The Engage Network is a learning laboratory for small groups that change the world. It is a best practices model for community empowerment and civic engagement that prioritizes people taking care of one another while also being passionate social change agents.

The Engage Network Story...

As with many of the world’s greatest endeavors, the Engage Network began with a group of women sitting around a kitchen table. Our job was to figure out the best way to take a major Hollywood film about Julia Butterfly Hill and ensure that it didn’t simply inspire or inform, but would mobilize people into action over thelong haul. We knew the answer was not creating yet another email list, website or petition to sign.

We spent a year in research & development finding the best ways to engage people over the long term. We studied everything from the cutting-edge thinking about decentralized networks that Ori Brafman wrote about in his book, The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations, to Howard Dean’s unprecedented presidential campaign, pulling lessons from union organizing, the civil rights movement and hundreds of other movements for change both “offline” and “online”, many of which are part of our strategy today.

However, it was our adventures into some of the leading Christian megachurches and their heavily influential international networks that revolutionized our thinking the most. In fact, these Christian networks were responsible for 40%of George Bush’s votes in 2004.

In one megachurch network we studied, churches are trained on how to successfully build small groups that both take care of their members on a personal level while making widespread social, environmental and political change on a national and global level. In a typical church, a small circle might bring a sick member soup when that member is ill.

In one large church we studied, 3,000 of these small circles joined together to feed an entire county of homeless people 3 meals a day for over a month.We learned from this research, and further illuminated by studies from the Saguaro Seminar and Harvard University, that taking care of people’s personal needs leads to their ongoing political and social engagement.

About   -   Who We Are   -  Background & History  -  Julia Butterfly Hill