real content from real people

Bootstrap Industries exists because after a year of searching, we found nothing like it. There are platforming and mentoring services, but they’re not focused on the economy. There are groups focused on the economy, but they’re not set up to provide working class people a seat at the table of national discussion. There are political action groups set up for the lower classes, but they’re divided by partisanship or social issues. The few organizations we found that are anything like us are affiliated with large interests so closely that they need to be politic in their work.

What we need, desperately, is to unite the working classes in shared economic interests. We need to recognize that there are as many Democrats working for Walmart as Republicans, and that we will always lose if we focus on what divides us. There are 45 million Americans living in poverty. Two thirds of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. United, we are a force unrivaled by any currently operating in the political landscape.

The trouble is that nobody has yet focused on harnessing that energy, making sure that working people of all ideological persuasions can speak about the issues that impact them - welfare policy, outsourcing and trade agreements, banking regulations, housing laws. People speak on behalf of the poor and nearly poor, but nobody seems to trust them to speak for themselves. We’re changing that.

Our goals: help the working classes speak in the public square, provide access for small nonprofits and citizen efforts to the kind of production normally only available to large institutions, and create an expanding library of reporting and personal narrative that can be used as a resource for research and to support the work of other individuals or organizations with similar aims. Bootstrap also exists to empower and educate others - having gone through our process, people will have the tools and experience to facilitate their own subsequent independent projects.

We connect people who have a story to tell about the economy with professional creatives acting as mentors: editors, producers, and PR people. 

This has a few benefits. One is we democratize access to professional editors and mentorship. The second is that because we are revenue sharing, everyone stands to benefit more as we build our library and become a known resource.

The end result is harnessing and creating a community of otherwise displaced people with stories to tell being heard in the format that fits best - facilitated by professionals in each respective medium who can aid production in a transparent and nurturing manner that enables everyone involved to gain more experience and inspire others to be more vocal about the struggles and issues they face.