Do Celebrities Really Help Online Causes?

by Zachary Sniderman

The Stars of Social Good Series is supported by CITGO and the Fueling Good Campaign, helping to change the world one mile at a time through contributions to local charities.

Justin Bieber wants you to build a school, Bono wants you to help Africa, Ed Helms wants you to stop Malaria, the San Francisco Giants are supporting LGBT youths, Stephen Colbert wants you to help students in need. More than ever, celebrities are pairing up with social good campaigns as a way to, presumably, help shine a light on some worthy causes.

No doubt they do — Lady Gaga’s partnership with the Robin Hood Foundation brought millions more people (and potentially dollars) to help New York’s homeless and impoverished. But do celebrities really help those organizations in the long run? Does Lady Gaga’s one-off concert partnership help Robin Hood five years from now?

Celebrities and non-profits have long formed a strange relationship. What may appear like a perfect union in ads and commercials can be the result of careful brand stewardship and pages of contracts and legalese. The celeb gets some good publicity and the non-profit gets a boost in its numbers. On the other hand, sometimes they really are good matches, when a cause resonates deeply with a celebrity committed to doing good.

READ MORE:

http://mashable.com/2011/06/29/celebrities-social-good/

Photo: Google

Trafficking of Boys Who Dream

As South Africa prepared to host the 2010 World Cup, the focus was on many of the continent’s brightest stars in soccer, including Chelsea’s Didier Drogba and Inter Milan’s Samuel Eto’o. Correspondent Mariana van Zeller explores the dark side to the sport’s global popularity, what has been called “the new slave trade.”

http://current.com/shows/vanguard/episodes/season-four/soccers-lost-boys/

Photo by Jamie McDonald, Getty Images

Stop Human Trafficking App Challenge

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
June 14, 2011
Public Information: 202-712-4810

www.usaid.gov

WASHINGTON, D.C. - The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), in partnership with the Demi and Ashton Foundation (DNA) and NetHope Inc. announced the launch of the Stop Human Trafficking App Challenge, a contest to develop the most effective mobile technology application to combat trafficking in persons in Russia. Leveraging the culture of innovation thriving in Russia and broadly across the region, the contest aims to raise awareness of trafficking in Russia and help civil society organizations provide services to survivors.

The technology application that wins the Grand Prize will be implemented in Russia through a pilot project with an anti-trafficking organization. Through DNA, the Grand Prize winner will also receive $15,000 and travel expenses to the 2011 Annual Meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) in New York, New York. The Second Prize winner will receive $10,000 and travel expenses to CGI.

Contestants from Russia, Eastern Europe, and the Commonwealth of Independent States, including Diaspora communities, can submit entries through August 8, 2011. Once the contest closes, stakeholders – including Russian anti-trafficking organizations, international non-governmental organizations, technology companies and the public – will be invited to judge submissions based on their usefulness in preventing trafficking, raising awareness, or providing services to survivors; innovativeness; ease of use; and potential for large-scale application. The ultimate goal of this program is to find an effective application that can be scaled up and replicated across Eastern Europe and other geographic regions in the future.

To enter the contest or for further details, please go to: www.nethope.org/appchallenge

For more information about USAID, visit www.usaid.gov.
For more information about DNA, visit: http://www.demiandashton.org

http://www.usaid.gov/press/releases/2011/pr110614.html

Photo: Google

Airs July 3rd

Damian Lewis and Wunmi Mosaku star in Stolen, a one-off drama about human trafficking due to be shown on BBC One on Sunday 3 July 2011.

Human trafficking is the subject of Stolen, a one-off drama due to be shown on BBC One on Sunday 3 July 2011. The 90 minute film follows the story of Detective Inspector Anthony Carter (played by Damian Lewis) and three children. He works in the Human Trafficking Unit, dealing with exploited children being smuggled into the UK. These children are brought to the UK for a better life but end up working illegally outside the system

Carter has a wall of snapshots in his office of unknown children who have been smuggled into the UK to be enslaved and exploited: Rosemary (played by Gloria Oyewumi) 11, is a terrorised young girl from West Africa, who thought she was coming to England to be educated. She is sold as a house servant. Kim Pak (played by Huy Pham), 15, is a gardener in a Vietnamese cannabis house, imprisoned in a semi in suburbia. Georgie (played by Innokentijs Vitkevies), 14, from the Ukraine, is put to work making sandwiches.

Stolen also features Vicky McClure as DC Manda Healy and Wunmi Mosaku as Sonia Carey.

Read more at Suite101: Stolen: BBC Drama Tackles Human Trafficking | Suite101.com http://www.suite101.com/content/stolen-bbc-drama-tackles-human-trafficking-a377582#ixzz1QnRzRr00

For more information about the drama on BBC: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b012g030

Photo credited to BBC

What’s next for rescued slaves?

