Real-life Dumbledore’s Army: Harry Potter fans mobilize to make the world better

While the final installment of the Harry Potter series is showing in theatres, the cinematic goodbye has not signalled the end of Dumbledore's Army. Instead, thousands of Harry Potter fans are mobilizing to make the world a better place.

The Harry Potter Alliance (HPA), started by 31-year-old fan Andrew Slack, is what he calls a "real-life Dumbledore's Army." Now in its fifth year, the group boasts approximately 100,000 members and fights for causes such as marriage equality, genocide prevention and literacy.

The HPA's goal is "to make civic engagement exciting by channeling the entertainment-saturated facets of our culture toward mobilization for deep and lasting social change."

"I think most people who love stories, they want to see something bigger than themselves," Slack told Boston.com. "Rise to a bigger occasion."

Last year, the HPA raised $123,000 for Partners in Health Haiti. Fans also rallied to purchase over 87,000 books for libraries in the Mississippi Delta region.

"The Harry Potter Alliance fights the Dark Arts in the real world by using parallels from Harry Potter. We work for human rights, equality, and a better world just as Harry and his friends did throughout the books," the official site states.

While the HPA's language often references the fictional world of Harry Potter, the activism is very real.

In the months leading up to the final film's premiere, the group's chapters focused on an issue per month, each of them labeled a "horcrux," which is called the "wickedest of magical inventions" in the books.

The seven horcux campaigns are child slavery, illiteracy, bullying, the Dementor, starvation wages, body bind and the climate crisis.

In May, the HPA's horcrux was labor violations and child slavery in the chocolate industry. Fans mailed fair-trade chocolate wrappers to Warner Bros., protesting the nonfair-trade Harry Potter-licensed chocolates.

The illiteracy horcrux is attacked annually with the HPA's Accio Books! drive.

"We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better," J.K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter series, once said. Her fans have taken her challenge to heart.