What are we building at WhyUnite? In a nutshell, our vision is to create a global network of teams who are collaborating virtually on new projects to help the Faith.
Thank you so much for checking out our site. We’re so excited to have you here.
My name is Nathan Thomas and I’m an author and creator of content about the Baha’i Faith. In the late 2000s, my wife and I started WhyUnite to share our materials with the world. Over the years we’ve seen a growing community of people of tremendous capacity reaching out with creative ways they are using our content.
During the 2020 pandemic, we asked ourselves how we could use this platform to start taking WhyUnite to the next level.
Our vision is founded on a few key principles.
First, the Baha’i community has a lot of talented people whose – we think – full capacity is not being harnessed. This includes artists, designers, writers, programmers, marketers, product managers, lawyers, professors, and more. We are constantly amazed at the diversity of talents and untapped capacity in our Baha’i community. We thought about what we could do if we channeled the talents of these people around the world?
Second, not everyone can move to Chicago, New York, or Haifa to work directly for the Faith full-time. But what if that wasn’t required? What if we could take 2 or 3 hours from people all over the world and put them to work on focused efforts to create Baha’i-inspired content that our audiences really want? We might not be able to get 5 people full-time to give us 200 hours, but what about 50 people giving us 4 hours each. And if we have the right tools, we can get the best ideas and creative talents from people.
The reality is that technology today is the ultimate multiplier. Abdu’l-Baha used to say that in this age, one believer was like 1000 in the past. When you think about what we can do with the technology platforms available to us today really anything is possible!
I’ll give you an example of the potential here. There’s a web app called WhatsApp, maybe some of you have heard of it. I remember one of the founders once said in an interview that with the automation and cloud technologies they were using, they could effectively run that web app with 50 engineers. That web app was reaching over 1 billion people at the time of that interview. It’s more now. But think about that. The work of 50 people was reaching over 1 billion people! There’s never been a time like this!
The problem, as we see it, is that it’s not enough to rely on people to work randomly on side projects and hope that all their creative efforts will pay off.
What many of us know in technology is that the one-man band is mostly a myth. What really creates magic is the empowered teams of cross-functional people focused on building, learning, launching, and iterating on a solution over some extended time. In technology, we know that version one of anything is almost always terrible. It’s the tracer shot. It tells us what won’t work. But we can’t get to version 2, version 3, version 4 unless we do that version 1. We have to make that effort systematically and consistently. We can use the modern tools and frameworks that have worked for all these great innovations of our age to discover what our audiences really want from us.
It’s not that hard. It just requires a committed team with the right tools. So, we at WhyUnite have partnered with Collective Nexus, which is a software company that makes community empowerment software that harnesses the untapped capacity of groups of people in engaging and effective ways.
We know we are just getting started here. But we’re excited to kick this off and start learning how to do this. We’re excited to connect with like-minded professionals in all kinds of fields and professions to bring them together around the goal of creating content and products that will empower people to learn about the Baha’i Faith and how it can change lives.
If this vision inspires you, we invite you to look at the open roles for our teams. If you find something that connects with you please reach out to us to find out more.
We’re trying to build a global network of teams making content that could really make a difference in the world. So, if this inspires you and you’re a fit for what we’re looking for, send in your resume and apply for one of the roles. Otherwise, you may know someone else who might be a good fit. Please, please, please ask them to check us out.
The fact is, working on our first version of WhyUnite, writing the books, interviewing Baha’is and hearing their stories, creating a set of courses about living the Baha’i Life, and exploring the history of this religion were some of the most rewarding experiences of our spiritual lives. This work is fun. It is inspiring. It is challenging (in a good way). It pushed us like nothing else. And it was good. It was meaningful. And it felt like we really used all our talents (and many new ones we had to learn along the way) to help the Faith. There is nothing like feeling you are fully engaged in service to humanity.
We want to share that feeling. We want to engage motivated believers all over the world in a community of creatives focused on making content that people want.
I hope if this is something that inspires you, that you reach out to us. We cannot do this without you!