Join #gno Twitter Party Tuesday to Share and Learn Tips to End Violence Against Women
March 11, 2010 by Jyl Johnson Pattee · 2 Comments
Monday, March 8 marked International Women’s Day. While not a formally recognized holiday in the US, events and conferences took place in many states as well as all over the world. Avon, in an effort to end violence against women, made a grant of $1.5 Million to the Avon Center for Women and Justice to help combat violence against women internationally.
Join Avon at the #gno Twitter party this Tuesday, March 16 from 9-11 ET (8 CT, 7 MT, and 6 PT) for an awareness raising conversation about how to take action and help end domestic violence, sexual abuse, and human trafficking. There is so much we all can be doing. Share and learn tips for ways in which you can empower women around the world and make a difference.
What: Girls’ Night Out (#gno) Twitter party (Click here to learn about #gno!)- When: Tuesday, March 16, 9-11 p.m. EST (8CT, 7 MT, & 6 PT)
- Where: Party with us on our very own Custom Tweetgrid! Check back Tuesday for the link. (Use hashtags #gno and #avoniwd.)
- Topic: Ending Violence Against Women World Wide
- Who: @avonprnewsflash @dianascimone
- Party Favors: Click here to enter for a chance to win this week’s giveaway. Deadline: 3/17
- RSVP: Use Mr. Linky below (enter the twitter URL and your twitter ID (e.g., http://twitter.com/jyl_momIF).
Note: Mom It Forward accepts paid sponsorships for most #gno Twitter parties. During the parties, brand sponsors provide tips, techniques, expert advice, and information on party topics. Mom It Forward is grateful for the giveaway prizes, coupons, and discounts that sponsors also provide to the Mom It Forward community in conjunction with #gno Twitter parties.
Giveaway! Win an Avon Prize Pack That Helps End Violence Against Women
March 11, 2010 by Jyl Johnson Pattee · 40 Comments
This week, I’m excited to announce that our giveaway not only benefits the winners, but when purchased, this week’s prize funds and supports programs to raise awareness for issues of domestic violence, human trafficking, and sexual assault.
In 2008, Avon Products, Inc. and the Avon Foundation introduced the company’s first-ever global fundraising product, the Women’s Empowerment Bracelet, designed to save and improve women’s lives worldwide. Now, just two years later, Avon sells an entire line of Empowerment products including a necklace, and the NEW T-shirt, and ring.
This week’s 10 lucky winners will each receive the entire line of Empowerment products, including a t-shirt, necklace, bracelet, and ring. Along with these stylish empowering products, you will also receive a booklet informing you on ways in which you can help further the cause to help end violence against women.
Entry Requirements
Please do the following three things to enter for a chance to win and leave a separate comment for each:
- Follow @avonprnewsflash on Twitter.
XXX - Click here, check out the Avon Empowerment line, and leave a comment on this post, sharing which product you’d enjoy.
XXXX - Post these messages on Twitter and leave comments here with a link to your tweets:
GIVEAWAY! Enter 2 win @avonprnewsflash Prize Pack (10 winners) http://bit.ly/cLwTzZ #avoniwd#gno PLS RT
XXXXJoin #gno Twitter chat 3/16—9-11 ET w/@avonprnewsflash 2 lrn tips 2 hlp end violence against women http://bit.ly/9S7rzL #avoniwd RT
Extra Entries
The following four entries are completely optional and will earn you one extra entry each. Leave a separate comment on this post for each completed entry.
- Share a tip for how to prevent or raise awareness to end domestic violence, sexual abuse, and/or human trafficking.
- Follow @momitforward on Twitter.
- Become a Friend of Mom It Forward’s Google Friend Connect (see box in right sidebar).
- Subscribe to the Mom It Forward RSS feed (click on orange heart at the top of the right sidebar).
