Imagine a world in which people's love for fantasy and magic meets Brandeis values. A place where fictional characters can inspire 100,000 people to work together to build a better world and fight for the greater good. Sounds like fantasy, right? Not to Brandeis alumnus Andrew Slack '02, creator of the Harry Potter Alliance. On Oct. 10, 2005, Slack officially founded the HPA, an organization that "uses people's love and inspiration from Harry Potter to fight for social justice." HPA uses characters from author J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter novels as models in their fight for social justice.

The organization now has three full-time staff members including Slack, a volunteer staff and 80 chapters. Slack's organization communicates via social media like Twitter and Facebook with over 100,000 Harry Potter fans to encourage and inspire them to act as heroes in our own world by advocating and initiating social justice projects.

HPA has focused its efforts on several social justice projects since its inception. It raised $123,000 for Partners in Health in Haiti, which resulted in the deployment of five cargo planes to Haiti, all of which were named after different Harry Potter characters. HPA also raised $4,000 for a village in Rwanda to help fund anti-genocide efforts. In addition, HPA focused its efforts on advocating equality for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer individuals by supporting Wrock 4 Equality, a campaign to prevent the passage of an act that would repeal gay marriage in Maine in October 2009.

"What we've created is a movement of popular culture to social change," says Slack, who managed to harness the inspiration of the Harry Potter books and use them to encourage people to advocate and work toward social change.

When asked what inspired him to start HPA, Slack credits his time studying at Brandeis more than anything else.

"When I went into Brandeis, my love for the arts as an artist myself and my love for literature and storytelling became fused with a love for activism," Slack says. "My professors [at Brandeis] were some of the most extraordinary human beings I've ever had the pleasure to meet," Slack explains.

But his friends were ultimately what inspired him to seek social change and create the Harry Potter Alliance.

"My fellow students and I collaborated on so many things, having late-night conversations about how we could change the world," Slack says.

"Brandeis is an intellectually stimulating campus, a spiritually stimulating campus," Slack says. "It is a campus that values things that you don't hear about too often. Unless you're a Brandeis student, you don't completely understand the magic that Brandeis has like Hogwarts. ... There's just this sense of magic in the air at Brandeis."

Social justice is the fourth pillar of Brandeis. But to this social entrepreneur, that doesn't say enough. For alumni like Slack, "social justice at Brandeis isn't just social justice. It is figuring out how to maximize social justice in ways that are creative and have never been done before."

Slack thinks of Brandeis as a laboratory for social justice, but he did not come up with the idea right away. "It was a clumsy beginning," he says. The idea, Slack explains, came from a blog he started whose themes centered around Harry Potter and social justice. "I began talking about the connection between social justice and Harry Potter, [and] I began thinking, 'You know, this is not enough. I would like this to be an organization.'"

Then he joined forces with the band Harry and the Potters. Slack told them about his idea to start Dumbledore's Army for the real world. Dumbledore's Army, a group of wizards in the Harry Potter series, fight against injustices like the evil antagonist Lord Voldemort. The Harry Potter Alliance does this in the real world by encouraging and working on social justice initiatives.

Eventually, Slack, his best friend Seth Reibstein '02 and Paul DeGeorge of Harry and the Potters started the Alliance. Slack credits Myspace specifically for help promoting the organization.

"Everything changed when I found out about the power of Myspace," Slack says. "I wrote an action alert about the Harry Potter Alliance, and Paul re-posted it to tens of thousands of Myspace friends."

A couple of days later, thousands of people joined the Harry Potter Alliance, according to Slack. The HPA also got recognition and "communication with some of the bigger Harry Potter fan sites, The Leaky Cauldron and MuggleNet. From there, everything continued to get better," Slack says.

"We continued to get media, and J.K. Rowling praised us in Time Magazine," Slack says. "In 2008, we established a board of directors, we registered ourselves as a nonprofit, and I began building a staff that is amazing, chapters that are amazing and we now have a volunteer staff, three full-time employees including myself and eighty chapters across the world."

Although he does not have a formula for success, Slack nevertheless had plenty of advice to offer.

"Try to surround yourself with people who are intelligent and who understand and respect your vision," he says.

"For me, I fortunately have a mom that is just totally into whatever I want to do," Slack says.

"I also have family members who continue to say they are proud of me but they want to know why I wasn't going to grad school. ... I thought it was an adventure, I said 'this is awesome.'"

Slack suggests taking advantage of every opportunity students have, especially at Brandeis.

"But really, when you're at Brandeis right now, you are surrounded by professors who are prestigious. Get them on board. E-mail other people out there who are the heads of entrepreneurial endeavors who are academics in the field you're interested in and get them on your advisory board," Slack says.

"Lay out your vision. Talk about it with friends. No idea is perfect. An idea can always get better. But no idea is wrong, either," he says.