Dear John,

This month Positive Money celebrates its ten year anniversary as a people-powered campaign driving positive change in our money and banking system. We’ve come a long way since 2010 and with your help, we hope to double our impact together in the next decade. Below we invite you to make a donation, but first  - check out the story of our first ten years and an update on recent successes...

In 2010 the world was reeling from the financial crash. The media and politicians were wrongly laying the blame on out-of-control government spending, but they’d missed something crucial - our broken money and banking system.

So a young economist called Ben Dyson started a blog, exposing the problems of our debt-based money system. Little did he know that alongside his first few hundred followers, he’d started a quiet revolution... 

As Ben and other activists started reaching out to MPs, they realised that to go up against the giants of our financial system, they’d need more than a few volunteers - they needed a people-powered movement and an official organisation. And so Positive Money was born. 

By 2013, the Bank of England’s quantitative easing programme was in full throttle. But the £445 billion it created was making the rich richer and leaving little for the rest of us. So we started calling for QE for People - public money creation to help people not financial markets.

This was quite a fringe idea at the time, but fast forward to April of this year and the Bank of England have suggested that the Government use this tool to directly finance government spending during the pandemic. Our unique combination of original research, media outreach and public pressure is working, and proves persistence pays off - we’ve succeeded in putting monetary financing firmly on the policy map.

2014 marked our first big victory when a quiet quarterly bulletin from the Bank of England confirmed what we’d been saying about money creation all along - that banks don’t just lend out other people’s savings, but create brand new money in the economy every time they give out loans. This gives banks huge power and is a big driver of inequality.

In 2016 we launched the International Movement for Monetary Reform to support sister campaign groups all over the world, which now has 26 members. By 2017, our staff team had grown to six, we’d made our first trips to political party conferences and one of our reactive videos had gone viral on social media - reaching nearly one million people in two days.

As we evolved, we expanded our mission based on three core values: to reform our money and banking system to support a fair, democratic and sustainable economy. We embarked on new research and campaigns to tackle the role of banking in causing ecological crises, to improve democracy and transparency in our central bank, and to combat the inequalities that result from our current system. With new tasks came new tools: stunts outside the Bank of England, publishing opinion polls in the press and movement-building with other groups.

In 2018, we celebrated the transformation of our QE for People campaign in the Eurozone, into a fully-fledged and impressive organisation in its own right: Positive Money Europe. We also launched The Money Question, a new home for debate and discussion about our money and banking system, and how to change it for the better.

2019 got off to an exciting start with our campaign win to stop the government’s sell-off of RBS after we delivered our 12,000-strong petition to the Treasury.

And our success continued in the spring, when Governor Mark Carney committed the Bank of England to disclosing the climate risk on its balance sheet - a change we called for just a year before in our groundbreaking report A Green Bank of England.

Mobilising voters during last December’s general election on protecting access to cash, helped us reach almost 25,000 candidates in 70% of constituencies with our campaign, and our pressure pushed Chancellor Sunak to announce future legislation on the issue.

Amidst Coronavirus, 2020 has undoubtedly been a year of turmoil, but we haven’t let that stop us. Alongside two new reports and several webinars, we’ve been shining a light on the Bank of England’s broken corporate bailout scheme. We won our first transparency campaign back in March and since then, we’ve continued calling the Bank out on the lack of social and environmental conditions attached to its corporate bailouts. 

In Parliament’s Environmental Audit Committee hearing last month we told MPs that 40,000 people have signed a petition (that’s still growing!) calling on the Bank of England to stop funding fossil fuels and to regulate the banks that do. We teamed up with SumOfUs and 350org for this campaign. We’ll keep pushing until we get a firm commitment from the Bank.

So, can you believe all this started with just a blog!? 

Positive Money’s many wins over the years have come about because together, we’re greater than the sum of our parts. It’s our people-powered movement that makes Positive Money unique and unstoppable.

We’ve come so far and achieved so much together - and all on a pretty shoe-string budget.

Imagine what we could do if we doubled our funds. We could double our staff team from 10 to 20, make more viral videos, put on bigger events and double our impact. 

John, if we’re going to make our money and banking system truly work for society, we can’t stop now. Please will you chip in now, so together we can double our impact in the next ten years? It will take you about a minute.

We can’t wait for the next ten years together. Many thanks for all your support.

Hannah, Rachel, Fran, David, Shupikai, Paul, Simon, Danisha, Anna and Zack (the whole Positive Money team!)

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