About The Harry Potter Alliance

The Harry Potter Alliance (HPA) uses parallels from Harry Potter to inspire hundreds of thousands of Harry Potter fans to act as heroes in our world. The HPA has sent five cargo planes to Haiti, donated over 88,000 books across the world, and has made signi!cant contributions to the anti-genocide, LGBTQ equality, environmental, and media reform movements. Currently the organization is in discussion with the CEO of Warner Bros. to make all Harry Potter chocolate Fair Trade.

The HPA has a staff of over 60 volunteers, more than 85 chapters, and a network that reaches well over one million people. With social media as its turf, in 2010, it won the $250,000 first place prize in the Chase Bank Community Challenge. It has received media coverage from almost every major publication in the United States and many throughout the world. Introducing Imagine Better

The HPA is in the midst of expanding its model to go far beyond Harry Potter through a new organization called “Imagine Better.” Through Imagine Better the HPA is bringing together fan communities of blockbuster movies, books, television shows, YouTube celebrities, Twitterers and best-selling authors in an unprecedented network that takes a grassroots approach to harnessing the energy of social media, popular culture, and modern mythology for social change.

In Imagine Better the theory of social change used is “cultural acupuncture.” As HPA Executive Director Andrew Slack writes in the Huffington Post, “cultural acupuncture is !nding where the psychological energy is in the culture, and moving that energy towards creating a healthier world.” The University of Southern California’s Annenberg School of Communication has hailed the HPA’s work and approach as the premier model for civic engagement in the twenty-!rst century.

In the HPA’s model, the organization imagines people working to end global warming, racism, and genocide as energetically as they flock to movies, television shows, and “self-help” books. Although many people care just as much about these issues as they do entertainment, activism and civic engagement do not have a Stephen Spielberg or a Walt Disney to make them exciting and accessible. This disconnect between values and action stems from a lack of imagination on the part of social organizers.

Just as the HPA has authentically used the language of Harry Potter and respected each Harry Potter fan site and Wizard Rock band’s autonomy, so too does Imagine Better respect the autonomy of each fan site and fandom with which it works. The idea is to serve as a welcoming space for sites to connect, promote each other, and work within the canon of each fandom to draw parallels that can create positive social change.

After speaking glowingly about the HPA in Time Magazine and on her website, J.K. Rowling writes in a letter to Slack, “The HP Alliance is, without doubt, the purest expression of ‘the spirit of Albus Dumbledore’ yet to emerge from the Harry Potter fandom.”