It was hard to figure out what were the good causes, the bad causes, even the good politics and the bad politics. So we started taking requests and figuring it out.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
We campaigned on the fact that we were going to have to take difficult decisions because of the state of the public finances. When we got into government we discovered that actually the public finances were in an even worse state than we thought.
Causes was founded with the mission of empowering anyone to change the world. Our model is based upon the belief that everyone has the power to have an outsized impact on the world by banding together with other like-minded individuals, taking direct action, and inspiring their friends and their friends' friends to join in.
Supporting causes with whatever we do can be effective.
The electronic media introduced this idea to the larger audience very, very quickly. We spent years and years and years meeting with activists all over Europe to lay the groundwork for a political response, as we did here.
If there is a political cause, then there has to be a political solution.
In the final analysis, the questions of why bad things happen to good people transmutes itself into some very different questions, no longer asking why something happened, but asking how we will respond, what we intend to do now that it happened.
People were concerned about national security, and that precluded us from having the opportunity to break through on the issues that we cared most about - the economy, education and health care.
You elected government officials to make decisions and it's about time they started making good ones.
The first point was we wanted power to determine our own destiny in our own black community. And what we had done is, we wanted to write a program that was straightforward to the people. We didn't want to give a long dissertation.
So I went into government with a clear mind about what the problems were, and what needed to be done.