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Harry Potter Fans Commit to Issues, from Gay Rights to Genocide
The Harry Potter fan community is hardly the only one engaged in charitable and political work, though the Harry Potter Alliance is the biggest and most united organization coordinating those kinds of efforts. Some chapters of the Browncoats, groups founded by fans of Joss Whedon’s short-lived fantasy television series Firefly, raise money for literacy organizations and groups that work to empower girls and women. Star Trek fans in many regions do similar fundraising, including walkathons for hospices and medical charities Slack sees political potential in the fan communities of shows like True Blood, whose vampires struggle for tolerance in a parallel of gay rights campaigns, and
The Harry Potter Alliance plans to reach out to fans of those shows and books through the same kinds of blogs and message boards where it found its own followers, in an attempt to create what Slack jokingly calls “possibly the dorkiest coalition in human history.” But the organization is also branching off from the stories that gave it impetus, talking to former Greenpeace leaders about designing and pitching a comic-book villain who promotes climate change for his own nefarious purposes.
Slack claims people who base their work in myth have an advantage over people who don’t acknowledge the deep emotions behind public policy, whether it’s the fear of illness and death raised by the health care debate, or worries about the stability or fragility of relationships brought up by fights over equal rights for gay couples.
That traditional approach to politics is “that hand before the eyes. It’s an experience of constraint and fear and disbelief of imagination,” he says. To succeed, “you have to believe that something is not a barrier at all, but a doorway..…[and to know that] love is the most powerful form of magic.”
Get Involved: The Harry Potter Alliance organizes fans to do good.
Alyssa Rosenberg is a staff correspondent at Government Executive and writes about pop culture for The Atlantic. She blogs at http://alyssarosenberg.blogspot.com.
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