The Harry Potter Alliance Celebrates 15th Birthday!
We’re 14 regular years and 1 pandemic year old!
This week marks a major milestone for our fan-led nonprofit: we’re 15-years-old! To mark the day, we’re sending out birthday presents to everyone who donates at least $15 — but we’ll get to that in a minute.
When the HPA started in 2005, we had a simple mission: to help fans use their passion and energy to do good. We wanted to find a way to channel activism into fans’ everyday lives and to make being an activist something that felt fun, heroic, and sustainable.
We had no idea how important that would become.
In 2020, the need for fun, heroic, sustainable activism has come to the forefront like never before. Our health and our communities face unprecedented challenges. Our democracy is openly under threat. Our minds are weary and our hearts need hope.
Throughout these dark times, the HPA has remembered to turn on the light.
Over 15 years, we’ve accomplished incredible things. We’ve donated more than 400,000 books worldwide and built libraries in three countries. We fought for Harry Potter chocolates to be fair trade — and we won! We’ve registered thousands of voters, advocated for LGBTQ+ rights, and created a community of first-time activists who are working to change the world.
In 2020, we’ve never backed down. When the pandemic hit in March, we created one of the first large scale, on-the-fly virtual conventions: Small Things Con, an event that trained and supported more than 700 young people.
Over the summer, we threw ourselves into advocating for immigrants, completing over 650 actions to reunite families and working with Never Again Action to #FloodICE with thousands of applications to disrupt their vigilante Citizen’s Academy. What’s more, we hosted the largest ever Granger Leadership Academy — our virtual Camp GLA — which trained 340 wizard activists in key community organizing skills.
Now, those trainees are putting their skills into action: this Fall, we’ve connected with more than 37,000 young voters to make sure they know where, when, and how to vote in 2020. We launched our weekly action guides for chapters, making it easier than ever for Chapter Organizers to plan and execute magical, impactful actions. We launched a new Voting with Wonder Woman Toolkit with actress Lynda Carter that has been accessed by more than 2,500 fans to date. Next week, we’re hosting our biggest GOTV event of the year, Fall into Democracy, a weekend filled with action, hope, community, and yes, pumpkin spice!
And we’ve done all of this while speaking out repeatedly against J.K. Rowling’s harmful, anti-trans bigotry and making sure that transgender fans know they are valid, welcome, and loved.
We don’t know what the future holds, but we do know this: the world needs a new story and fan activists will write it. Fan activists are passionate, empathetic, imaginative, and hopeful. When we give them a place to come together, they seize the opportunity to become heroes.
So this month, for our 15th birthday, we’re asking our supporters to donate $15. As a thank you, we’ll send everyone who donates at least $15 their very own Granger/Lovegood 2020 pin — the last of their kind, just in time for the U.S. election.
And we hope, of course, that you’ll take today to celebrate. The last year — the last 15 years — couldn’t happen without you.
Happy birthday, Wizard Activists.
Love,
The HPA
