About the Yes Men

A big part of the Yes Men's aims has been to help advocacy orgs use trickstery fun to further campaigns, and we've been doing that for the past 15 years. About 1/2 of the projects listed on our website fall into that formal but ad-hoc model; partners are listed on each one. (In the latest project, for example, one of our team partnered up with this group to make that project happen.)

We started doing this—partnering—sort of instinctually and chaotically back in the late 1990s, and then more deliberately after a successful project from 2004 that Greenpeace had a big hand in.

Then, around 2007, we began trying to build a more formal sort of workshop machine, that we called (and call) the Yes Lab. For a while, we helped produce partnership-based projects from the New School and NYU on a regular basis—but that was full-time plus, so only made sense when one of us had a salary and there was funding for others.

We went even further down that rabbit-hole with the Action Switchboard, a platform for individuals to propose projects and find collaborators independently. But guess what? As it turns out, it's super-difficult and expensive to build a platform and even harder to make it come alive and maintain it.

So now we're back to the formal but ad-hoc model that began in 2004, where one or more of the Yes Men work somewhat loosely with an activist org to publicize our common issues. We also still organize occasional Yes Lab workshops, usually at the request of universities or sometimes activist organizations, but mainly it's much more project-based.

Oh, and after several giant fails (only one small part of one big, failed project is even mentioned on our site), we're steering clear of electoral politics—except in the broad-strokes, culture-changing approach of the latest newspaper project.

To partner with the Yes Men on an issue of interest to your group (the main way we keep going financially), drop us a line. To organize a workshop, read about the Yes Lab here. For practical advice about Yes Men techniques and the like, check out our Cookbook, which explains pretty much everything that we do—we think. To learn more about the Yes Men and what we've done, see our movies or browse our museum of websites.

(If you're a creative type who wants to make meaningful, concrete electoral change, and you work well with others, we highly recommend joining a local group like the Creative Resistance, whose videos—according to some pollsters and other pros, as well as the candidates in whose districts there were sometimes ten times as many video views as the final vote margin—are a big reason the New York State government is now fully blue, and hence capable of forming a meaningful part of the resistance to Trump. But that's a whole other story....)