User:Acerbix/sandbox

Etymology and origin
The name Avaaz (Persian: آواز, Devanagari:आवाज़) was derived from the Persian word for 'voice' (also 'sound' or 'song'), which has also been borrowed into Hindi, Urdu, Bangla, Punjabi, Marathi, Sindhi and Turkish.

Avaaz.org was co-founded by Res Publica, a "community of public sector professionals dedicated to promoting good governance, civic virtue and deliberative democracy", and MoveOn.org, an American non-profit progressive public policy advocacy group funded by George Soros. It was also supported by Service Employees International Union, a founding partner, and GetUp!, an Australian non-profit campaigning organization.

Avaaz's individual co-founders include Ricken Patel, Tom Pravda, former Virginia congressman Tom Perriello, MoveOn Executive Director Eli Pariser, Australian progressive entrepreneur David Madden, Jeremy Heimans (co-founders of Purpose.com), and Andrea Woodhouse The board consists of Ricken Patel (president), Tom Pravda (secretary), Eli Pariser (board chairman), and Ben Brandzel (treasurer).

Avaaz's founding President and Executive Director is the Canadian-British Ricken Patel. Patel was born in Edmonton, Canada. His mother is Russian-English and his father is an Indian born South African. He attended school on a Native American Reservation where he was bullied. He studied PPE (Politics, Philosophy, Economics) at Balliol College, Oxford University and joined in during tuition fee protests in 1998. He received a Masters in Public Policy from Harvard University, where he was a part of the protests demanding a living wage for the school's workers. He worked for the International Crisis Group around the world, including in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Sudan and Afghanistan, where he says "he learnt how to bring rebel forces to the negotiation table, to monitor elections (covertly), to restore public faith in once corrupt political systems and to spot when foreign forces were being manipulated." He returned to the US and volunteered for MoveOn.org, where he learned how to use online tools for activism. In 2012, GQ India listed Ricken as one of the most powerful Digital Indians.

Since April 2012, Avaaz has a new feature: website tools to allow any registered users to instantly start their own online petitions, tell friends, and campaign.