The HP Alliance Forums will be down for some maintenance beginning today at 9:30 EST.

They will be back up and functional after Sunday’s DA meeting.

Thank you,
Tita

Thanks to everyone who was in the DA Meeting tonight! We had tons of fun and were so excited to make our big announcement about Accio Books.

Accio Books is a new house-themed effort to get Harry Potter fans to donate books to those who need them most. If you missed the meeting, you can learn more about it by downloading the audio through the Potterwatch podcast feed on Itunes.

To  celebrate the launch of “Accio Books,”  we will be having our third live Dumbledore’s Army meeting on Sunday, March 1st at 1pm EST. You can join in through Ustream.

On the call, we’ll have the new heads of HPA’s Hogwarts houses, who will be heading up the HPA effort to collect books:

• Evanna Lynch, otherwise known as Luna Lovegood in the Harry Potter films, will serve as the head of Ravenclaw house!

• Sue Upton of Pottercast will be the head of Hufflepuff!

• Wizard rock pioneer Paul DeGeorge (from Harry and the Potters) will head Gryffindor!

• Brian Ross (Draco and the Malfoys) will serve as head of Slytherin!

This call  will mark the kick off of the “Accio Books” campaign, and the HPA’s House Cup competition. On Sunday you will be able to sign up at www.thehpalliance.org and start donating books!

(read on to find out how you can participate in Accio Books and the DA Meeting this Sunday)
Read the rest of this entry »

We got a really great follow-up question to the awesome Conference Call we had last night and I wanted to share it with all you guys because it brings up a lot of important issues and it’s something I wish we had gotten a chance to address during the call.

I’m sure you guys have thought this through, and I really admire what you’re doing with the No New Stuff movement. However, I think the situation is somewhat more complicated than simply not buying stuff. I work at a Borders bookstore, and I know we’re really suffering right now because people just aren’t buying. And so they cut down our hours, and they’re probably going to close our store.

So I truly agree with you guys when you say that you shouldn’t spend beyond your means. I think we all need to reasses what we’re buying, but I think the WHERE is more important than the WHAT.

I think we should focus more on spending at small, local stores, rather than just on not buying new stuff in general.

So more a thought than a question. It’s just a struggle - I hate big corporations, and what they do. But I also work for one and am dependent on them for my paycheck, as are many others.

What do you guys think?

You are absolutely right, and I’m not sure anyone can put things in a better perspective than you just did. I wish we had a chance to address a question like this during the call.

This is a really complicated situation. How do we, as a culture, dig ourselves out of this gigantic consumerist hole that we’ve been digging for generations? And is there any way to do that without jeopardizing our financial well-being? As we were discussing on the call, it’s so easy for these giant companies to come into communities and destroy local businesses. On the flip side of that, it is so much more difficult is for a new local business to start fresh and take on these large corporations. This is a problem that cuts clear across the country and changing it is not going to happen anytime soon. But I hope that a project like No New Stuff will lay some framework for things to come. It all starts with education and hopefully consumers who are conscious of what they’re buying will breed better spending habits on a larger scale.

I totally agree that WHERE you buy is nearly as important as WHAT you buy. Matt and I should probably try and make it a little bit more clear that we’re taking a real extremist approach with this project. And we’re doing that simply for illustrative purposes: to prove this can be done and to hopefully raise some interesting questions along the way. It’s very much in the vein of that documentary ‘Supersize Me.’ If Morgan Spurlock, the filmmaker, had only eaten McDonalds once or twice a week, it probably wouldn’t have been quite as interesting as doing it for one month straight. Hopefully projects like this will help people reevaluate their spending priorities.

There are no easy solutions to this problem. It’s been growing and growing for years and years. But I think one thing is clear - something needs to change. When the US has 5% of the world’s population and consumes 30% of the world’s resources and creates 30% of the world’s waste, something is totally MESSED UP and we need to change it!! And while approaches may differ, I think any kind of attempt to counter this problem is going to do more good than bad in the long run.

Thanks so much for your awesome question. It really helps us to get this kind of feedback.

Paul

Hola friends!

Maybe you can help me out here.

Open up google, or your search engine of choice, and type in Cap Candy.

