How to Start a Movement "If something happens in the world that requires a response within 48 hours, you can mobilize people at a moment’s notice."

Home page of Purpose, a new organization that consults 

on the formation of movements and helps spur of few of its own.

His mother wanted him to grow up to be a doctor, a lawyer or an architect, Jeremy Heimans says with a laugh. Instead, the Australian native became what he calls a “movement entrepreneur,” an expert in using the internet to build social movements around pressing issues. He launched GetUp.org, a grassroots organizing force in his homeland that has more members than all the country’s political parties combined, and he co-founded Avaaz.org, a global online pressure group (avaaz means voice in languages from Hindi to Farsi to Bosnian). His latest venture is Purpose, a New York–based consultancy on movement formation and development that has a not-for-profit arm that launches its own campaigns; one of them, AllOut.org, promotes LGBT rights worldwide and recently helped quash a bill in Uganda that would have made being gay punishable by death. Last month the Ford Foundation presented Heimans with one of its 12 Visionaries Awards, an honor that comes with a $100,000 grant, calling the 33-year-old “a next generation leader.” Here, excerpts from a recent interview with Heimans, conducted in an admittedly old-fashioned way — by phone. READ MORE design observer