The want of an education is a human universal. These girls in Afghanistan are risking their lives to attend school. I think girls (and boys) would do the same here, if we had to. The hunger to learn is within all of us.
Amy was on the radio today, talking in a really nicely conducted one-hour interview about Girlworld. Keesha Ewers, whom we met at a fundraiser for another lovely org that supports girls’ education and women’s empowerment in Nepal, invited Amy to be a guest on her show.
It was prerecorded last week, but we didn’t hear it until it aired today. I believe you will be able to download an archive of the show from this link–it’s a 25 megabyte MP3 file that will download and you can play on your iTunes or other media player.
Keesha and Healthy You! Radio have also highlighted Girlworld as “A Holiday Gift that Counts” on the website. Wow!
The interview itself was really good. Keesha herself is very interested in educating girls, in particular as a means of preventing their becoming victims of sex trafficking, and her family is quite involved with this cause. So there’s a ton of overlap between her area of interest and ours. She really laid out this landscape in the interview, and Amy held up her end quite admirably too (yeah, I’m proud, and glad I wasn’t in the hot seat!).
We’d love to hear your comments. Ahem, once we get you the link to hear the show, that is. If you heard it, tell us what you thought!
We mentioned in our last post that we’d made up some gift cards. Since it’s getting to be giving time, here’s a look:
You’ve got the cards–there are three different ones…
We wrap them up with little raffia ties so they’re giftier.
And inside there are these little cards, so that you can tell your loved ones how much you donated in their name…
And on the back side of that card is a little menu giving a few examples of what we might spend donations on…
We invite you to email us to get some cards. No pressure to use them only to give Girlworld donations as gifts–they’re nice notecards too.
If you’d like to share it around, we can also send you a DVD of the current 20 minute work in progress cut.
On Sunday we had our “Baking a Difference” Girlworld Fundraiser Afternoon Tea and Mixer, and it was a huge success!
We want to send HUGE thanks to Liv, who masterminded, orchestrated and alchemied this event, and to Gina and Seth who hosted. You guys rule!
Liv shows off the star of her show, the Pear Ginger Cheesecake. It was uproariously good (We know where you can get one, and help Girlworld while you’re at it, hint, hint!).
Liv baked a ton of delicious desserts. From memory (left to right): Fig tarte, Pear Ginger Cheesecake, French Buttercake with pear, Almond poundcake, and in the middle, almondy shortbread cookies and gluten-free yum-yum crisps. We and others fleshed out the table with some other goodies, and there was wine and tea and coffee and …
O figs!
We put together some party favors (mainly gift cards, so you can gift people a donation to Girlworld if you like. If you’d like some, just holler, perhaps there are some gift-giving occasions coming up on your calendar? All tax deductible of course!)
Amy and I got kind of dolled up, and talked a bit to the assembled hordes, then we screened our 20 minute cut.
Bunches of lovely people, enjoying our film.
It was a really buoying event for us. Total proceeds from this event as of now are just under $1000! We are thrilled and grateful!
We’ve been planning to return to Nepal for a second round of filming in early 2011, and that money (and maybe even more importantly the support) is going to make a huge difference in our ability to do our jobs well during that trip.
Thank you all!
A great blog post today by Lisa Belkin in the Times, kind of gets to the heart of our motivations around doing Girlworld. It may be that you won’t be able to read it unless you’re subscribed to the New York Times.
If you can read it, it’s worth making your way through all the comments as well–these are normally infuriatingly vacuous and toxic in newspapers (and I don’t mean just the comments by folks whose opinions I disagree with), but thanks to some very level headed commenters, it is a pretty sane exchange.
Belkin wrote this in part in response to another post by Nick Kristoff, about the appeal of doing good work, because it seems almost too ‘doable’ not to do, once you actually get ‘over there’ to somewhere like Nepal where there is so much to be done, and where so much can be done so cheaply.
Forgive the clunky paraphrase. But both of these posts are reflective of the whys and wherefores of Girlworld.
