How It Works

Our journey began before member #1

We began this journey with the generous support of our Founders who have donated exactly $1,000 each. Some wanted to give more, so we decided to treat any individual’s support of more than $1,000 as an interest-free loan which will be repaid to them once our financial resources will allow it. We further decided to limit the amount of such loans to a maximum of $9,000 per person.

Those decisions were made early in our formation so that we would never be influenced by large donors or other types of benefactors. We will not accept any free goods, services or cash donations from any corporation and we pay the prevailing rates for all outside products and services we procure. We are committed to transparency in all of our finances and will make our quarterly financial reports available to you online. We are still accepting funds from new Founders so please click here to let us know you are interested.

Each of our members pays $9.95 per month to Wethepeople.org, Inc., our 501(c)4 nonprofit corporation.  While our member base is still small, most of our operating expenses are paid from the donations received from Founders. But over time, the member base will grow to a substantial monthly income stream and we will increase our operating expenses to fulfill our mission as the people’s voice in Washington. We hope to attract at least 2 million members within the next 5 years. 

On our way to 10,000 members

In this earliest growth phase, our financial resources remain limited. We will have hired a small full-time staff while making extensive use of part-time contractors and volunteers. We’ll operate this website, build out our IT infrastructure for information delivery to and from our members, sign up as many members as we can and publish a weekly email and blog post to keep our members and email followers up-to-date on our progress and current member count.

Our outreach during this crucial period will consist of identifying social media influencers from across the geographic, political and socioeconomic spectrum that are thoughtfully selected to make sure our member base grows in an inclusive and balanced manner. 

We will also begin soliciting ideas and feedback from our members in five broad categories of public policy;

• Domestic and Foreign Policy
• Healthcare, Wellness & Pharmaceuticals
• Sustainability and the Environment
• Privacy, Technology, Education & Internet 
• Taxation, Finance and Banking 

We’ll form a working group of volunteer members for each of these categories who bring us domain knowledge and leadership. We’ll reach out to established public policy research organizations to form alliances and gain access to their work.

Once we reach 10,000 members

Once we’ve reached 10,000 members, we will have convened the first formal meetings of our working groups to prioritize and refine our public policy positions. Each of these will be put to a separate vote to our membership and only the initiatives that receive a supermajority (>67%) of  support will advance to the active phase.

When an initiative is deemed to be active, it will have an assigned internal advocate and receive monthly budget dollars to advance it in Washington. We will want some early victories, so we’ll limit the scope of these early initiatives to ones that we can realistically accomplish with the resource constraints we are operating under at the time.

Our weekly email reporting will include a regular progress report on our active initiatives and our efforts to expand this list of organizational activities. Each of our working groups will grow in scope over time and will divide into two or more sub-groups once we have the administrative capacity to handle that expansion.

When we exceed 100,000 members

Once we reach this critical growth milestone, we’ll form our Super PAC which will give us the ability to influence federal elections through targeted media buys in support of candidates which can best advance our public policy platforms. By this time, we’ll have our own full-time ‘feet on the ground’ in Washington as well as an office there.