Terms and Conditions
No purchase necessary to enter. Giveaway ends at midnight ET Wednesday, March 17, 2010. No more than one entry per person via each of the methods listed in the Giveaway details. The odds of winning a Giveaway depend on the number of entries. Winners will be selected randomly by Mom It Forward. All decisions of Mom It Forward are final. Employees of Mom It Forward and the Giveaway sponsor are not eligible to participate. All entries received after the Giveaway closing date and time will not be considered. Entries that do not follow all of the entry requirements will not be considered. Winners will be notified via email and will have 24 hours to confirm receipt of the e-mail. If the winner does not reply within 24 hours, another winner will be selected. Open to participants who are residents of the US 18 years and older. Void in Maine. Void where prohibited. Taxes on Giveaways are solely the responsibility of the winner. Winner agrees to permit Mom It Forward and the Giveaway Sponsor to use her or his name, voice, photo, or likeness for reasonable promotional and marketing purposes for up to 90 days after the end of the Giveaway. Mom It Forward and Sponsor are not liable for late or misdirected entries, entry errors, or transmission problems. Mom It Forward reserves the right to terminate the Giveaway in the event of technical problems, or to correct typographical or technical errors, or to amend these rules. All participants should review the Mom It Forward disclosure and privacy policies. By entering, participants agree to release and hold harmless Mom It Forward, Sponsor, and their respective parents, subsidiaries, affiliates, directors, officers, employees, and agents from any and all liability or any injuries, loss, or damage of any kind arising from or in connection with a Giveaway. Mom It Forward will provide the name of the winner for any Giveaway, upon request, for 90 days after that Giveaway’s entry period ends. Unless otherwise provided by the Sponsor, no substitution, transfer, or assignment of prizes is permitted. Non-winning entries from one Giveaway are not carried forward to future Giveaways.
How Are You Supporting International Women’s Day Today?
March 8, 2010 by Jyl Johnson Pattee · 2 Comments
While at my in-laws for dinner tonight, I asked: “So, what’s everyone doing to support International Women’s Day (IWD) tomorrow?” My mother-in-law replied: “It’s a real holiday?”
She recently returned from 18 months in Ukraine. While there, she learned about IWD when some locals asked her and my father-in-law what we did in the United States to celebrate.
My mother-in-law had never heard of IWD so she explained that we celebrated Mother’s Day here. Their Ukrainian friends’ response: “But what about the women who aren’t mothers?”
Touche!
While the US hasn’t declared IWD an official national holiday, it has dedicated the entire month of March to Womens’ History Month and the United Nations and many organizations, including prominent companies, put on conferences during this time to further promote and address women’s issues and rights focusing this year’s theme on “Equal Rights, Equal Opportunities: Progress for All.” (Click here to read conference summaries and progress/challenges.)
So, why is this important? What does this have to do with me as I sit behind my computer in my little corner of the world and you as you sit behind yours?
I watched this video and marveled at how relentlessly Iranian women are fighting for a chance to enjoy the gender equality freedoms I take for granted. I read this article that stated, “A growing number of countries have legislation that supports sexual and reproductive health and promotes gender equality. Nevertheless, maternal mortality remains unacceptably high, too few women have access to family planning, and violence against women remains a cause for global shame.”
I sit here behind my computer with the opportunity to work and provide for my family and I am haunted by a scene of 12-year-old girls dancing in the night market in Bangkok right out in the open with hardly any clothes on for all to see, for some to take advantage of. Taken from their homes. No mothers to care for them. I couldn’t take it in. I didn’t know what to do. Global shame doesn’t begin to describe the anger and helplessness that I felt in that moment and still feel 8 years later as I write this post. I turned my head. I kept walking. What could I do? The scene has never left my mind. But maybe there is more I can do. Maybe there’s more we all can do to further equality and rights and justice for women everywhere.
I am excited to be partnering with Avon to promote their commitment to help end violence for women world wide in support of IWD.
As I have researched and watched the #iwd hashtag on Twitter, here’s ways to learn more or get involved:
- Check out this site, which has a searchable database of events listed by country and state/city. Is there one in your area? Next year, Utah is going to be on that list!
- Choose an issue that speaks to you, like this one on maternal health perhaps, and look for ways to support the organizations that are dedicated to progressing these causes.
- Check out organizations like Vital Voices and attend one of their celebrations this week.
