“We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.” – JK Rowling

It’s the time of giving, and in light of the season (and ABC Family’s weekend long runs of the Harry Potter films,) I wanted to bring your attention to a pretty fantastic organization, The Harry Potter Alliance.

The Harry Potter Alliance is a coalition of fandom leaders and members who feel passionate about the power of story to inspire and affect social change. Just as Harry and his friends fought the Dark Arts in JK Rowling’s fictional universe, they strive to destroy real-world horcruxes like inequality, illiteracy, and human rights violations.

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 significant 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.

From their website…

MISSION STATEMENT

The Harry Potter Alliance (HPA) is a 501c3 nonprofit that takes an outside-of-the-box approach to civic engagement by using parallels from the Harry Potter books to educate and mobilize young people across the world toward issues of literacy, equality, and human rights. Our mission is to empower our members to act like the heroes that they love by acting for a better world. By bringing together fans of blockbuster books, TV shows, movies, and YouTube celebrities we are harnessing the power of popular culture toward making our world a better place. Our goal is to make civic engagement exciting by channeling the entertainment-saturated facets of our culture toward mobilization for deep and lasting 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.”

Former heads of houses include John Green (Hufflepuff, author of The Fault in Our Stars), Maureen Johnson (Ravenclaw, author of 13 Little Blue Envelopes), and Holly Black (Slytherin, author of the Spiderwick Chronicles). To find out more information about The Harry Potter Alliance, visit their website – they have a pretty fantastic store which includes some delicious Fair Trade chocolate frogs, and a Granger/Lovegood 2016 t-shirt that I wish Santa would bring for me: