and goals of the Evolver Social Movement include the following:

Self-sufficiency and local resilience
People’s democracy: direct decisionmaking as opposed to remote-control rule
Creative and personal freedom within the context of ecological and social responsibility
Freedom of self-determination of consciousness
Bring an end to the dominance of the corporate military complex
Undo the poisoning of air, land, and sea by applying techniques of ecological design
Reduce and ultimately eliminate inequity by transforming the monetary system
Reconnection with nature and support for local knowledge and indigenous ways
Innovations in science and technology mediated by actual needs of civil society
Nonviolence: global peace as an end goal

We don’t know if any of these goals are achievable during our present lifetime. Some of them – such as remediating the pollution that has damaged the biosphere – will require a commitment of many generations. We do know that the pace of change continues to increase. When we explore recent discoveries in sciences ranging from physics to biology, there are good reasons to believe that a quantum jump in the awareness and habitual behavior of our species is possible, perhaps even inevitable.

The obvious question is how to achieve such lofty goals and principles, which are shared by many, in a rapid timeframe?

We believe that the answer to that question involves utilizing the power of social networks and social media to connect people, educate them, and bring them together in an organizing infrastructure, the Evolver Social Movement.

All money collected through the Evolver Social Movement membership will go directly to help build the movement, in the following ways:

Salaries – minimal staff required to coordinate the movement, support the development of regional groups, to produce media content, to organize events and conferences, etc.

Technology costs – we intend to augment and develop Evolver.net, adding a barter system and alternative currency hub, plus recommendation systems that will help people find the projects

Marketing and promotion – Developing the Evolver Social Movement requires continual outreach to new communities, from ghetto minorities to rural Christians. We hope to produce promotional videos and shows that help to carry the Evolver message far and wide.

Evolver Regionals – Given funds, we will be able to support local Evolver Regionals in their efforts. As the Evolver Social Movement develops, some disbursement of funds collected as membership dues will be decided upon by the Evolver membership community, who will have the opportunity to review and vote on projects through Evolver.net . We will keep the financial operations of the Evolver Social Movement as transparent as possible. Ultimately, we hope to convert our members into shareholders.

Additionally, the Evolver Social Movement intends to develop the Evolver Membership Card, a commerce platform and discount program that will offer members a range of low-cost goods and local services that augment and improve their lives. The Evolver Membership Card will also be a great outreach tool, as it can potentially bring in a much larger demographic – people who are at first uncertain about the deeper intent of Evolver, but immediately respond to a commercial inducement that has tangible benefits for them as consumers.