Leadership

I started We Are Americans Foundation because of a question I heard over and over, in different words, from very different people.

For more than ten years I have worked in government relations, public policy, legal affairs, and federal service. I have sat on the government side of the table and I have sat with residents trying to get something out of it. The question people asked me was almost never about politics. It was practical. Who do I call. Does a letter actually do anything. Am I allowed to go to that meeting. Will speaking up hurt my case.

Every one of those questions has an answer. Most of the time, nobody had given it to them.

I also noticed who was asking. Often it was someone who had studied the Constitution in a second language, passed a citizenship test most native born Americans would fail, and then found that nobody had written down what came next. They had done the hard part. They were stuck on the part that should have been easy.

That is a solvable problem, and it is the reason this organization exists.

We are not here to build a following or to move anyone toward a position. We are here so that a person can find out how their government works, figure out who to contact, walk into a public meeting knowing what happens there, and decide for themselves what to do with that.

I have spent enough time around government to know that the system responds to people who understand it. Our job is to make sure understanding it is not a privilege.

If you have a question we have not answered yet, tell us. That is usually how the next page gets written.

Meenahil ChaudharyPresident and Founder