CNN’s Mallika Kapur reported on how more than 500 slaves were rescued from a brick kiln in southern India. But what happens to the victims after the rescue?

http://thecnnfreedomproject.blogs.cnn.com/2011/06/29/whats-next-for-rescued-slaves/

Photo credited to The CNN Freedom Project

Women fight sexual harassment with their mobile phones

(CNN) — By now, everybody knows that mobile technology has transformed the way we share information.

Now a digital network called Hollaback! is using the latest tech to change the way victims and witnesses react to sexual harassment.

Hollaback!, which launched as an app and website where victims of sexual abuse could report incidents, plans to launch a new app in March 2012 that will let bystanders report cases of sexual harassment as well.

The new network will be called “I’ve Got Your Back,” and the group is currently raising money for the project through the crowd-funding site IndieGoGo.

They plan to launch Android and iPhone apps, as well as an online map that aggregates reports from people who witness harassment.

The campaign was motivated out of a desire to “map something happy,” said Emily May, co-founder and executive director of Hollaback!.

“What ‘happy’ happens in the world of street harassment? What about when people intervene?” May told CNN.

Hollaback!’s previous efforts have focused on getting victims of sexual abuse to report crimes online.

The group began in 2005 as a blog run by a group of friends living in New York. Each member had come into contact with behavior on the streets of New York that made them feel victimized, and reporting harassment to the police didn’t seem to help, they said.

The blog re-launched on the global platform iHollaback.org in September of 2010 and smartphone apps debuted in November. By allowing victims of street harassment to share their experiences, and even send pictures, the campaign quickly caught on internationally. Hollaback! now has blogs in 24 cities around the world, with 30 more set to launch in August.

READ MORE

http://edition.cnn.com/2011/TECH/mobile/06/27/mobile.tools.combat.harassment/

Photo credited to Hollaback!

More focus needed on forced labor

Michelle Goldberg

Modern human slavery isn’t just about sex trafficking—up to 27 million people are forced into labor in the global economy, from tomatoes to electronics to American military contracting in places like Iraq. Michelle Goldberg on our underreported slave trade.

June 28, 2011 10:55 PM EDT

When Americans think about human trafficking, they tend to think about sexual slavery. The very real stories of girls sold to brothels or tricked into prostitution by gangsters are great fodder for journalists. They attract the kind of celebrity commitment that puts causes on the map—see, for example, last week’s Demi Moore-hosted CNN special about sex slaves in Nepal.

The issue certainly deserves our attention—indeed, its horrors can scarcely be overstated. But as the State Department’s 2011 Trafficking in Persons report makes clear, sexual bondage is only a part of a much larger and more insidious evil. Modern slavery isn’t just about sex. Huge parts of the global economy, from tomatoes to electronics to American military contracting, are tied up with forced labor.

“Many people who work on this, work on this because sex trafficking awoke them to action,” says Luis CdeBaca, director of the State Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons. But in fighting slavery, he says, “getting to a place where we are looking at domestic servitude, agriculture and factories as well as prostitution is the natural next step.”

Releasing the annual trafficking report on Monday,Hillary Clinton pointed out that as many as 27 million men, women, and children worldwide are victims of modern-day slavery. The report doesn’t contain a breakdown of various types of trafficking, but CdeBaca says labor trafficking is the most prevalent type. “The dusty images of slaves working on plantations line bookshelves and museum walls, but the demand for cheap goods in a globalized economy sustains slavery today in fields and farms,” the report says.

READ MORE

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/06/28/world-s-hidden-slave-trade-includes-forced-labor-in-u-s-military-contracting.html

Photo credited to ChinaFotoPress / AP Photo

How Social Media Can Reinvigorate Consumer Advocacy

March 18, 2011 by Jeremy Heimans

Jeremy Heimans is the CEO and co-founder of Purpose.com, a home for creating 21st century movements. He is a co-founder of some of the world’s largest online political and social movements including Avaaz.org and GetUp.org.

Some of the world’s smartest people are currently at work creating online platforms like Groupon and Gilt Groupe that make consumption more social, game-like and addictive. By combining clever behavioral economics with the immediacy and universality of the social web, we’ve never been better at tricking people into buying stuff.

What if we used those same dark arts and new technologies to actively shift our consumption away from mere products and more toward the consumer behavior and brands that are part of the solution? The 21st century needs a revitalized consumer movement that does just that.

READ MORE

http://mashable.com/2011/03/18/social-media-consumer-advocacy/

Philippines boosts effort to fight human traffickers

Sunshine Lichauco de Leon in Manila
The Guardian, Tuesday 28 June 2011

When Anne was given a chance to work abroad as a waitress, it was an offer she could not refuse. Life in her impoverished village of Tarlac, north of Manila, offered few opportunities. Her family did not have money to care for her sick brother. “The recruiter was from our town,” she recalls. “I was told that all girls they recruited now have better lives and can help their families. It was as if God sent me an answer to my problems.”

