How Does Move to Amend Use My Donations?
Who gives to Move To Amend?
We are proud to be grassroots-funded. More than 85% of Move to Amend’s budget comes from people like you who give anywhere from $5 to $20,000.
Our supporters are ordinary folks—and they’re all over the country, across political spectra. We're over 490,000 supporters strong working for an amendment supported by 80% of Americans. Our average donation is $40… we’re proud to say this is what a mass movement looks like!
Here’s the breakdown of 2018 income projections based on past years:
How does Move To Amend use my donations?
We are a lean, efficient organization. Much of our $575,000 budget goes toward our 6-person staff who help our grassroots organizers across the country to educate and influence their communities and policymakers. Our internship program trains 3-6 young leaders in the skills needed to run an organization and build a movement.
Only a small percentage of our budget is devoted to fundraising.
We have invested in cutting edge resources such as our massively informational website which is our main educational tool, both for the general public and our volunteers. We maintain a sophisticated database that helps our volunteers organize and mobilize Move to Amend supporters in our community. This spending is a critical part of Move to Amend’s responsibility to be organized, efficient, and effective.
We do not ever contribute donations to politicians' campaigns. We don't pay anyone more than $50,000/year. We don't rent fancy expensive office space and we don't hire overpriced consultants. We'd like to offer our tireless employees healthcare, but at this point we don't have the budget for it.
A good percentage of our budget goes towards travel, because we make a point to spread the word in person through our ongoing educational Barnstorming speaking tours. But to keep our expenses down our speakers almost always stay in host housing provided by our generous supporters.
What has my gift accomplished?
Move to Amend formed in 2009, when a group of people who were deeply concerned about the impending Citizens United ruling met in a living room in northern California to explore what could be done about so-called "corporate personhood".
You and our other supporters can point to extraordinary headway in building our movement for a real democracy. Together, we:
- Mustered more than 491,000 individual supporters, 729 institutional endorsements, and pledges from 279+ lawmakers across the country to support the “We the People” constitutional amendment
- Built more than 100 Move To Amend grassroots affiliates across the country
- Passed more than 750 resolutions calling for an amendment through government bodies and state and local political parties, and helped 22 states endorse the call for a constitutional amendment
- Placed the issue on the ballot in more than 300 communities—conservative and liberal alike—and won every single time -- usually by landslides
- Got the We the People amendment introduced in Congress three times, most recently in January 2022 as House Joint Resolution 48, with a current count of 94 co-sponsors
- Reaffirmed our mandate to keep going since a 2011 nationwide voter poll verified that 80% of Americans support amending the Constitution to end "corporate personhood".
Frankly, we don't think there are many national organizations who can compete with Move to Amend in terms of "bang for your buck." We provide this information in the interest of transparency for our supporters, but also because people are almost always flabbergasted when they see how far we stretch a dollar.
Our website is pretty slick, and our communications are as polished as those of organizations with multi-million dollar budgets, so sometimes it can be hard to tell -- but the truth is Move to Amend is ordinary people, right up to the top decision makers. We're in it to win it and our tenacity will pay off.