- Read this article and learn five things you can do to help support IWD.
- Watch the videos below and others like it to be more informed on global issues and how you can help.
- If nothing else, tweet your support for IWD (#iwd) and connect with women globally who share your support. Maybe together we can all make a difference!
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Photo above used with permission from: http://www.flickr.com/photos/george/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0Avon Donates $1.75 Million to End Violence Against Women Worldwide
March 2, 2010 by Jyl Johnson Pattee · Leave a Comment
Many companies, organizations, and brands give back. But the one I am highlighting today is a company I have a particular fondness for—Avon, Inc. I had the pleasure of getting up close and personal with Avon while working on a 2-year project with them a little over 10 years ago. I became so close with one woman in fact that she actually flew out to Utah from Tennessee to throw me my first baby shower. That type of kindness and love was common at all levels in the organization.
Avon’s tagline is: the company for women. While they may dedicate a lot of R&D to making great products, I’ve witnessed firsthand Avon’s passion for helping women succeed in their personal and professional lives as well. This passion starts at the tippy top of the company and oozes out of every Representative you meet. So, learning last week that Avon just announced plans to set up partnerships, secure grants, and donate money to end violence against women is not surprising to me.
Did you know that one in three women worldwide experience violence in their lifetime? And did you know that in the U.S. alone, a woman is assaulted every nine seconds? Around the world, services for victims are often vastly underfunded or unavailable, and in many countries, laws to protect women do not exist or are not enforced.
To help eradicate violence against women and help ensure justice for all women worldwide , Avon:
- Secured a $1.5 million grant to launch the Avon Global Center for Women and Justice at Cornell Law School. This new center will focus on working with judges, legal professionals, governmental and non-governmental organizations to improve access to justice in an effort to eliminate violence against women and girls.
- Expanded its relationship with the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) with a new commitment of $250,000 for the UN Trust Fund to End Violence against Women, which will be added to the grant of $1 million awarded in 2008 for the Trust Fund.
- Is donating 100% of the proceeds from these products—the Empowerment necklace, bracelet, and ring and t-shirt. I bought a t-shirt today. It was a small thing, but a simple way in which I could contribute to the cause.
Avon believes that when women are empowered they can make their dreams a beautiful reality.
March 8 is International Women’s Day. What can you do to help empower women and further their rights and justice worldwide?
To learn more and to help, connect with these organizations online: @UNIFEM and Facebook.com/UNIFEM.
Photo courtesy of Flickr.Note: I am participating in a social media campaign with Avon to help end violence for women. While the topics I address and the details I provide in my posts during the campaign are at my sole discretion, I am receiving compensation for the time I put in to writing them.
Born to Fly International Announces Sept. 9 Twitterthon to Fight Child Slavery
September 7, 2009 by Jyl Johnson Pattee · 5 Comments
A Florida-based journalist turned abolitionist recently named in Huffington Post as one of the “Top 10 Women Warriors of Twitter” has launched “09-09-09” – a one-day Twitterthon initiative on September 9, 2009, to raise funds to fight child trafficking.
Diana Scimone, a veteran journalist who has chronicled the $9.5 billion-a-year human trafficking industry for years, founded the non-profit Born to Fly International to help end child slavery. Scimone’s 09-09-09 Twitterthon goal is for 9,000 people to give $9 each – the $81,000 needed to start printing a new child-trafficking awareness book and curriculum by Scimone and illustrator Leah Wiedemer. “Each year more than a million children are lured into slavery around the world,” Scimone said. “Imagine what a dent we can make in the trafficking pipeline if we educate kids and their parents about the tactics traffickers use before they show up at their doorstep.”
While there are many reasons why a child may be trafficked (sadly, some are knowingly sold into slavery by their parents), Born to Fly works specifically to educate the millions of children and parents who are lured into slavery by false promises of “employment” and a better life for a child. The centerpiece of the Born to Fly project is a picture book – wordless so it doesn’t have to be translated into hundreds of languages – that teaches children to make wise choices. A companion curriculum will reinforce the important concepts in the book.
