About Us

Our Story

We started this nonprofit social welfare organization in February of 2025, but our story dates back to 2018…

Back then, a dozen grassroots community organizers got together in Eugene to start an ambitious social and economic justice ballot initiative campaign that eventually became IP 2024-017 and Measure 118.

While that campaign was not ultimately able to prevail against an onslaught of corporate money, we got further than even our opponents thought we would — and we are extremely proud of that.

• We qualified IP 2024-017 for the ballot by turning in 179,000 signatures at an unprecedented low cost of $630,000 while paying petition circulators a family living wage ($44/hr). By comparison, the only other initiative petition in Oregon to qualify that year spent $2.4 million to qualify while paying their petition circulators about half as much per hour.

• The signatures we turned in where of such quality that we qualified for the ballot after the first verification pass by the Elections Division (with zero duplicates in the verification sample), something that’s generally understood to “never happen” in Oregon.

Most importantly, we learned a lot. And all those learnings are the foundation of the Direct Democracy Factory and hopefully useful stepping stones for your own ballot initiative campaign!

Why reinvent the wheel? Let’s build upon each other’s work for Justice!

Our Values

We are a values-driven organization, among them:

• We believe in people and in rules, not rulers;

• We believe that the system is not broken, it is working exactly as designed;

• We believe that there’s no hierarchy of justice — only when all justice work is done we’ll actually have Justice (with a capital "J");

• We believe that the purpose of power is to empower; and

• We value expressing the courage and flexibility to work both outside and inside the political system as is necessary.