Thirty‐four young entrepreneurs, hailing from 16 countries and targeting issues ranging from the rehabilitation of former child soldiers in Liberia to the use of agricultural waste to produce energy in Bangladesh, will vie for twenty‐five spots in a ten‐week Boulderbased incubator called the Unreasonable Institute. The mentor‐intensive Institute has developed an unusual way to involve the world in selecting its twenty‐five entrepreneurs while admitting them free of charge, testing their entrepreneurial ability, and covering its costs of operations. It’s an online platform called the Unreasonable Finalist Marketplace, where the 34 finalists in the Unreasonable Institute’s selection process showcase their ventures to the world.
This campaign from the Children’s Workforce Development Council aims to promote the value of social work and get more people to choose it as a career. Some nice copywriting which recently won an award. Two more after the jump.
LDM Film has gathered 8 filmmakers to share their vision on the challenges set by the UN for 2015, the so called Millennium Goals. A few days ago all 8 films became available for a month on YouTube.
The 8 directors are: Jane Campion, Jan Kounen, Gaspard Noé, Abderrahmane Sissako, Gael García Bernal, Mira Neir, Gus van Sant and Wim Wenders.
See all 8 films after the break.
Nice trailer for The Rethink Scholarship, an $18,000 scholarship for aspiring art directors and designers to Langara College’s Communication and Ideation Design program. The winner will also receive a 3-month internship with Rethink.
Judging the winner is based on one thing: a sketchbook. The sketchbook can be any size in terms of width and height, but it must have a hard black cover.
Former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Anan warns of the danger of excluding poor rural communities from the Internet:
“People lack many things: jobs, shelter, food, healthcare and drinkable water. Today, being cut off from basic telecommunications services is a hardship almost as acute as these other deprivations, and may, indeed reduce the chances of finding remedies to them.”
With this in mind Project FOCUS works with local organizations in rural Southwest Uganda to launch an Internet Café, providing access to information and communication previously unavailable to residents of the region. The Café will also provide technology skills training, a revenue source for a local community-run primary school, and allocate space and tools for the production of creative multi-media projects.
Web access provides communities with the opportunity to improve social welfare, and claim their voice in the global conversation on strategies for rural development. With this service, the local populace will benefit from direct links to job, educational, weather, and health information, as well as more efficient markets for produce and products.
The community Internet café will be administered by I.T. trained staff members from the local partner organization ICOD (Integrated Community Efforts for Development), and will provide technology skills training, a revenue source for a local community-run primary school, and the space and tools for the production of creative multi-media projects. Groups of local teachers, farmers, and healthcare workers in Lyantonde will be connected with respective groups in the U.S., the latter assisting the former in utilizing best-practices while searching the web for relevant materials and networks.
Barnardo’s is the biggest children’s charity in the UK, helping young people to achieve a promising future, having created The Teens’ Speech to support that effort.
Poke London created the website/blog were teenagers share their stoires, making us feel more sympathetic with their world view and not regard them as a bunch of bullies. These experiences will be edited as a short documentary to be shown on Christmas day after lunch at MySpace’s front page.
“Looking at the world and looking at ourselves through the camera lens.”
The Italian Fotografi Senza Frontiere (Photographers Without Borders) embodies the idea that the “other” always has a story to tell, and by listening to their story, they become less “other” than we thought.
Feelings and emotions frozen in a photograph are able to immortalize a moment, and to explain our differences, which are also our uniqueness.
Through photography, those who do not have a voice – and who, in the collective imagination exist only in the news – can find their own place, and in this way, can come to know themselves and relate to others.
These are our own convictions. Our projects begin from here.
In short: Fotografi Senza Frontiere is working to raise a new generation of photographers.
Once a year I teach Design Rebels, a course on socially conscious design that I created for Virginia Commonwealth University’s Graphic Design department. As part of the class the students are required to create a real world group project, based on the themes of the class, that reaches into the community beyond the school. This year the class decided to focus on the issue of local, in-season food. They’ve created an art event called Project Winterfood that will give people in the area a fun way to learn more about what grows in the area in the winter and why it’s important to eat locally grown food. This free event is this Wednesday, December 2nd, from 7-10 in Richmond, Virginia. If you’re in the area I hope you’ll consider stopping by.
This piece of art about the art of writing already got over 250.000 views at YouTube in twelve days. It is a visualization and a excerpt from the novel Going West by Maurice Gee.
“Like no other human activity reading opens up our imagination. It enables us to understand those around us. It allows us to project the future and reach back into the past. Reading can entertain, challenge and educate. We believe that reading can transform people’s lives.”
The ad is from the New Zealand Book Council. Their mission is to inspire more New Zealanders to read more; to promote reading in general, but particularly to represent and promote New Zealand writing and writers – their own artists, stories and points of view.
Overview of 37 innovation principles and inspiring examples for a better world. Made by Marc Heleven from New shoes today, a ídea factory based in Belgium.
New shoes today is a growing number of soulmates in business who give support to people and organisations on their road to creation, innovation and change. Together with clients they take on 21st century challenges. Their values: open - drive - unity - fun - care - today.
