History

On the right, you’ll find more information about our past, including the bios of the Founding Board of Directors and the overview of our initial raison d’être.

For more info on how we got started, read on.

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In the words of our founder, Wayne Moses Burke:

“I came to DC at the age of 36 with a diversity of entrepreneurial experience and a freshly minted Master’s degree in international relations. For the first time in my life, I was job hunting, and in a very competitive field: foreign policy. Six months later, I’d met a lot of people and learned a lot about Washington, DC, but I still didn’t have a job.

“On April 14th, 2008, I received an email from the United Nations Association asking me to “Click here to tell your Representative about this important issue!” and I thought “I know it’ll only take 35 seconds to send that message, but I don’t actually think it’s worth the 35 seconds.”

Wait a minute. What?

“I had helped organize a successful citizen lobbying effort at state level previously, so I ran through all the ways that a citizen can communicate with his or her elected officials: email, web forms, faxes, phone calls, personal visits. In the US Congress, I had no trust that any of these would be effective.

“I found this deeply troubling. I mean, elections are important, but what about the two years in between when the real decisions are made? If citizens have no means of voicing their opinions during this time, how are we a representative democracy?

“In my estimation, anyone who really wanted to have their opinion heard would have to spend three weeks minimum visiting Capitol Hill everyday – learning how the system works, getting to know the important players, and educating them on his or her perspective. The average US citizen isn’t going to do this.

“But wait a second, I thought. This is 2008. We have the internet. We have communication technology. We have vast stores of information organized and sorted any way you want it. People from every continent in the world can communicate with one another as easily as if they were next door, and yet the average American citizen can’t communicate with their elected representatives? It’s not right!

“I started dreaming, creating, planning – what would a system look like that would provide legitimate and reliable communication between governments and their citizens? What features would be required? Who would it have to appeal to? What problems would it have to solve? And so on… I didn’t sleep that night.

“I was inspired and in a unique situation. I was half in and half out of the DC system. I understood it well enough to be able to devise a solution that would meet the needs of representatives, without my thinking being constrained by the perspectives of the current system. I had all the necessary skills to put this together – a unique blend of entrepreneurial experience, an understanding of internet technology, an interest in policy formulation, and political independence. In addition, I was frustrated by my lack of success in job hunting and saw an opportunity to start an organization that could really make a difference.

“I ran my idea past some Hill staffers and lobbyists, and they were really excited about it. I did a lot of research to see if someone else was already doing this and found nothing. Thus began an adventure that can best be described by the old cliché, “If I’d known how hard it was going to be, I never would have started.” Luckily, I didn’t know because it’s the most gratifying work I’ve ever done.”