What is the Windmill Project?
We are a small group of people who have all, at one point or another in our lives, felt frustrated and angry and sad, at people and institutions that were too big, too rich, or too slow to care about us. It felt like there were too many important problems to tackle, and none of them easily solvable, so how could we possibly do anything that would make a difference?
Then we realized: every little tiny thing we do makes a little difference - often, we just don’t see it!
Maybe you:
…wrote a letter to your senator to ask them to fight for LGBTQ+ rights, and got a generic boilerplate response that didn’t actually mean anything?
Well, equal rights for LGBTQ+ people is an ongoing battle - and your senator got one more letter to get them to bend the arc towards justice. Five years from now, maybe your senator will be the one vote that stops a transphobic Supreme Court Justice from being confirmed.
Your letter contributed to that momentous vote - but you’ll never know!
…joined a local school board to make sure the anti-education movement doesn’t ban a bunch of books under the guise of ‘protecting our kids [from black and gay authors]’?
…were disgusted when a sitting president shilled for Goya beans in the Oval Office, and vowed to never buy that brand again?
Now, it’s kinda boring, and you feel like you’re just spending a lot of evenings in a smelly school gymnasium talking about budgets. But maybe a scout from Moms against Liberty came in to see if they could fund a takeover - and saw your polite, stubborn, caring face as too much trouble!
Your presence contributed to school kids still being able to read important, beautiful, vital books in a safe place - but you’ll never know!
But beans are so expensive now and that’s the only canned bean brand carried by Costco, so it is TEMPTING? Keep walking by them, start cooking dry beans in your crockpot while you’re gone to work, and next time you renew your membership, tell Costco you hate that brand.
Maybe there’s internal discussion about changing bean brands, and your vote against Goya will tip the scales - but you’ll never know it was you!
Each of just those three things - LGBTQ+ equality, keeping books in schools, and not selling out our country - are huge, and have more money than we can possibly imagine, and a whole lot of creepy powerful people behind their messages of hate.
And so we work hard to do whatever we can - writing letters, supporting our local kids, boycotting Goya - and never ever see a result! It’s so tempting… Why not put our heads down, and try to just survive the hate swirling around us?
It just… feels so overwhelming… There’s so much money and power, and we’re just one little person…
Well, here’s the good news you’ve been looking for:
At the Windmill Project, we know that we are up against behemoths,
and we do not give a f*ck.
Like Don Quixote, who tilted angrily at windmills, we are tilting at these who are actively fighting to make our shared world worse, not better.
Unlike Don Quixote, we have a good reason and a good community - we are shouting and laughing and wearing pink ruffles, glorying in being alive and making the world a better place with our presence!
So join us - we’ll tilt at these windmills together, roaring with anger and cheering with camaraderie, and the dents will add up until the windmill crumbles.
We may not ever know it was us, but that’s fine - because we’re just here to tilt!