Powerful, Not Powerless: Emerging Approaches to Massive Action

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We are living in a moment of great fear. Autocratic governments, nihilistic oligarchs, escalating climate impacts, dynamic pandemics, menacing technologies, rampant misinformation—all of these forces and more conspire to leave Americans and people around the world feeling less safe, more uncertain, and more frightened about the future. While entirely justified, this anxiety is, in and of itself, the greatest enemy of all to an effective response, undermining the solidarity, creativity, and action we so desperately need.

One major strategy to counter this fear lies in massive collaboration, a coming together of individuals, groups, and organizations at unprecedented scale to exert major influence on political and social events. Massive collaboration methods simultaneously build a movement’s potency and loosen fear’s grip; there is both power and courage in numbers.

Happily, we live in a time when the ability to combine in large numbers to produce impact has never been greater. In just the last decade or so:

• Soccer fan groups from around the world took on 12 of Europe’s largest and wealthiest soccer clubs, stopping their plan to create a breakaway Super League that would guarantee them huge revenues while eliminating fair competition and badly damaging smaller clubs.
• Donors combined contributions to relieve over $15 billion dollars in medical debt for almost 10 million people living in the United States, facilitated by a nonprofit called Undue Medical Debt.
• Over 3 million individuals worldwide contributed over 200 million observations of plants and animals on the iNaturalist platform to contribute to global understanding of changes in biodiversity.

Far from being the province of progressives alone, these large-scale actions have occurred across the political spectrum. For example, millions of Americans boycotted Bud Light beer in protest of its association with transgender influencers, dethroning it from its position as the country’s top beer and resulting in a 28 percent reduction in sales and purchase incidence.

These massive actions are not anomalies. They are increasingly persistent ways of mobilizing, emerging at the confluence of intensifying crises, widening disparities, and new technologies. The social sector should better understand the potential and risks associated with these approaches and learn how they can be harnessed to advance justice and agency, confront authoritarian forces, and more fully redistribute power across society.

Forms of Combined Power

Mass mobilization to combat authoritarianism and demand social responsibility dates back millennia. Between 500 to 300 BC, the working classes of Rome mounted a series of general strikes known as the Plebian Secessions, wherein they physically retreated to a mountain on the outskirts of the city until aristocrats met their demands for political representation and an end to debt bondage.

In the centuries that followed, successive major movements employed similar strategies of massive nonviolent action, creating iconic moments of courage and solidarity that are deeply embedded in our collective consciousness: the Boston Tea Party, sugar boycotts in support of abolition, the Salt March in India, sit-ins across the southern United States, China’s Tiananmen Square protests, and more. Combining money for impact has also continuously borne fruit. As early as 1885, more than 120,000 Americans combined small-dollar donations to fund the construction of a pedestal for the Statue of Liberty, and in the last 75 years, combined donations to the Nature Conservancy have led to the purchase of over 100 million acres for protection from environmental degradation.

What is notable today, however, is the potential scope and rate of massive actions. Ready-made platforms for collaboration and broad connectivity mean that staggeringly fast mobilization is possible. Where it took 2,000 years for the Christian movement to enlist 2 billion followers, after all, it took Facebook less than 20 to eclipse that total. While coordinating action within and between vast networks is a non-trivial enterprise, combining for impact is already familiar to many millions. For example:

• More than 40 percent of Americans have given to a crowdfunding campaign.
• The Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 involved over 25 million Americans in over 40 percent of the nation’s counties.
• An online game to advance social good like the World Food Programme’s Freerice engages nearly 10 million people from 135 countries each year and has purchased over 225 billion grains of rice for food emergencies.

Remarkably creative and effective forms of massive collaboration include both newer methods and more well-established ones.

