We call ourselves a “For Benefit” company.  To us, that means that everything we do should benefit the world around us.  But in the black-and-white world of for-profit and not-for-profit, we're a for-profit company.

We have a really simple reason for not running JUST CAUSE as a non-profit (which we thought about doing.) We think there’s a bigger bottom line. For too long, too many businesses have made messes in the world around them, and depended on small, under-funded and under-staffed non-profits to clean up those messes.  We have a secret desire to be part of a business revolution that will result in businesses adopting practices that benefit the world around them.

We know we’ll fall short of our goals.  And we’ll have good reasons.  Moreover, we’ll share those reasons with you.  We will be creating a report card for ourselves that lists all of our goals as a “For Benefit” company.  We’ll tell you how we’re doing, because if we can’t meet our goals, there are probably others who can’t either.  By working together to look at the problems, maybe we can all come up with solutions together.

That depends on where you live.  JUST CAUSE has created a fabulous distribution network by teaming up with City Magazines in cities across the country.  So, if you live in one of “our” cities – Seattle, Chicago, Atlanta, for example – then the only way to subscribe is to subscribe to that city magazine, and you’ll get JUST CAUSE automatically.   If you don’t live in one of our cities, you’ll be able to subscribe online – just as soon as we’re ready for that.

It’s as easy as registering.  Once we’re up and running, you’ll be able to register as a JUST CAUSE, and you’ll get a homepage of your own.  You’ll be able to blog about your causes, communicate with people on your lists, set up and manage events to support your cause, and a whole host of other things.  If you’ve ever had a blog, or used an online social networking site like MySpace or Tribe, it’ll be very familiar to you.  If not, we promise you’ll be able to figure it out.  Right now, most of our energy is going to building the technology to do that. Our main goal as a company is to give you everything you need to go out and save the world.  If we can just get everyone to pick one little thing to do to solve problems, we figure the world will be a whole lot better, just like that.

Lots of ways.  By just writing about your cause, people all over the world will be able to read your perspective.  You’ll also be able to create lists of people to send newsletter updates to.  You’ll be part of a vibrant community and can invite others to join your cause – just like any other online social networking site.  Recent and popular blog entries will automatically filter to the “home page,” so the more you do, and the better you do it, the more visibility your cause will have.  Lastly, we publish a national print magazine, so if we see your cause getting lots of attention, or see lots of people have the same cause, it will get turned into a story for the magazine.

Here’s the deal.  We believe in freedom of speech.  We also believe that people have the right to passionately pursue the things that matter to them.  We will NOT be censoring people’s pages and feel very strongly that vibrant and engaged dialogue is the only way that progress can happen.

That said, there will be rules, and we will delete the sites of people who violate those rules.  We’ll publish the rules in-depth when we launch the networking site, but, in general, you have to be nice.  Anyone who is advocating any kind of violence against other people or their property will be deleted.  Period. Anyone who is just using the JUST CAUSE site to call other people names, belittle people, make fun of people or just be mean, will be deleted.  We hope to have lots of contrasting views represented, and we hope that the people with those contrasting views will behave ethically, kindly and with an open mind in the hopes of finding common ground and peace.

Well, that’s really up to the users, isn’t it?  But we hope that because we have such a clear and succinct editorial focus that is centered around intelligent discussion of serious causes, we’ll attract a higher caliber of user.  We’re pretty sure we’re right, but we’ll be keeping an eye on it and constantly making sure that we are offering valuable content and services for the type of people we want to attract, and not offering the kinds of things that would let it turn in to “a massive collection of crap.”  (But thanks for asking, this really matters to us!)

A lot.  And we’re working on those.  Fortunately, there have been a lot of companies working on handling this kind of security issue, so we have learned a lot from them.  We will only be providing links to registered charities, and will really try to make VERY clear that you should only give money to a registered charity.  We will provide the tools to check up on charities before you donate, and have lots and lots of educational resources about how to make the biggest impact, safely.

It doesn’t mean a thing.  We just liked it.  But, since you asked, the VAST majority of the pictures on the site were taken by our very own Matt Freedman, who is a stellar photographer.  You can check out his photos on his professional site, www.silentcolor.com.  He’s even available as a photographer, when he's not busily building the technological tools to save the world.  It’s a big job, but he gets out occasionally.