(I’m waiting, guys)

Ok. What do you see? Several links for retailers, online candy stores selling Bertie Bott’s Every Flavor Beans and the like, maybe an article or two about some interesting new product…But do you see what’s missing? I can find no contact information for Cap Candy. The only hit for a website, www.capcandy.com, just brings you to Hasbro’s home page, where there is no mention of Cap Candy.

To this date I have made three phone calls and sent one email to Hasbro, trying to find information on Cap. The first time I called I spoke with a woman who told me that yes, Cap was a licensee, but as they aren’t a subsidiary they aren’t obligated to follow Hasbro’s lovely rules of global business ethics, found here: http://www.hasbro.com/corporate/corporate-social-responsibility/Global-Manufacturing-Ethics-Principles.cfm. Please note that the first two rules are against forced labor and child labor respectively.

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A few weeks ago, we let you know about a “No New Stuff” Greeting Card Drive sponsored by the Hampton Roads Chapter.

I’m excited to report that they collected 256 Greeting Cards to donate to St. Jude’s Ranch for Children!

Those cards will be recycled and sold to help raise money to fund their facilities.

And it was also a great exercise in getting rid of the “stuff” in our lives!!

Congrats, Hampton Roads Chapter!

And we’ll talk to you all about No New Stuff Wednesday night at 9pm EST right here!

The UK based Wizard Rock band RiddleTM has a beautiful song for Jo Rowling that a fan turned into a youtube video. I think any member of our fandom would be proud of this. I’ll let the video speak for itself.

There is a conference call on Wednesday, but remember the videos continue twice a week by Paul and Matt.

The second HP Alliance Dumbledore’s Army meeting will be this Wednesday at 9 p.m., on UStream.

During the last meeting hundreds of Potter fans came together to talk about helping those less fortunate in Burma and Darfur. This time the call will focus on consumer culture, and being conscious consumers in a tough economy: Paul DeGeorge and Matt Maggiacaomo, of Harry and the Potters and the Whomping Willows, respectively, will talk about their vlog project, “No New Stuff,” which is updated twice weekly at the HPA YouTube Channel. It will also feature information about a new HPA campaign to make sure all products sold in Harry’s name are done so under the banner of Fair Trade. Author Peter Gould, the author of “Write Naked,” will also be on hand to talk about breaking out of consumer culture. We encourage all of you to check out Peter’s book, “Write Naked” and it’s totally cool to go out and buy it. One of the exceptions in “No New Stuff” is helping independent artists!

So please step into the Room of Requirement and Join us for a fun call, which will end with a major HPA announcement, a great surprise that’s sure to excite everyone…one for which it is very much worth DVR’ing Lost.

See you there! Remember, it’s at 9 p.m. at this channel. You can listen to the call and interact with the participants by going to this page. You should sign up to be a member at UStream, as if the chat gets too crowded we will require membership to chat.

I don’t know where to begin in thanking the folks at PFW Radio for their amazing assistance in creating the Calendar of Wrock 2009 who include Julia, Dan, Cody, and any one else I’m missing!

And of course all of you went and ordered the Calendar of Wrock and the bands themselves for being part of it. But special special thanks to PFW Radio - through your efforts you’ve raised 700 dollars for the HP Alliance! That is a really big donation for us and it will go a long way in making sure that all of the things that we do to put more love and justice in the world can continue! Thank you so much for your help. As I said to Julia, I’m a bit speechless, which is rarity.

This was amazing! Thank you!!!!

In Voldemort’s mind, Harry Potter HAD to be killed before he could publicly announce himself as dictator.

After all, Harry represented a symbol of hope for the “anti-Voldemort movement” as Order of the Phoenix member Hestia Smith calls it. After all, “The Boy Who Lived,” had survived not one, but several encounters with Lord Voldemort. Having the so-called “Chosen One” killed would be synonymous with killing the lifeblood of the “anti-Voldemort movement.”

And indeed, once Harry is finally “dead” Voldemort comes forward and announces to the Wizarding World from here on out, all would be Death Eaters, all would be Slytherins, and all would live under his command in a new world that they would build “together.” A world where Magic is Might and where all Muggles would be crushed.

But for Voldemort, it was not simply a matter of destroying the morale of the movement that opposed him. More to the point, Read the rest of this entry »