In March, 1989, a young black man living in Hyde Park, Chicago was preparing to head off to work a night shift as a pest control technician. He heard a loud banging on his door and went to check it out. By the time the 23-year-old St. Xavier College student-athlete reached the front door of his mother’s townhome, the door had been ripped off of its hinges as a group of plainclothes police officers stormed the building, opening fire and hitting the man over 12 times, including on the crown of the head and in his groin.

As he lay on the ground bleeding to death, the officers realized they had the wrong address. Rather than rush this wrongfully victimized man to the hospital, they first paused to cover-up their mistake, planting drugs in his dresser, and further assaulting him before paramedics arrived.

Doctors predicted he wouldn’t make it through the night.

72 hours later, he emerged, alive, but forever altered by this egregious case of police misconduct.

Chloe Sledd was born a year later. This man was her father.

“I remember being a little girl watching him put on a bulletproof vest under his clothes before he would leave the house because he suffers from extreme PTSD from what happened to him,” she told Black Enterprise. “Every single day that my family and I interact with my dad, we have to watch him in pain because he still has a bullet fragment lodged in his spine that can never be taken out, or else he will become a paraplegic.”

A photo of COMMUNITYx Founder & CEO, Chloe Sledd (left) and her father, Andrew Sledd (right). 

Chloe knows these tragic events are not rare occurrences. That is why she has dedicated her career to enacting change where it is most needed. From this problem, COMMUNITYx was born — A platform to connect like-minded activists and organizations of all kinds, allowing the power of communities to take on the challenges our society faces every day. 

COMMUNITYx is the place for changemakers who are addressing social issues such as police misconduct, climate change, women’s rights, poverty, voter engagement, and more!

This is an age of activism, but today’s activists have been constrained by platforms ill-suited to creating real change. This was echoed in a Pew Research Poll, which found that 77% of Americans feel social media distracts from larger issues, rather than assisting in achieving lasting impact.

Those who do seek to leverage these platforms must put in unnecessarily tedious hours scraping the sites for hashtags, discover pages, and follower lists across multiple platforms to find like-minded allies.

COMMUNITYx is a platform that is built by activists, for activists, and puts organizing and connecting around vital issues at the forefront, without the distractions of other platforms. 

Our algorithms don’t focus on the standard connection principles found on other sites, like attractiveness or social life, instead opting to focus on people’s shared hearts and minds. We want to understand who you are, where you are, and most importantly: What you care about. Your passions build the base of our platform.

We make a Call-To-Action infinitely more frictionless due to the organizing nature of our platform, and using our unique dataset we make protests, summits, marches, and more, much easier to share and attend. In the future, we are also working to implement petition creations, and even crowdfunding features.

62% of Gen Z’ers say they have the potential to impact the world, while just 19% say they believe the country is heading in the right direction. They are fed up and looking for outlets to do something about it.

There are more than 67 million Gen Zers in the US, and studies show that half of all Gen Zers in the US care about social impact.

We know that movements are only as strong as the number of people behind them. In discussions with our user-base, we have found that they would have to spend up to 70% of their time simply trying to connect with likeminded changemakers, while the nonprofit spend up to about $40K on online advertising.

It’s clear that there is a market in acting as the bridge between movements and individuals looking to join.

Since launching BETA in September 2019, we have seen over 10K connections* made on our platform, with 100% of our users uniting with allies across two or more cities, which bodes well for validating our value proposition as a strong activist network.

*A connection is when two users become connected on the CommunityX App, this statistic is based on the average of about 10 connections per user in our app as of May 2020.

In July we saw our monthly active users grow four-fold month over month, and have found early adopters in Instagram activists like Brea Baker, Sara Mora and Zellie Imani. Organizations like Freedom March NYC, Signs for Black Lives Matter, Youth vs Apocalypse, Prison From The Inside Out, Platform, and others have already begun organizing on our platform.

COMMUNITYx is a Mobile App connecting activists, organizations, and changemakers to build the types of coalitions that make an impact.

New users tell us a little bit about themselves, selecting their top causes, and we use that data to suggest like-minded changemakers in their local community (and around the world) and facilitate their connection.

Users can post Calls-To-Action like petitions, videos, images, and crowdfunding.

We are laser-focused on building meaningful and transformational user communities, but we envision future revenue growth coming from three sources.

First, Cx Events that will bring in revenue through sponsorships and ticket sales. These will be Social Impact Summits that will also drive community growth.

Secondly, in-app fundraising as a premium feature. When a user or organization uses our crowdfunding feature, we will charge a 4% fee and $0.30 per transaction. As of today, this feature is built and is being tested.

Lastly, we plan on implementing in-app ads and user promoted content to drive increasingly larger swaths of revenue as the network effect grows our user base. It is important to note here that we plan to implement ads in a way that is most valuable for our user community -- by focusing specifically on impact advertising. We believe that there is a significant opportunity to be able to help brands better target their impact and cause-focused advertising directly to consumers who will resonate most with their message. This feature is currently in development and not available yet.

COMMUNITYx is not just an “Instagram for Activism”.  Our values, our concerns, and our algorithms are fundamentally different. Where other platforms wield algorithms in favor of transactional connections resulting in artificial followings, we are dedicated to real life connections that will empower communities.

We consider the privacy and safety of our users first. We don’t tolerate hate, the incitement of violence, or other harassment or dangerous behaviors. Users who violate our policies are suspended and removed immediately. 

We also have a vital first mover advantage, and we believe that once established, users will not want to rebuild their social justice coalitions on a competing platform.

At scale, we believe our data points (who people are, where they are, and what they care about) will allow us to influence social and political change in ways previously thought impossible. 

We will be a major step forward for grassroots candidates, who can use our platform to identify possible volunteers and voters in their area to mobilize and create real change.

CEO and Founder Chloe Sledd graduated from Howard University and while there interned with The Haitian Embassy, Teach For America, and Google. Upon graduating, she worked for Google and then Emerson Collective. Her father’s story has altered her entire life and led her down this road of activism and advocacy for positive change.

Co-Founder and CTO Kourtni Marshall is a Loyola Chicago graduate. He held a tenure on the Global Leadership Team for the Black Googler Network where he helped set the direction for the organization, which has over 20 chapters. He and Chloe met while they were both working at Google in Mountain View, CA.

We have a lean team of engineers and marketers pushing toward a future where activism is as seamless in the online space as sending a Tweet or posting an Instagram.

In our view, COMMUNITYx has everything it needs to be the single most important digital organizing tool for activists and organizations, and we want you to be a part of it as an early investor. We believe we can help modern day society address its flaws and hope you join us on our mission to do so.