As many of you know at this point, beloved HPA member and incredible Nerdfighter Esther Earl passed away due to pulmonary thyroid cancer around 3 a.m. Wednesday morning.  Please click here to visit her caringbridge page, where you can find out more information about Esther, leave messages of encouragement for her family, or make a donation to help cover her medical bills.

We, along with our friends at the Leaky Cauldron, will be updating you soon with information about the ways we will be honoring Esther’s memory.

Esther, we will miss you always, but I hope more than that we will be inspired by your positivity, courage, and unending tenacity.  This star won’t go out.

Hey everyone, and welcome to this week’s wrap up blog!

There’s a really good forum discussion on the ning, about a religous group that is holding ‘burn a Quran day’ on the ninth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. You can find it here: http://bit.ly/a30Iaj

Prop 8 has been overturned again! From August 18th, gay and lesbian people can get married in California. I’ve no doubt this isn’t the end of Prop 8, but we’ll see.

The Islamic Community Centre that is being built near Ground Zero in New York is causing more controversy. The opening date for it is September 11 2011. What’s your opinion on this? Leave a blog on the Ning, or reply here.

Remember, the Ning Staff are looking for Ning Marauders. This is a position between staff and Ning members. If you’re interested, check out this blog post: http://bit.ly/9JEob0

That’s it this week, folks. Check back next week for more interesting stuff in the weekly wrap up blog!

We hope your Birthday is filled with good friends, great times, and all of the warmth and spirit you bring to each and every one of us, everyday!

Hello fellow Harry Potter nerds! Can we talk?

Have I ever mentioned how grateful I am to be a part of this fantastic community? Kind and generous people who want to make the world a better place, who strive to do more then what is expected of them, surround me everywhere I go. It is here with the HP Alliance where we have all come together to celebrate one of the greatest things on this earth. The power of love. We have helped those who are in dire need of support and it makes me proud to be a member of the HPA. There are so many people to thank for keeping this community alive and welcoming, but none more than Mr. Andrew Slack, the creator of the HP Alliance. So, today, on Andrew’s Birthday we’re going to increase that power by a trillion! We will be participating in a special MAK-4-SLACK day. Do you remember our Magical Acts of Kindness campaigns? Well, it’s back!

For Andrew’s birthday, the Harry Potter community is doing Magical Acts of Kindness, or MAK. These are random “good deeds” that are done throughout the day. They can be big or small, completely anonymous or in front of a crowd of people. The goal is to decrease world suck and increase world awesome, just for the sake of doing it. Fill somebody’s empty parking meter, give someone your seat on a crowded bus, or help an old lady across the street. Just for the sake of doing it. It can be anything! Remember, MAK is going to last 24 hours. After you do your good deed tweet it to @thehpalliance or @andrewslack with #MAK4SLACK or post a blog on the ning.
Read the rest of this entry »

“Dumbledore taught us what magic for” – APWBD by the Remus
Lupins. But the HPA taught us what activism is for. Now onto the Weekly Wrap Up Blog!

The ning’s discussion What Color Would You Polyjuice Potion Be? has been mighty popular (and cool). Personally I think I would have a sparkling silver to show off my Slytherin Pride and because I’m a good person all around.

Vanessa’s blog, The Holocaust of the 21st-Century, is not only powerful but also extremely informational. This could be one of the most well stated blogs about Darfur I’ve read in a while.

Can’t get enough of Doctor Who? Share your love, excitement and your frustrations with these fellow fans at the topic Doctor Who.

The Arizona Immegration Law has had a few (awesome) setbacks! It looks like it just may be completely declared unconstitutional! Check out this video.

If you happened to run into Jo Rowling walking down the street, what would you ask her? Talk about it in the topic What Unanswered Questions Would You Ask JK Rowling if You had the Chance? and maybe you could share an answer or two! Well th-th-th-that’s all folks!

A quick update for everyone: Chase bank will be presenting The Harry Potter Alliance with a giant check today (Saturday) at 4:30pm PST at Comic-Con 2010! It will be in room 33A, all Comic-Con registrants are welcome to attend. Andrew Slack, as well as Melissa Anelli from The Leaky Cauldron (a member of our Board of Directors), will be in attendance.

For more updates on the press conference, follow our twitter.

Update: The press conference will be Saturday (7/24) at 4:30pm in room 33A for all Comic-Con attendees!

The Harry Potter Alliance and JP Morgan Chase will be participating in a second press conference this weekend in San Diego at Comic-Con 2010! At this this time, we do not know the exact time or location of the press conference but we will update with more information as soon as possible. We are working to see if we can broadcast this event live as well. Stay tuned..

Andrew Slack, the executive director of The Harry Potter Alliance, and Melissa Anelli from our Board of Directors, will be present at the press conference. In addition, both are also speaking at Comic-Con on Sunday, July 25th 2:00pm on the Harry Potter Fandom Panel.

2:00-3:00 Harry Potter Fandom Panel— This summer sees the Harry Potter series and fandom slip into the future with the close of filming on Deathly Hallows and the grand opening of The Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Orlando. What is the impact on the fans, fandom, and their future? Insights from Melissa Anelli (webmaster of The Leaky Cauldron and author of Harry: A History), Darren Criss (actor/composer, A Very Potter Musical, A Very Potter Sequel), Leslie Combemale (ArtInsights Gallery, official/exclusive HP art supplier), Eddie Newquist (executive producer, Harry Potter: The Exhibition) and Andrew Slack (HP Alliance Creator and Executive Producer). Moderated by Heidi Tandy (HPEF/Ascendio 2012, FictionAlley). Room 24ABC

If you missed the first press conference at Infinitus 2010 in Orlando, you can check out the footage from the live broadcast over at our livestream.