Within a few weeks, Anne, then 16, was working in a sex den in Malaysia.

“When we arrived, they took me to a hotel room with my new boss and he raped me. After that I was sold to different men, sometimes 10 men a day,” she says. “We were sex slaves. The only rest we had was to go to the toilet. They beat us if we refused to do what a customer wanted. And our boss had men who held us down and forced us to use drugs.” Anne and 60 other Filipinas worked under slave like conditions – under constant watch by guards and sleeping on the floor in padlocked rooms: “They would starve us – sometimes three of us would share a cup of noodles. And if we did not make enough money, we did not eat.”

Anne became one of the lucky ones when a customer helped her escape. But she is just one of tens of thousands of Filipinas trafficked each year, women whose stories might end differently but share the same beginnings. Local human traffickers target the poorest communities, lure young girls and women away with promises of a better job and trap them with no resources, contacts and very little chance of escape.

The Philippines has become very fertile ground for human traffickers. Because many live in poverty , the remittances sent home by relatives working abroad improve the lives of families left behind and fuel the country’s economic growth. But this has also led to a “culture of migration”. Cecilia Flores-Oebanda, president of Visayan Forum, a Philippine NGO campaigning against human trafficking, explains: “The majority of Filipinos believe that finding work outside the country is the only way to have a better life.”

It is this desperation to take any job opportunity, combined with the porous borders of the archipelago’s 7,000 islands and widespread corruption among government agencies that have allowed trafficking to operate with impunity. For the past two years, the Philippines has been on a US Department of State watch list of countries that America thinks could do better at combatting traffickers.

READ MORE

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jun/28/philippines-boosts-fight-human-traffickers

Photo: Google

How U.S. Budget Cuts Prolong Global Slavery

By E. Benjamin Skinner

Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Three days before the U.S. congressional elections last fall, Hillary Clinton stood halfway around the world from Washington, pledging to young victims of human trafficking at Cambodia’s Siem Reap Center that they would continue to enjoy the support of the U.S. State Department, which then provided some $336,000 to the shelter. The acclaimed center, situated near the magnificent temples of Angkor Wat, was an oasis of peace for some 50 survivors who, before they were rescued or escaped, had endured slavery in brothels, where they were forced to have sex with as many as 30 men a day. At the shelter, they received counseling, studied hairdressing, learned to sew, and otherwise worked to rebuild their lives and reclaim their humanity. In the evenings, they did aerobics together.

On Monday afternoon, some eight months after that visit, as she unveiled the State Department’s 11th annual Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Report to a packed room in the department’s ornate Benjamin Franklin Room, Clinton only hinted that the result of the congressional elections had left in doubt the long-term value of her pledge to the survivors. “Even in these tight economic times, we need to find ways to do better,” Clinton told the overflowing crowd.(Watch “Nepal: Escaped from the Sex Trade, Unable to Go Home.”)

Clinton’s confidence belied the fact that in April, Congress slashed the grant-making capacity of the State Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons. When the Republicans won the House last November, the office’s $21.2 million annual budget to fight the war on slavery was already microscopic. At the time, it was barely equal to the U.S. government’s daily budget to fight the war on drugs. For fiscal year 2012, Congress sliced away nearly a quarter of those antislavery funds, as part of its broader $8 billion State Department budget cuts.

For Mark Lagon, a former Republican staffer on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who headed the TIP office during the Bush Administration’s second term, the budget cuts are “a sign that all programs are evenly hit, even those with broad nonpartisan support.” But Lagon was troubled that shoestring yet lifesaving overseas antislavery programs would feel those cuts most dearly. “We need to spend 10 times as much on fighting human trafficking and ending slavery,” said Lagon, “and it would still be a bargain even at that price.”

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2080202,00.html#ixzz1QbwYsf00

Photograph credited to Evan Vucci / AFP / Getty Images

CNN- Clinton: We are shining a light

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sits down with CNN’s Jim Clancy to explain what the annual Trafficking In Persons Report does and how the U.S. helps countries tackle their own slavery problems.

http://thecnnfreedomproject.blogs.cnn.com/2011/06/27/clinton-we-are-shining-a-light/

To read more about the Trafficking In Persons Report: http://www.cnn.com/2011/POLITICS/06/27/human.trafficking/index.html?eref=rss_politics&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+rss%2Fcnn_allpolitics+(RSS%3A+Politics)

Photo: U.S. Department of State

Kristen Stewart makes a donation to kick slavery

Beaverton, OR

Monday, June 27, 2011