For the next few weeks we're focused on U.N. Millennium Development Goal #3: Promote gender equality and empower women by eliminating gender disparity in primary and secondary education. Here's why: Changing women's lives changes the course of the world. A girl in a developing country who gets six years of school cuts her risk of poverty by 60 percent, her risk of HIV/AIDS by half, and becomes five times more likely to send her own kids to school. It's powerful. Help a woman, and you help the world. Which brings us to:
HumanKind Challenge #2: Help one woman. Of course we have ideas and organizations to suggest, but we're opening it up to your infinite creativity: Help a woman, any woman, any way you can think of.
The HumanKind Challenge is our offer, here at HumanKind Media, to give you a way to hang in long enough to touch that longing and heartbreak you feel when you hear a devastating story about someone in the world suffering needlessly. The Challenge asks you to stay for just a moment with that longing, stay one more moment in that feeling of overwhelm and impossibility, and step through to wonder: What's possible? What can be done? What small step can I take?
Here are our ideas: You could check out Kiva and make a micro-loan to a female entrepreneur (read about Liz's Kiva business partner here). You can sponsor one woman for a year through Women for Women International, which gives training to women in war-torn countries so they can get on their feet and build up their communities. You can buy a copy of Monique and the Mango Rains, the proceeds of which go to support a medical clinic for women in Mali: Cabinet de Soins Monique, or Clinique Monique, which also needs direct donations. You can host an art show at your home, featuring the beautiful Monkeybiz dolls.
Maybe you know someone who knows someone. The always inspiring Potentia Foundation needs a technology partner for their Keep a Girl In School program; call Amanda Jones if you have a contact in a "cutting edge web technology" company who might want to take this on. Or you could get involved by hosting events for women's groups, or by volunteering a couple of hours for an organization that helps women. You could educate yourself about a particular issue that affects women and then make it a point to talk about it with friends, which is a way of paying attention. (The reward for paying attention is always healing, remember?)
And of course, it's not just women thousands of miles from you who need help. Support someone nearby: a mom who needs childcare so she can go to school or work, a woman fighting cancer who needs a ride to medical appointments, a woman who needs a job or someone to talk to, a girl in your community who wants a mentor.
For our first HumanKind Challenge, donate a bed net, we suggested a simple step that anyone with a computer and $10 could take to end poverty. As a new and admittedly small media venture, we were pretty surprised to get so many donations -- including two people willing to match those donations! (Thanks, Paul and Mike!) If you participated in HumanKind Challenge #1, thank you, from the bottoms of our hearts, for tapping into that longing you have to help and taking that step.
Already doing some of these things? Tell us about it! Help us inspire more actions like yours. We'll share the stories you send in, creating a bigger and bigger picture of all the ways we members of humankind are working for women, on the way to healing the world.
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