UPDATE #2: The press conference is over now, but we should have some footage and pictures soon! Thank you everyone!

UPDATE: The press conference is live at http://www.livestream.com/sayaha NOW!

The press conference where The Harry Potter Alliance will receive the check for $250,000 is today at 12:30pm in Orlando, Florida in the midst of Infinitus 2010. Among the attendees will be Melissa Anelli, Paul DeGeorge, and Matt Maggiacomo from our board of directors, and Andrew Slack himself is there to accept the check from Chase.

We’re working to find out if it will be livestreaming anywhere, so stay tuned.

On Monday, at 11:59pm EST, The Harry Potter Alliance won the grand prize of $250,000 from the Chase Community Giving challenge on Facebook. There was a lot of cheering involved. For those who don’t know, I’m Kate and I’m one of the Co-coordinators for this project. I helped Andrew and The HPA Staff get organized as we strategized and pushed to get our voters over to Facebook. I think I did okay. I want to tell you a little bit of the story behind this competition.

It was a month long contest, and during the entire span, the entire four weeks, The HPA was in either 1^st, 2^nd, or 3^rd place. We never dropped lower than that at any point, and we were only in 3^rd place for two or three days at most.

I thought we were the underdogs, but when you think about those rankings, it just seems patently untrue. In hindsight, we were more like Vocal Adrenaline. Or at least, those rankings make it appear that we were The-Force-To-Be-Reckoned-With.

But in truth, we felt very much like the underdogs here. We found out early on that last time, that third place and up had gotten… get this… 90,000+  votes.

90,000+ votes? We couldn’t do that. We knew it. We were scared. “Should we even bother pouring our sweat and blood into this project if that’s what we have to reach? Maybe we should just shoot for a 20K prize.” A couple of things made us go for it anyway. Firstly, last time the prize was $1 million, so the stakes were much, much, much higher. Secondly, a lot of organizations that have excellent social networking systems and a big online following… well, most of those organizations made a bid for that $1 million last time, and therefore were ineligible to compete this time around. So we decided to go for it. We went all in.

And in the end we didn’t get 90,000+ votes. We got a little big over 38,000.  And we won. This time, the contest happened on an entirely different, an entirely smaller scale. I remember telling Andrew a week into the contest “Look, the way things are going, I sincerely doubt the winner this time will have anywhere near 100,000 votes.” (Invisible Children, the winners last time, had 120,000+). Boy, I’m glad I was right about that.

But smaller scale or not, I am still stunned when I think about the final week of the Chase Community Giving Contest. I still catch myself thinking, “Wait, we actually won?” I don’t think it’s sunk in yet. I don’t think it will for a while.

Those of you who joined our staff during the past weeks, you heard me repeat over and over and over “We CAN do this! We WILL do this.” I truly believed that we had the potential to win, but even still… a small part of me felt like a liar every single time I made that bold assertion. This past week has taught me not to doubt. Not to doubt myself, not to doubt the HPA’s staff, not to doubt the hundreds of volunteers who poured in to help Monday evening, not to doubt Nerdfighteria or Youtube, and not to doubt that people in the world truly do care about making it more awesome – we only need the chance.

I cannot thank everyone who deserves to be thanked for making this happen, there are simply too many of you. But I do want to thank a few people for helping me keep my pickles during our aptly-named “insanity week.” Thank you to Michelle, my HPAFTW co-coordinator extraordinaire. Thank you to Taekia my Staff Coordinator of Awesomesauce who kinda turned into a co-coordinator of this project despite declaring she’d “keep out of it.” Thank you to senior staffer Karen, who didn’t have the time, but found some anyway, to make it to our livestreams and save me when I was too exhausted to cheer everyone on. To all the managers and regular HPA staffers who worked their collective asses off to contact HUNDREDS of other Harry Potter fan sites, other fandoms, livejournals, facebook groups, you guys deserve to preserved in jelly so that in the future we can pick apart your brains and figure out how you managed to be so cool.  To everyone who voted, thank you.

To my HPAFTW staff: I watched you guys grow from 5 to 200 in a matter of weeks. And without you, we would never have gotten first place. I don’t know how you all managed to put up with hearing me talk for so long on livestream, but I love you all. I have never had so much fun in a Skype chat in my life. DFTBA guys, and I hope you all stick around and join our regular staff.

And finally, to Mr. Andrew Slack: Thank you for working tirelessly, even when things looked grim for a while. Thank you for your Buffy-inspired speeches. And thank you for calling me up that day, two and half years ago, and inviting me onto The HPA Staff. I would not be the person I am today without The Harry Potter Alliance.

So that’s the end of my speech-ifying! Folks, stick around. We’ll have more news for you about HPAFTW very, very soon.

For those of you who are interested, I’ll be on Livestream in about an hour (9:30pm EST). You’re welcome to join.

The Harry Potter Alliance has won first place in the the Chase Community Giving Challenge, which means we have won $250,000. Voting ended on Monday at 11:59pm EST. It was a tense and crazy night, but we did it. Thanks to everyone who voted and supported us! We’ll have more info soon, but for now our staff is taking a brief, but well-deserved rest.

Congratulate yourselves, we couldn’t have done it without you.