Our History & Background

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 advantage of an upcoming major Hollywood film about Julia Butterfly Hill and ensure that people weren't just inspired or informed, but mobilized into action over the long haul. We knew the answer was not just to create another email list, website or petition.

We spent a year conducting extensive research in order to find 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, to pulling lessons from union organizing, the civil rights movement and hundreds of other movements for change—both "offline" and "online". Many of these sources inform our strategy today.

However, it was some of the leading Christian megachurches, and their heavily influential international networks, that revolutionized our thinking the most. Evangelical Christian networks are so influential that they 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 soup to a group member 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.

From this research, and from studies from the Saguaro Seminar and Harvard University, we learned that taking care of people’s personal needs leads to their ongoing political and social engagement.

The Engage Network was founded to train leaders to create self-replicating small groups that take both care of people and change the world at the same time. We are a best practices model, strategically partnering with some of today’s leading social champions, organizations and networks.

Influences & Inspiration

We draw strategy from hundreds of environmental and social change organizations, corporations, online and offline networks, political campaigns, churches, spiritual centers and more. Highlights from our extensive list of resources are listed below.