It’s a fascinating time in human history to study communication. It will be years before we fully know what we’ve made and unmade of ourselves in the midst of all this change. I wonder if we’ll like it.
The SOLD Project didn’t win the grant from GOOD Maker, but they’re not giving up on their idea. They need at least 24 people willing to give $16 a month to join their Stand 4 Freedom campaign this week to make their Trafficking Awareness Program a reality this summer. Click here to give.
The best part is, this week only, for every person who joins the Stand 4 Freedom campaign, an anonymous donor will match your pledge with a $50 one-time donation. Just like that, your $16 gift becomes nearly $70! This opportunity ends Monday, May 7 at Midnight PT, so spread the word.
Hundreds and hundreds of you voted; now, if just a fraction of you can give just a small amount each month, your long-term impact will be incredible. Thank you for investing in the lives of these children.
The SOLD Project has a chance to win a $2,500 grant to fund their human trafficking awareness programs in Thailand, and all they need is your vote!
Since 2007, The SOLD Project has been preventing human trafficking and child sexual exploitation in Thailand through education and community development. Part of that prevention work has involved hosting well-received and very impactful human trafficking awareness classes for at-risk Thai nationals.
For this summer’s biannual Parent Meeting, SOLD has a brilliant idea: Hire a local partner organization to train the older girls in their program to lead the awareness courses themselves! If they win this $2,500 grant from GOOD Maker, The SOLD Project will be able to host trafficking awareness events for the entire community, purchase costumes and sound equipment, and train their students to take a peer-to-peer trafficking awareness course on the road to 2 – 5 local Thai schools, reaching hundreds of at-risk children with a message that could change the course of their lives.
Want to do something about human trafficking and child exploitation? This is a great place to start.
He said, ‘You have to go there. You have to take your character to the place where he just can’t take it anymore.’ He looked at us with a tenderness we hadn’t seen in him before. ‘You’ve been there, haven’t you? You’ve been out on the ledge. The marriage is over now; the dream is over now; nothing good can come from this.’
He got louder. ‘Writing a story isn’t about making your peaceful fantasies come true. The whole point of the story is the character arc. You didn’t think joy could change a person, did you? Joy is what you feel when the conflict is over. But it’s conflict that changes a person.’
His voice was like thunder now. ‘You put your characters through hell. You put them through hell. That’s the only way we change.’
” Robert McKee in A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, by Donald Miller
There’s a CliffsNotes for CliffsNotes now, and I’m oddly happy about it. CliffsNotes Films has condensed the CliffsNotes version of six of Shakespeare’s plays—Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, and Julius Caesar—into seven-minute animated cartoons written in contemporary slang. I confess, my not-so-inner word nerd (and some-time Shakespearean actor) was initially horrified by the idea of irreverently abbreviating Shakespeare’s prose, but then I watched one. And then I watched another. And then I watched all of them. Turns out these films are actually pretty awesome and kind of hilarious.
Maybe it’s just because I’m familiar with these plays, but I found them immensely entertaining. (And, for the record, surprisingly accurate.) Now, as to whether this sort of learning tool will have a positive or negative affect on the teaching and study of classic literature…I’m probably unqualified to comment. Either way, these are out there for the world to use as it will. I say enjoy them.
So…these exist.
My car’s odometer recently hit 112,012, or 1/1/2012. (Yes, I was really hoping to see this odometer reading a few weeks ago, but couldn’t justify driving 600-odd miles on New Year’s Eve to time it out right. Still…)