The transcript of the slideshare presentation with all links can be found here.
Smokescreen is an alternate reality game that is “not promoting a product or show,” because “its goal is to illustrate the threats, dangers and opportunities of life online” by drawing players from a younger demographic into short fifteen-minute missions that demonstrate risks to privacy and security of the Internet. Designers at Six to Start explain the game’s formula here, where player comments also discuss how visitors to the site eventually get drawn into “uncomfortable decisions.”
It is hard to surpise me with new creative work after blogging four years about social advertising. But Nuru did! In this post three gorgeous video’s all made in house. It is a combination of personal stories and animated storytelling.
Nuru, a Kiswahili word meaning “light”, is a new humanitarian organization at the crossroads of innovation and extreme poverty.
Nuru founder and CEO Jake Harriman attended the U.S. Naval Academy and served over 7 years in the Marine Corps as an Infantry Platoon Commander and a Special Operations Platoon Commander for an elite unit called Force Recon. During his career, Jake assisted in numerous humanitarian and disaster relief operations in the developing world including Indonesia and Sri Lanka after the Asian tsunami, and he completed 2 combat tours in Iraq. After witnessing the fight against terror firsthand, Jake came to believe that the war against terrorism won’t be won on the battlefield alone. It must be won by eradicating the root causes of terrorism: extreme poverty, lack of education and injustice. Jake left his old life in the Marine Corps and dedicated himself to studying humanitarian development, organizational leadership, innovation, and the problem of extreme poverty. He enrolled in Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business (GSB) where he began learning at the legendary Center for Social Innovation.
Jake Harriman tells his story in his own way in the video above.
Great use of media at YouTube from the London Metropolitan Police. You choose the ending: “Take the knife” or “Don’t take the knife”.
When writing this post 199.000 choose for option one and 191.000 choose option two. For what it’s worth, I think most people choose both.
But there are more choices to make. Try it for yourself.
These storytelling video’s are part of a campaign partly aimed to promote a new website: droptheweapons.org. The website from the Metropolitan Police is made to show how real people can turn away from violent crime.
“Know when to say no. Picking up a gun or a knife always makes a situation worse never better.”
The DIGITS campaign seeks to elevate interest in science, technology, engineering & math in the United States. It promotes “a middle school program opening minds to math and science. Figure this. Imagine that.”
A collection of illustrators, including Nate Williams, were commissioned to playfully depict hand-drawn chalkboards that would appeal to young minds.
A new PSA campaign is being launched today by KidSport BC to help raise awareness of the importance of sport in children’s lives. Developed by DDB Canada’s Vancouver office, the campaign includes three TV spots and eight radio spots that will hit airwaves on July 27th. The new campaign is the recipient of the 2009 Humanitarian Award for the British Columbia Association of Broadcasters and received $3-million of gifted media placement.
Additional creative work is planned to be in market later this year.
Oxfam International has been given a bold, typocentric makeover by Barcelona’s Hey Studio which is expected to resonate with a young Spanish audience. Oxfam pursues education, disaster management and health initiatives alongside advocacy and policy research to ensure sustainable development in combating poverty and injustice. The new look highlights issues through confronting icon-typographic mash-ups applied to a vividly coloured range of products from posters to pencils.
Together with their rebrand, The Feast launched a few other intresting projects like The Feast Kitchen, The Feast Worklshop and Salons. The Feast Conference gathers the world’s greatest innovators from across industries and society to empower, inspire and engage each other in creating world-shaking change.
“The Feast” is a cross-disciplinary series of programs addressing social innovation and new ways to make the world a better place. Our secret sauce lies in a healthy combination of passion, creativity, and entrepreneurship to shift the way things are done - thereby changing individuals, industries, and ultimately the world.
An open exchange of ideas across industries and society is necessary to produce lasting, sustainable, meaningful change. “The Feast” brings together the world’s leading creative entrepreneurs, revolutionaries, radicals, doers and thinkers to inspire more action, share best practices, and create valuable connections that will change the world.
What a great way to spread the word for a library!
In Kansas City USA Johnson County Library couriers are making their book deliveries between Library locations in some specially decorated, literary-themed trucks: Captain Ahab’s Fine Seafood, Benjamin Button’s Diaper Service, Kafka’s Pest Control, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’s Pharmacy with the tag line “Available at Johnson County Library.” The messages on the trucks are part of campaign to promote the library, the many stories that can be found there and to encourage reading, even the classics.
“Young workers watch the movement. Raise your hand for safer workplaces across BC.”
Raise You Hand is a brand new campaign from WorkSafeBC dedicated to promote workplace health and safety for the workers and employers in British Columbia, Canada.
Raise Your Hand is a young worker movement focused around worker rights: the right to know about hazards at your job and how to protect yourself, the right to participate in making sure your job and workplace are safe and healthy, the right to the right to refuse unsafe work. Unlike many young worker safety campaigns, which take a ‘shock and awe’ approach to scare young workers from being unsafe on the job, Raise Your Hand focuses on the positive steps young workers can take to prevent injury and death at work.