The curriculum and book illustrations are nearly complete. The final layout is scheduled for October. If enough funds are raised, printing will start in December. Born to Fly will then ship to a waiting list of schools, missions and aid organizations in North America and as far away as Ghana, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, India and Bulgaria. “Our goal is to give the books away without charge, of course. So we are counting on our crowdfunding to help get this done.”
Enter the 09-09-09 Twitterthon.
Crowdfunding 101
Twitter has become a major source of crowdfunding – raising funds by appealing to large numbers of ordinary people for small donations. The 09-09-09 project, which has its own special twitter account – @09_09_09 – was featured prominently in a recent article on Mashable.com entitled A Guide to Crowdfunding Success. The Mashable Twitter account has nearly 1.2 million followers, and Mashable.com is one of the most respected social media authorities on the web. Scimone says the attention should help Born to Fly reach its 09-09-09 goal: “Lots of awareness, lots of strong new relationships, and lots of money.”
Scimone, who regularly tweets as @dianascimone where she has 1,500 followers, says Twitter could not have arrived at a better time. “What I love about Twitter is the community,” explains Scimone. “Twitter connects me with people I don’t know, but should.” Many companies have even donated prizes to give away during the Twitterthon. Everyone who donates $9 will be eligible for a prize drawing. (The prizes include original artwork, handcrafted sterling silver jewelry and plenty more. Scimone is announcing a prize each day leading up to 09-09-09 on her blog – www.dianascimone.com.)
Children as young as pre-schoolers are lured into modern-day slavery all over the world, including in the United States, where they’re raped for profit—night after night. Scimone wants her followers to get angry about this and to do something about it. “Traffickers think kids are commodities,” said Scimone. “On 9/9/09, I challenge my twitter followers to tell kids they’re priceless.”
The Born to Fly Project 09-09-09 Twitterthon Challenge:
• Donate: Go to www.born2fly.org and use the orange Chip-in button to donate $9.
• Twitter: Tweet about it. Follow @09_09_09. Add a Twibbon after you’ve donated.
• Email: Tell 9 people about 09-09-09 and send them to www.born2fly.org where they can donate via the Chip-in button.
• Blog: Post about 09-09-09. Include the logo and a link to www.born2fly.org.
• Facebook: Talk about 09-09-09; include a link to www.born2fly.org.
• Updates: Check Diana Scimone’s blog for the latest: www.dianascimone.com
For more about the Born to Fly Project, visit www.born2fly.org.
Diana Scimone’s Back Story
Born to Fly International founder and director Diana Scimone is a journalist who has traveled to more than 40 countries including Sudan, Zimbabwe, Thailand, China and India.
“As a journalist I’ve seen a lot. I’ve been to a refugee camp in Sudan, an orphanage overflowing with “throw-away” kids in China, and a home for AIDS orphans in Zimbabwe. Nothing, however, prepared me for what I saw in Mumbai (formerly Bombay), India: cages that held little girls—some as young as 5 years old—smuggled in from Nepal.
“That’s when I first learned about the global child sex trade and began to write about it. On that trip I interviewed a young teenager whose boyfriend had drugged her and sold her to a madam. The stories did not get prettier. In Pattaya, Thailand, I remember a banner hanging over an intersection in the red-light district proclaiming this was “boys town.” In most areas where child sex slavery flourishes, girls are for sale, but this particular area specialized in young boys.
“I’ve stood at border crossings into Cambodia and Myanmar, knowing that children were trafficked across the border along with cattle, chickens, and rice. The real shock was to learn that child trafficking is not just across the globe but also across the street. The problem has grown so bad in my own city of Orlando, Florida, that we now have a human trafficking coalition as well as a prayer group that focuses specifically on the problem.”
Born to Fly International—One Woman’s Goal to Stop Human Trafficking
April 10, 2009 by Brooke Naylor · 4 Comments
The sun was setting in Mumbai, India, as a guide quietly drove journalist Diana Scimone down a crowded street. It wasn’t your usual tourist destination. It was Falkland Road, Mumbai’s notorious red-light district.