Newer Methods

• Aligned Market Actions: In this approach, large numbers of individual investors align market actions to influence corporate behavior. This famously occurred in 2021 when investors in the “wallstreetbets” Reddit community rallied behind GameStop, the retail video game seller, driving its price up 1,500 percent in a matter of days and creating massive losses for several large (short selling) investment firms. Another example is The Carbon Collective, creator of an equity fund that invests in publicly traded companies addressing climate change.
• Global Games for Good: These are Massively Multiplayer Online Games that achieve positive social outcomes by engaging numerous players in actions that advance knowledge or a particular cause. Games like Freerice (noted above), Sea Hero Quest (over 4 million players whose activities contribute to Alzheimer’s research), and Foldit (over 600,000 players who solve protein-folding puzzles to contribute to disease research) have all accomplished this. Similar digital simulations could engage participants to work on fairer distribution of global resources, building on analog exercises like Buckminster Fuller’s World Game.
• Group Buys: Here, individuals pool money to buy or build things with social value (e.g., protected land, sustainable infrastructure, affordable housing). For instance, Costa Rica’s largest nature preserve of over 57,000 acres is the Children’s Eternal Rainforest, created through donations from school children around the world, while the Greater Yellowstone Coalition recently purchased 1,300 acres that had been targeted to develop a damaging gold mine. Abundance Investment and Spacehive, crowdfunding platforms for green infrastructure and green spaces, have funded over £185 million in projects in United Kingdom and Ireland while cryptocurrency pools have emerged, as well.
• Knowledge Treasuries: In this approach, individuals contribute information to shared pools to create comprehensive knowledge and document truth. The most renowned example of this is Wikipedia, the largest encyclopedia in history crowdsourced from more than 120,000 contributors each month. iNaturalist (noted above), Missing Maps, an 180,000 volunteer community mapping remote locations to support humanitarian relief, and Open Human, a platform where more than 10,000 people make personal health data available to support research, are other interesting cases. Similar collaborations to preserve scientific data, information, and ideas become especially important when hostile governments and other groups seek to purge them.
• Pooled Debt Relief: This occurs when individuals pool money to relieve others’ debts as in the Undue Medical Debt example described above, and in initiatives like the Rolling Jubilee/Debt Collective (tens of millions of dollars of student, payday, and probation debt relief) and The Human Utility (crowdfund to cover neighbors’ water bills). This can be increasingly relevant when social safety net programs shrink.

Traditional Methods

• Boycotts and Buycotts: These are collective purchasing actions that either reject corporate malfeasance (boycott) or support ethically aligned businesses (buycott). Recent examples include the Bud Light boycott and consumers flocking to Costco to acknowledge its ongoing embrace of DEI principles.
• Emergency Crowdfunding: Here individuals combine funds (and sometimes in-kind services) to provide relief to communities in crisis as happened when donors on GoFundMe raised more than $250 million for victims of the January wildfires in Los Angeles. This could have increased relevance in the aftermath of climate-related catastrophes, particularly in areas where the government reduces disaster relief or it is difficult to secure property insurance.
• Mass Protest: During mass protests individuals join large, peaceful gatherings to express discontent with the status quo and build solidarity. Recent efforts by political groups like 50501 and Indivisible culminated in 1,280 “Hands Off” protests in every US state in April 2025.
• General Strikes: These occur when individuals jointly withhold their labor in protest of unjust policies with the Indian general strike of 2020 (250 million participants) and the Global Climate Strike of 2019 (7 million participants) as major recent examples.

These methods of mass action should be of particular interest to large networks for social good where scale already exists. If activism platforms like Change.org (500 million users) and Avaaz (68 million members) or philanthropic initiatives like Giving Tuesday (34 million donors in 2023) employed these approaches, they could express more power and experience impact rapidly.

Similarly, groups that already pool money for impact on a smaller scale (family credit unions, giving circles, tandas, investment clubs) might occasionally combine for greater impact. For example, there are more than 4,000 giving circles globally that give more than $3 billion per year and many of them use the same online platforms to manage their work. Investment clubs at colleges cross the United States also hold an estimated $1 billion under management, some of which could be aligned for greater influence on social matters.