Driven by the insight that many young workers don’t know what to do when faced with an unsafe situation, this movement shares that the first step is to know your rights, and the way to find out about your rights is to ask. The idea of raising your hand is inspired by the fact that many young workers have recently left school, or may still be in a school environment where you raise your hand to find answers to what you don’t know.
The campaign is found where the target audience – youth aged 18-25 – gather, at summer festivals and online. Key elements of the campaign are the Raise Your Hand anthem (see above) and buttons that people can customize and either wear or create digital versions to put online. The creative theme is inspired by 70s movements – psychedelic album covers, peace, love.
The 70’s inspiration came about because of the affiliation of grassroots movement with that decade. RYH is very much about empowerment and participation to join this movement to make a difference.
The Ask Yourself campaign from Dropping Knowledge is a series of over 100 digital postcards which promote dialogue on social themes of global significance. Answers can be added as comments by clicking on the postcards and each card can be shared through dragging and dropping into emails. Registered users are encouraged to pose questions as well. See more below.
Q&A at its best: participatory, provocative and pertinent.
Another campaign made for the international day against child labour. This video called Hammerchild is from the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC).
“With rising poverty and inequality, and funding for schools under pressure in developing and transition countries in particular, the economic crisis is likely to add even more children to the 200 million who are already at work instead of getting a proper education. This is a tragic scenario just ten years since the ILO adopted Convention 182 on eliminating the worst forms of child labour,” said ITUC General Secretary Guy Ryder.
Tens of millions of adults are losing their jobs due to the crisis, putting family incomes under huge pressure and making it even more difficult for poorer families to cover the costs of education.
“The consequences of child labour, often devastating for the children concerned, are also felt in terms of economic and social development in the longer term. Countries which do not ensure universal education will not have the broad base of skills and knowledge required for solid economic foundations for the future,” Ryder added.
Today, june 12th is the international day against child labour. Agency G2 Amsterdam made for Hivos and the European Union this international ad to let everyone know that even during a recesssion not everyone is desperately looking for a job.
218 million children are working under terrible conditions. The Stop Child Labour Campaign is an international campaign which seeks to eliminate child labour through the provision of full-time education.
“Stop Child Labour. School is the best place to work.”
A recently launched campaign which mashes-up fashion and fundraising: The Uniform Project in which a pledge has been made to wear one dress for one year as an exercise in sustainable fashion. Actually there are seven identical dresses – one for each day of the week. Every day the dress is artfully reinvented via layers and accessories and images posted online in the effort to raise money for the Akanksha Foundation – a grassroots movement that is revolutionising education in India.
While we more often see fashion brands leveraging cultural connectivity The Uniform Project is instead an online fundraising initiative masterfully leveraging fashion itself. Great to see the Manolo on the other foot!
Aseema is an Education Centre for Street and Unprivileged Children in Mumbai, India. The NGO is working to provide the children of suburbs - or more currently known as slumdogs - access to primary education, preparing them for entry into the formal system and encouraging their love for learning.
The regular storm drain was transformed into an abacus, placed near a high-end housing complex in Mumbai to stimulate donations for the Aseema Charitable Trust.
From the One Tama website
”One Tama is an invitation to a movement and a challenge for us to do something right for our communities and our country, the Philippines.
One Tama is about doing a positive task, having the most number of people participate, and aiming for the biggest impact possible. You may invite your siblings, friends, family, co-workers, and neighbors to get involved in actions as simple as throwing the trash, crossing the road at the right time, planting seeds, cleaning the seashore, or anything creative you can think of.
The possibilities of doing the right thing are simple, diverse, and endless. If done together, and with more onboard your task --- the impact is multiplied. A great experience like this must be shared to inspire the rest in leaning towards positive change.
One Tama breaks the mold of the proverbial Juan Tamad, lying on the grass while waiting for the fruit to fall from the tree, by finally getting him on his feet. We no longer need to wait for good things to happen in our country. We can begin today by inspiring one another for positive action.
Hi! We are Judith and Gertjan, a Dutch couple with an open heart and mind for the people of South Asia. In 2010 we will move with our two kids towards South Asia to work as volunteers. Judith is a nurse with a medical management qualification and will be involved in a medical training program. Gertjan is an entrepeneur and will start an education program and an IT business. Our Christian faith is an important motive for us in doing this kind of work.
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Osocio is dedicated to social advertising and non-profit campaigns. It’s the place where marketing and activism collide. Formerly known as the Houtlust Blog, Osocio is the central online hub for advertisers, ad agencies, grassroots, activists, social entrepreneurs, and good Samaritans from around the globe.
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Hi! We are Judith and Gertjan, a Dutch couple with an open heart and mind for the people of South Asia. In 2010 we will move with our two kids towards South Asia to work as volunteers. Judith is a nurse with a medical management qualification and will be involved in a medical training program. Gertjan is an entrepeneur and will start an education program and an IT business. Our Christian faith is an important motive for us in doing this kind of work.
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