Celebrating the Art of Empowerment

The decade-old social-networking site Care2, which has empowered millions of people to lead healthy, sustainable lifestyles and support important causes, announced recently that its PetitionSite has surpassed 100 million petition signatures to support human rights, the environment, animals and other causes.

"When we started the PetitionSite over 12 years ago, it was a grand experiment to empower individuals to start online petitions and make a difference," Care2 Founder and President Randy Paynter said in a press release. "Critics laughed and said it wouldn't work.

"Today, nearly 20 million Care2 members have demonstrated the incredible collective power each one of us has to change the world," he added.

Care2's PetitionSite has helped individuals and its more than 1,000 nonprofit partners win countless victories for vital causes, including:

• Helping concerned parent Shannan Nelson get fast-food giants to stop using pink slime in their menus;
• protecting vital fish off the United States Mid-Atlantic coast through comprehensive legislative reform including the first ever protection for river herring that are critically important to the health of the ocean's ecosystem;
• calling on President Obama to enact a National Plan to Address Alzheimer's Disease, which was released this past May;
• protecting students in Jackson, Miss., from being handcuffed as punishment for noncriminal activity (with AlterNet);
• ensuring that high-school student Maverick Couch's stand for equality does not get him suspended from school (with Lambda Legal);
• protecting 1,400 acres of the San Francisco Bay's natural wetlands from a Cargill development project;
• assisting in banning commercial shark fishing in the Bahamas and turning the country's 240,000 square miles of ocean to a shark sanctuary (with Bahamas National Trust);
• helping persuade the U.K. government to create the largest protected marine reserve in the world — the Chagos Islands, in the Indian Ocean;
• helping gain passage of the Matthew Shepard Act, a law that makes it illegal to commit hate crimes (with the Human Rights Campaign); and
• helping protect western Oregon's old growth forests from being destroyed by a plan to open them up to logging (with The Wilderness Society).

Other recent PetitionSite milestones include increasing petition signers 60 percent year over year and growing the Care2 Take Action Platform to extend the power of Care2 petitions across 230 media partners with a combined reach of more than 150 million people.