Important Values

Because some of these methodologies are emergent, and because these approaches are also inherently neutral, it is important to try to capture common operating values that advance agency and justice. The best of the mass actions described above are distinguished by:

• Justice Motive: The mass action seeks to redistribute power and money, advancing the interests of poor, disenfranchised, and powerless groups in the face of persistent oppression and growing consolidation of wealth and power. It draws people in through compelling narratives that offer a vision of a better, more virtuous world and speak to many belief systems.
• Moral Operations: The large-scale collaboration emphasizes fairness and inclusivity in its operations, values truth, avoids violence of any kind, and reduces unintended harm. This allows the group to maintain the moral high ground in contrast to illegal or harmful tactics from those it opposes, and, importantly, it also increases the attractiveness of the cause to those who seek to join.
• Unprecedented Togetherness: The mass actions described here benefit from the power and safety that their sheer size provides. Achieving scale, however, also requires them to raise a big tent; they must embrace unlikely partners, avoid the petty fights for territory or credit that often occur between civil society organizations, and avoid time-consuming consensus-building processes (although promising tools for large-group decision-making are emerging). Such deep collaboration during adversity can yield effectiveness, solace, and even joy.
• Concrete Products (Simple Aims): More than anything, participants in massive collaborations want clout. The aim of the group’s action needs to promise that in very simple, specific ways by seeking concrete products from the collaboration. It is much more attractive, for example, to invite people to pool money to buy a large piece of land with specific dimensions in a specific place than to ask them to pool money for a general donation to an environmental cause.
• Network-Riding (Opportunism): As noted above, mobilizing people for a large-scale action is challenging, particularly in a world where there are so many competing causes. As such, it is important to leverage networks and associations that already exist to have bigger impact sooner.

Accelerating Learning and Discovery

These approaches aren’t a replacement for an active voting citizenry and a healthy government. Contributing taxes to provide our societies with the services they need is the largest and most important form of collaborative action. But these methods should nonetheless provide a helpful complement—a set of ideas that can be employed for significant impact during times of government failure or as a prelude to broader government action.

As such, they should become a subject of greater interest to movements, associations, foundations, governments, and other stakeholders in civil society. The fact that numerous foundations and high-net-worth individuals have combined funds to increase their impact and pledged to meet the challenges of the current moment increases optimism that they might invest in better understanding methods of mass collaboration, raising awareness of their potency, and harnessing them for ongoing impact in service of justice.

Those with an interest in building this field should start by addressing the challenges inherent in these large-scale approaches. For example, tackling the question of how to facilitate faster and fuller collaboration among disparate and independent organizations—without requiring them to cede too much authority—is essential. While some movements, like the Australian preservation effort described in this SSIR article, have made progress by explicitly acknowledging the difficulties that can emerge under such circumstances and making space to address them, more systematic identification of both common threats to collaboration and effective methods for group trust-building and decision-making, drawing on new innovations in democracy and group process, could help. Likewise, studying unintended consequences of massive action, including deepening of inequities, seems important, as does understanding how AI and AI developers can enhance or undermine public power.

It is also important to capture new methods of large-scale collaboration as they emerge. Gene Sharp’s classic list of 198 methods of nonviolent action should be augmented with new mass action approaches and reviewed for their potential to have impact at larger scale. Some databases, like this one from the Nonviolent Action Lab, have begun the work of documenting large-scale events as they happen.

Perhaps the most important question of all, however, is to determine how these powerful mass actions can become more well-known and durable. In a moment when authoritarianism and wealth consolidation are on the rise, people need to understand the many methods available to expand their power, viewing them as more than extraordinary, sporadic phenomena. New and existing forms of mass action are extremely timely and feasible, and they deserve a more prominent place in our thinking and our strategies.

These approaches to rapid, large-scale combination have remarkable potential to advance justice and knowledge. If we can pool our time and treasure to eliminate debt for millions of neighbors, disrupt corporate predation and put millions of acres under protection, what else can we accomplish? If we can comprehensively document the natural world and inform global research, what else might we learn? If we can harness the economic and political will of billions toward fairness and redistribution, what kind of power might we gain?

Read more stories by Joe McCannon.