Scimone was covering a story on forced prostitution in India. The driver and his wife, who were the head of a charity that helped these women, wanted Scimone to see some of the conditions the women lived in.
“It was shocking, to say the least,” she said. “The look on their faces was total hopelessness. But what I remember most was when my contact pointed out the vague outline of cages in upper floor windows.”
Scimone soon learned that’s where brothel owners keep little girls who are smuggled in from other countries. The girls—sometimes only 5 years old—are caged like animals for a month, abused, tortured,or raped—until they no longer have a will to rebel.
“I think at that moment my life changed,” Scimone said.
Not only did Scimone’s life change, but so would the lives of many children whom she would help. Not long after that trip, Scimone founded Born to Fly International (B2F), a non-profit organization that works to stop child trafficking worldwide.
As a journalist, Scimone has traveled to more than 40 countries, including China, Zimbabwe, Sudan, India, Thailand, and more, reporting on human rights.
“I’ve seen up close and personal—a lot more up close and personal than I’d like—the devastation that many of the world’s children face,” she said. “I founded B2F to meet some of those needs. I knew we couldn’t fix every hurt, but the one that made me passionately angry is child trafficking, so that’s the issue we focus on.”
According to B2F’s website, 1.2 million children are trafficked each year for sex around the world. The average age of sex workers around the world is 11, but some are as young as 5. Even in the United States, more than 100,000 children and young women are trafficked.
“When kids get trafficked for sex or slavery, it’s usually because they don’t know any better,” Scimone explains. “Someone shows up at their doorstep and promises them the moon—and they believe it. They really think they’re going to be models or waitresses or nannies. Likewise, their parents really think their daughters will get an education in the big city. ‘Just sign here,’ the traffickers promise, and the kids are never seen again.”
Scimone knew if she could warn kids and parents ahead of time, she could drastically cut the numbers of kids who are trafficked.
“Wherever awareness training takes place, the rate of trafficking plummets,” the website states. “There’s just not enough nor is it available to kids in most high-risk areas. That’s the hole that B2F is designed to fill.”
The centerpiece of the B2F Project is a wordless book, created by Scimone, to educate children, families and teachers about grave dangers of human trafficking. The book, entitled Born to Fly, is an allegory about the realities of child trafficking that teaches children to make wise decisions to avoid being thrust into such a world. The book is wordless so that any child around the world can understand it, without having it translated in countless different languages. Parents who are illiterate can “read” it also.
“We’re in the final stages of illustrating that right now and hope to have it finished by fall,” she said. “Meanwhile we’re raising the funds to print and distribute it. We need about $300,000 to get everything into the hands of kids around the world.”
Scimone is also writing a curriculum to go along with the book, which Born to Fly will distribute all over the world to schools and non-profit organizations that work with children.
She points out that child trafficking happens not just around the world, but also around the corner. “It happens in every country—including the United States,” she says. “We have a huge problem with human trafficking in every state—adults and children. Just Google the name of your state and the word trafficking and you’ll see what I mean.”
“It’s very inspiring to know that the work we’re doing with Born to Fly could literally change someone’s life—even save their life,” Scimone said.
While most children are too young to get involved in this particular cause, teaching them the importance of volunteer work and to respect different cultures is essential, Scimone said.
“I think it’s critical to begin involving even young children in volunteer work,” she said. “If it becomes part of their life while they’re children, that sense of giving will continue when they become adults.”
And not only is it important for children to understand the importance of volunteer work, but it’s important adults understand as well.
“Ask yourself, ‘What makes me really angry? What makes me cry?’” Scimone said. “That’s where your passion lies, and where you should invest your time and energy.”
For more information on Scimone, Born to Fly, or to get involved, go to www.born2fly.org. (Photos (c) by Diana Scimone.)
Diana Scimone is a journalist who has reported extensively on issues of human rights around the world. She founded Born to Fly International to help stop child trafficking both globally and locally. Diana is also author of the Adventures With PawPaw children’s book series. She writes a regular blog, and loves following new people on Twitter (@DianaScimone).
