Take a Position.

Hey, it’s Quinn.

Big news today, and I can’t wait to share it with you.

Let’s go.

Looking back through two years of my insane, mostly illegible notes on the *Actually* Pro Life (APL) process, I’m not sure when I realized there was something missing.

Like dark matter, it felt like something that already existed but I couldn’t put my finger on, between all of the almost two thousand Actions we’d been recommending, reviewing, and refreshing for the past few years, and the eight new but also very old APL Principles we’d discussed and agreed on here at HQ (here = Slack 😢).

Something tangible was missing.

It’s one thing to walk around, never questioning, “Yes, obviously I am a human, not a monster, who holds the Principle, “Every person should have a home.”

And it’s another to take the leap and fight for that Principle — to donate to Habitat for Humanity, for example, or even step up IRL with a hammer, but something in between those was still missing.

Unless of course you’re one of the many millions of people who’ve had to fight for one or all eight of the APL Principles, from day one.

In either situation, there are some questions that need to be answered, such as:

It’s always been true that whatever we make, our beloved audience and users are quick to 1) thank us and 2) tell us what more is missing. Our Actions exist at all, and now, centralized at WCID, because the most recent and strongly-held feedback we got was you saying, usually, literally, “Ok, but what can I do?”

But something else sticks out, and it’s driven the past year of our work on WCID — and what will soon become WCID 2.0.

You had 3 more asks:

Positions — and their respective pages — are our answer to #3.

Well, we actually had every intention of launching Positions back when we first introduced you to Actually Pro Life.

I’d been working on them for a long time — measurable standards for the Principles we hold, built on the work of so many people and orgs and governments over so many years to measure a disadvantage, why the fuck it exists, and how to measurably improve it, or demolish it all together.

The Positions began in my notes, made their way into spreadsheets, and got better defined. Along the way, we tried to understand which of our almost two thousand Actions fit which Positions — or better yet, more than one.

The original set of Positions numbered about 130, and then as we reconciled all the data, we found new patterns and gaps (there are still plenty of gaps to address, what we’re sharing is just the beginning), and about 20 more Positions immediately presented themselves as research projects from orphan Actions that didn’t have a home yet.

There’s still a long list of orphan Actions. But again, there’s more to come there.

Otherwise, the two biggest holdups were:

A founding merit of APL is bringing some goddamn receipts to the party.

The priorities: who needs help, the most measurable ways to help them, who’s preventing progress, and who shows up to help.

We’ll never, ever get it all right (at least, not as long as I’m in charge), but we’ll sure as hell try. Of the first two priorities, I/we built many of our educated assumptions on first-party, relatively non-partisan government data (the Congressional Budget Office, censuses, etc).

It took a very long time to get all that straight, and logged, and matched up to actions that would measurably impact that data.

What’s worked in the past? Has change been made? Where and when and how has it not been evenly distributed?

But by the time we got to publishing the original set of Positions, the current US administration had made significant strides in hollowing out imperfect but invaluable institutions at home and abroad, including those that collect, analyze, and report our most impactful data.

Trust in those institutions and data sank lower, by way of crimes of omission, at least, to outright, dangerous, fascist disinformation.

All of which meant, if I wanted a leg to stand on, and as the vast majority of our launch set of Positions are US-focused or concern US foreign policy (and in particular, foreign aid), my only real recourse was to find almost entirely new Evidence sources for nearly every one of the original Positions.

Because, remember: each Position has to answer to these four questions:

That’s made a lot harder when your government is a bunch of lying fuck-wits who don’t care whether you live or die.

We were in the midst of a massive technical rebuild to satisfy feedback #1 and 2, anyways, and it became clear that the tech that got us here — that we will remain forever so fucking proud of — wasn’t going to be able to power much of what we wanted to achieve and make available to you.

We had all these grand plans and our merry little band of mostly part-time shit-givers had thrown a lot of ziti against the wall, and the result was that we needed a brain transplant.

Why now? Well, our shop simply does not walk into Mordor have the time - internally, or out there in the world - or resources, to make many mistakes.

We don’t have the bandwidth, now or later, to lean on duct-tape more than we absolutely have to. We put ourselves under enormous pressure to make the big, foundational moves before not making them becomes a problem later.

So while I went back to the drawing board on Positions evidence data, and Lauren took over the day to day APL data management, and Allie made our social lively and fun, and Christina roped in some #INFLUENCERS, and Casey built out our partnerships, and Willow published so much incredible editorial work, Tom and Conor got to down to business figuring out the how/when/where to do the brain transplant without taking the whole thing down.

WCID 2.0 is a massive analytical upgrade, calling on all kinds of dynamic inputs and interactions, and if our little team didn’t make the change, or get it right, the result would be a couple hundred well-founded Positions, associated with a couple thousand rigorously researched actions, and thousands and thousands of users acting on them, but still mostly in isolation, wondering, despairing that no one else was acting like they were, that progress wasn’t and couldn’t ever be made, not at this rate.

The best news: We think we got it right. And that starts with sharing the first batch of 160 or so Position pages with you today.

A minimum tax on billionaires? Sure.

Automatic voter registration in all US states? Yes.

Hot meals in SNAP.

MERV-13 air filters at a minimum in public buildings. Yes.

Replace all lead pipes (chat, trust: some states haven’t even checked to see if/how many lead pipes they’ve got yet!).

Eliminate TB, everywhere.

WIC fully funded.

DC statehood now.

End child marriage yesterday.

Full Title 1 funding for every single low-income school.

…and so much more.

On each Position page, you’ll find a measurable Position to aim for and it’s related APL Principle, a description of the what and why, a collection of Evidence and Metrics to help you trust it’s real and meaningful, all of the current Orgs and Actions associated with that Position, and — of course — the Members that have taken action on it.

Fun fact: Because we have a new brain and these pages and our ability to tie all the data together are literally brand new, you might be the very first Member to register action on a given Position, and for that, we say thank you!

For now, you can search and get to Position pages from https://www.whatcanido.earth/actually-pro-life.

In the very near future, they’ll be built into WCID search, actions, and more, everywhere, as the APL system becomes more and more cohesive and connected.

Please and thank you.

But if you want to be counted, in public, if you want people to see and be inspired to take action because you did (and, again, vice versa), if you want updates when there’s a new Action for Positions you follow, or Locations you live in (or don’t), you can upgrade with a free 30 day trial right now.

Position pages are also a really, really great reminder that bad guys are real, and that we should always say their names and put them on the record, and that most of the progress we’ve made, but which hasn’t been distributed evenly, or that we can still make, requires inventing very little other than some fucking backbone.

Despite the enormous efforts of so many millions of people before us, these ass-hats have spent decades and centuries making choices to disadvantage people and rape ecosystems and it’s enough.

We all have to carry the fire. No more hobbies.

The Positions throughout WCID require all of us — or at least more of us than there are of them — to continue the tradition of Compound Action, to “simply” make different choices, in the aggregate, including but not exclusively to who we recruit, train, campaign for, and vote into every single level of office, from school board on up.

Positions put the Actually in Actually Pro Life. They put the “works” in “faith and works.” They’re the fighting words, the line in the sand, they are the target, they are what we’re working towards with every action we take, inside and outside of WCID.

Check them out now, let us know how we’re doing, sign up to put a dent in history.

Let’s go.

Quinn