Bad News For Bad Actors
Erin · In-house · 2025–26 · Role: Executive Director
A national platform built from scratch: a reporting tool, a community map and a playbook for taking on corporate harm.
How do you answer thousands of letters from people hurt by corporations, when there’s only one Erin Brockovich?
Some days it feels like America got hijacked by corporate spreadsheets. A lot of executives care far more about quarterly earnings than about the people drinking the water downstream of their factories.
The agencies meant to referee all this, the EPA and FDA included, are underfunded, tangled in red tape or sidelined. Thousands of families end up stranded on an island, waiting for a rescue crew that isn’t coming.
In 2024, I sat down with Erin Brockovich in a noisy LA diner over a crispy chicken burger. She told me about the thousands of letters in her inbox: strange cancer clusters, well water that tastes like chemicals, medicines that did more harm than good. One woman can’t answer all those letters, no matter how legendary she is.
So we built Erin: a community-powered platform that gives everyday people the tools to report corporate harm and fight back together, and sometimes in court. Every report becomes a live dot on a shared map, turning one family’s story into a pattern corporate lawyers can’t wave away.
Manifesto
Greedy corporations only care for their shareholder value. But we don’t have to stand for their BS. When they lie, deny, and manipulate the facts, we can hold them accountable. When communities find contaminants in their water, fires fueled with negligence, products causing harm, or medicines that hurt instead of heal, Erin is the antidote.
Erin isn’t just one woman’s fight. It’s a movement that helps people take real action. It’s a community that supports and uplifts.
Together, we’re taking back the power and putting people first. What corporations try to hide, we shine a light on. When they try to hush it up, we raise our voice. Where they try to intimidate, we rise up together. When they defend the status quo, we fight for change that makes an impact.
They want us to take it sitting down. So we stand up. Stand with Erin.
The Erin Brand
America does not agree on much right now, so we built a brand that acts like an open front porch. If you or someone you love got hurt by corporate negligence, you belong here, regardless of who you voted for. Red state or blue, industrial pollution tastes the same.
Most advocacy groups speak in a dreary, somber monotone. You can see why, because the subjects are heavy. But we made a different call. Erin deals with heartbreaking issues, but the brand itself is warm, hopeful, and colorful. Joining a fight should feel like stepping into a room full of allies, not sitting through a wake. We wanted activism that feels empowering, practical, and maybe even a little exciting.
How It Works
Everything runs on the ERIN Engine: Empower, Reveal, Investigate, Navigate. It kicks in the second someone tells us what is happening in their town.
Empower: We acknowledge the frustration, then pivot straight to action. We move people from “Why is this happening to my family?” to “Here is how I take my power back.” Every message lands in one place, backed by tools to act instead of just cope.
Reveal: Through our reporting tool, people share what they are seeing in their own plain language, upload photos or lab results, and turn a quiet suspicion into usable evidence. Every report adds a pin to the map. One story is a sad anecdote. Twenty stories in the same zip code is a cluster nobody can ignore.
Investigate: Corporate defense teams count on normal people getting overwhelmed by legal bureaucracy. Erin hands you a simple playbook and one core rule: You do not have to win the whole fight today, just move the ball ten yards.
Navigate: Proving the problem is only step one. Erin provides a clear roadmap from the kitchen table to the local water boards and city councils that failed you. And if the officials in charge refuse to fix it, Erin helps you run for their seats.
Stories from the Frontlines of Harm
We cover stories from small farming towns, suburban cul-de-sacs, red districts, and blue cities, because corporate shortcuts do not care about state lines. Many of these folks started by sending a letter to Erin, only to realize their neighbors were fighting the exact same battle alone.
Our goal is to help these residents become leaders in their own backyards: organizing their block, running for the local utility board, or replacing local officials who forgot who they work for.
The Poisoning of America’s Farms
State officials dropped by Penny and Lawrence Higgins’ farm to tell them to stop drinking their own well water. Then the rest of the story came out. Decades of dumped industrial sludge had saturated their soil with PFAS “forever chemicals.” Almost overnight, their crops, their livestock, and the peaceful life they had built were gone.
They were not about to let silent regulators and polluters take their family home. This farming couple started knocking on doors, rallied hundreds of neighbors, stood up to state representatives, and exposed a sludge crisis threatening farm communities nationwide.
Betrayal at Camp Lejeune
Retired Marine Corps Master Sergeant Jerry Ensminger spent his career training Marines. Then he discovered the military was fully aware of the toxic drinking water at Camp Lejeune, which was the same water linked to the leukemia that took his nine-year-old daughter, Janey. For three decades, nearly a million service members and their families drank and bathed in contaminated water.
He turned grief into relentless pressure. Ensminger spent years digging through archived military records, exposing one of the worst environmental disasters on US soil. He organized thousands of military families, fought government cover-ups, and ultimately got a landmark federal law passed in his daughter’s memory.
Defeating City Hall
When Hannibal, Missouri, quietly decided to treat its drinking water with ammonia chloramines, local resident Kellie Cookson got worried about what it would do to vulnerable neighbors. The all-male city council brushed her off like she was being dramatic. So she started organizing local mothers in hair salons, school drop-off lines, and parks.
She faced personal attacks and political scare tactics, but the momentum kept growing, especially once Erin Brockovich joined the push. Backed by thousands of petition signatures and a landslide ballot measure, Kellie got the chemicals removed from the town’s water. Then, for good measure, she ran for a seat on the very utility board that had tried to silence her, and she won.
What I did
Co-founded Erin with Erin Brockovich and ran the whole ship: brand strategy, product vision, budget and the creative team.
Took it from the back of an envelope to a living platform.
Worked side by side with Erin to turn forty years of street-level advocacy into digital tools regular people can actually use.
Built a digital brand that carries the trust millions of people put in Erin Brockovich, without feeling corporate or cold.
Managed hiring, agency partners and the day-to-day design work.
Erin Brockovich can’t answer every letter. Now she doesn’t have to.
Want to talk about work like this?
Email me or find me on LinkedIn.