Andrew Slack

Background

About Andrew Slack

I am dedicated to using the power of popular stories to empower all of us to build a more just, compassionate, and imaginative world.This has lent itself to a career wearing many hats.As a narrative strategist for Avaaz, a global civic organization with over 69 million members, I have organized A-list celebrities like Leonardo DiCaprio, Meryl Streep, Pedro Pascal, Mark Ruffalo, and Adam McKay, as well as elected officials, to promote pro-democracy, climate, and human rights campaigns worldwide. As a content producer, the videos I have produced have been seen over 100 million times. One of these videos is for Save Santa’s Home, a children’s book that I co-authored, which takes a playful approach to empowering kids around climate activism. As co-founder of the Harry Potter Alliance (HPA), now Fandom Forward, I spent ten years employing parallels from Harry Potter to inspire hundreds of thousands of fans to become first-time activists, winning major campaigns and starting chapters in over 30 countries. My pop culture campaigns linking The Hunger Games to economic inequality, Superman to immigrant rights, and Star Wars to money in politics earned me fellowships at Ashoka, the Nathan Cummings Foundation, and Civic Hall. From the New York Times and the New Yorker to Comedy Central and People Magazine, my work has been featured in over 100 major news outlets across the US. As a featured speaker, I've given talks on the power of story to create social change at TEDx Youth, SXSW, the American Library Association, Harvard, Yale, Columbia, MIT, and over 100 other venues worldwide. I've written on the subject of civic imagination for both the LA Times and CNN. As a thought leader, my work, ideas, and counsel have been used to shift how academics, nonprofits, and major foundations approach the subjects of fandom and pop culture. Of course, none of this pioneering work could have taken place without the collaboration of brilliant colleagues along the way. I am looking forward to continuing to meet amazing new collaborators as we work together, to imagine better stories.