HumanKindMedia

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So when I was done choosing my media palette for my Google home page, I ended up with three different daily quotation offerings. On one side of my page I get lofty quotes from Lao Tzu, like "Stay at the center and let all things take their course," and on the other side, just below my weather report, I get stuff from Dave Barry, like "Electricity is actually made up of extremely tiny particles called electrons that you cannot see with the naked eye unless you have been drinking." The other day, in the third set of quotations, I found "A tragedy, the person who does nothing because they can only do a little."

Not here at HumanKind Media. You and I are all about the opposite of that tragedy: We know that millions of people doing just a little can end up creating a giant, quiet movement to heal the world.

What do women need?

Aliaa, an artist in Egypt, has been working with women in the small fishing village of El Max for several years, helping them develop skills and strengthening their community. We wrote about Aliaa's group, Gudran, which is helping this fishing village regain its economic health and local pride, in September. Here's the story of the work Aliaa is doing, in her own words.

Looking for a chance

by Aliaa El Gready, artistic counselor, Gudran Association for Art and Development, Egypt

There are many people who work to help women, whether on economic or social issues, issues within the family, and others. In my time in the Egyptian fishing village of El Max, Alexandria, I have focused on this question: What does a woman here miss and need in her life?

3 ideas for changing your media diet

Editor's note: Though we suggest a 5% media shift in this post, in this 2008 New Year Post, we upped our aspiration to 10%!

If you've ever done that little experiment where you track your food intake for a week, you've noticed that you eat stuff you don't really care about, yes, and some stuff that isn't even satisfying -- it's just something to keep your mouth busy. And then you're left hungry for substance, but stuffed. Unless you're in your 20s and can eat anything without any noticeable side effects, you eventually start to substitute -- a little more of the good stuff, a little less of the stuff that doesn't contribute to the healthiest, happiest you.

What would inspire you to run 31 miles?

If you know me, you know I don't run. Sure, I can do a few minutes on the treadmill. Okay, maybe 10 minutes. So you can guess how impressed I was at Lisa Shannon's decision to help support women in eastern Congo -- who are suffering from almost a decade of violent conflict -- by putting on a pair of sneakers and pushing herself to run a 31-mile fund-raiser of her own invention.

That run became Run for Congo Women, which over the past few years has raised money to support hundreds of women through Women for Women International.

Check out our interview with the inspiring Lisa Shannon.

Filling a need for unconventional media: Potentia

"In a world inundated with information, there is a need for unconventional media." This is the message and mission of Potentia Media, the brainchild and heartchild of Amanda Jones, part of our focus this month on helping women heal the world. If you're going to indulge in more media today, make three of those indulgences short stops at Potentia's home , their Projects page, and Potentia Foundation's Keep A Girl in School film. And make the fourth Liz's new column.

Amanda first touched the spark of her longing to help create change during her wanderings as a travel writer and photographer. While traveling in the developing world, she wrote about and photographed some of the most remote tribes, and saw how underused women around the world seemed to be. "They were almost invisible, they had no voice, they were rarely present, and accompanied by men," she says.

Can the fate of the world depend on the fate of women?

There's a reason that three of the eight U.N. Millennium Goals specifically mention women: In regions where women's lives are the worst, changing their lives means changing the course of entire countries.

Check out this most elegant presentation of staggering data from Potentia Foundation, an organization we'll hear more from in the coming weeks: We live in a world where 1.2 billion people (that's four United States of Americas) live on less than $1 a day, and 11 million kids die each year before age 5. There are 4 million new HIV infections every year. One in three women will be beaten, raped, or killed each year, and 1 million girls will be forced to marry before they're 15 years old.

However: When a girl in a developing country receives six years of school, she cuts her risk of poverty by 60 percent. Her risk of HIV infection halves. She's less likely to be forced to marry, be sold into the sex trade, or stay with an abusive partner. Her children are 40 percent more likely to survive childhood. She's five times more likely to send her own kids to school.

Lamed Vovniks, all

Whew! Liz and I are at a crossroads today. Our HumanKind Media launch in early September on ending poverty and our efforts to help people change their media diet to 5 percent more "possibility" and 5 percent less conventional media brought us more readers than we had hoped. And, our HumanKind Challenge #1 helped purchase a bunch of bed nets (which, by the way, is one of the single most effective things you can possibly do to help end world poverty). We're still shooting for 2,000 nets, but we're patient.

Hey, you're gorgeous!

In the interest of more love = more possibility, I signed up to receive free stickers a couple months ago that say, in no uncertain terms, "You are beautiful." It's not vanity -- it's a project meant to get people to stick these silvery little things on anything and everything in their hometown, take a picture, and send a high-rez version to the people who run the site. So, strangers who see the stickers around town might find themselves ambushed by a warm fuzzy feeling, and people who visit the web site get to feel a little connection with others who are trying to spread all that warm fuzziness. Now this is my kind of media project!

Anyway, I was going through a pile of mail today and voila! Amid the bills, the magazine subscriptions, and bank statements, were my stickers! I'm beautiful! You're beautiful! Warm fuzzies for everyone!

I'm going out right now to spread the love. To get your own stickers, send an SASE to the people of You Are Beautiful here.

Paying it forward with the Global Oneness Project

Here we are already at four weeks of HumanKind Media. When we started this little media experiment, we wanted to see if offering a small shift, maybe 5 percent, in the average daily media consumption, would make a difference in our shared social narrative: 5 percent less violence, consumerism, gossip, and division, and 5 percent more possibilities. Five percent less media that takes away, and 5 percent more that gives something. We count the Global Oneness Project as a perfect example of media that gives.

While I was researching for Help a Woman, Heal the World, I discovered Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee, founder and director of the Global Oneness Project. After a career as a professional jazz musician, Emmanuel followed his own longing to make an impact and found himself in the non-profit world, where, working for the Kalleopeia Foundation, a private family foundation, he said he "saw a need people have for media that focuses on what brings us together." Continue to video: