HumanKindMedia

A surprise next door

Our premise when we started HumanKind Media was that the more people heard stories about regular people taking on some of the big-ticket suffering in the world, the more possibilities we as humans would envision for ending that suffering. Since we started, we've learned that there are gazillions of those people and stories, and while we enjoy relaying them to you, we're really having fun finding them. Not surprisingly, you don't have to go far before you trip over a story about someone who's decided to create the change they want to see in the world. Meet my neighbor, Ellen.

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.

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:

Beyond Bono

"Where you live in the world should not determine whether you live." Bono

The first I heard of the One Campaign was when Audrey told me about hearing U2 frontman Bono's plea to the 2005 TED conference , a meeting of the brightest and best thought leaders in the world. He was that year's recipient of three wishes granted by TED attendees , and he made them all for Africa. It's a powerful speech that I hope you'll bookmark and listen to.

While there's nothing like a celebrity to draw a crowd to a cause, for me it's still about one story at a time, one unique person doing something with his or her own individual gifts -- Jeff Sachs studying the economic failures of the past, Ze Frank considering possibility, Chris Baty getting friends together to write novels and build libraries. One story at a time about people-- who don't have billions or celebrity-- who are creating, connecting, and changing things gets me thinking about what I could do.

How can two people save a fishing village in Egypt?

I'm still at sleepover camp for writers and artists here in Vermont, and I've got to tell you about the world-changing project one of the artists here founded in Egypt.

In 2000, husband and wife team Sameh El Halawany and Aliaa El Gready wanted to find a way to use art to help one of their country's last fishing villages, El Max, lift itself out of poverty and save itself from being razed. With an initial grant of about $3,000 from the Ford Foundation, they formed Gudran and moved into the village.

First, they tried to pitch their ideas to the local fishermen, but that didn't go so well, Sameh says.