Mitu’s Awesome World-Saving Blog.

The fantastic Imogen Heap (of whom I am a massive fan) has just announced her new film project Love The Earth. Details below!

I am excited for this. You can also read Imogen's letter to find out more. Submit a video to the project about why you love the Earth by September 26th to be included in the premiere at the Royal Albert Hall. I know what I'll be doing.

If you know me, you will know my love of robots, monsters, and of course world-saving projects, so you have no idea how insanely happy it makes me that this following project even exists. I just stumbled across RobotsAndMonsters.org, a charitable project that matches charitable giving with custom-made commissioned pop art. From the site:

Giving just a little bit gets you an original drawing of a robot or a monster of your specification sent to your door – and in the process, you get to sleep better at night, because you know you’ve just helped out a great cause.

Part charitable powerhouse, part experiment in collective creativity, and part underground pop-art gallery, we aim to change the world, one robot and monster at a time.

Over the past three years, Robots and Monsters has raised almost $20,000 for Water.org, The Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the San Francisco AIDS Foundation.

Their current cause for 2010 is Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF).

Sadly, they seem to currently be on a well-deserved hiatus, having raised $5,000 this year already. But, they seem to be relaunching soon, so keep an eye out. In the meantime, I am definitely getting myself one of these awesome tees and/or hoodie.

You have hopefully noticed a very exciting announcement over at the Arohon blog, or on the project's Facebook fan page (of which I sincerely hope you are a member! If not, go 'Like' now.) 

Breadpig, fellow geeky world savers, are teaming up with Arohon to match every donation you make between now, and the ever-scarily-fast-approaching Kilimanjaro climb in September, YAY!

Through Arohon, my sister & I are trying to raise at least £5000 to establish a brand new education and community centre for women and girls in rural Bangladesh, in an area where women wanting to pursue their own careers face much cultural opposition. Furthermore, investing in women and girls has been shown to have far reaching effects in helping the climb out of poverty, as explored in this previous MAWSB post.

So, now, more than ever, there is no reason not to donate. Go do it now? You're helping make REAL change, the results of which you will be able to see yourself. 

You can donate here.

And, of course, a huge thank you to our porcine hero Breadpig, whose other world-saving endeavours you should definitely follow.

(Also: oops! Apologies for the lack of updates for the past couple of weeks, normal service resuming now. Er, after the blatant Arohon self-promotion, I mean, ahem.)

This project has me really excited, mostly because it encapsulates so many of my loves: positive social action, New York City, and of course, GIANT ROBOTS.

ROBOTS>>>> is an artist collective from London which uses reclaimed wood, discarded furniture and trash to build site-specific giant robots. We have an opportunity to build our creatures with a group of children living in a New York shelter for families who have escaped domestic violence, paint a large accompanying mural in their playspace, and film the process in a documentary led by the kids. While we're in the city, we will transform the roof of a Brooklyn venue with another installation - and hopefully find other neglected public spaces ripe for surprising additions. But…we need funds to do it!

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These are kids who have undergone serious trauma, and previously had little control over their lives or living spaces. The shelter staff believe this will be a really empowering experience for them - as well as a lot of fun. So we’re appealing to the Kickstarter community to make it happen.

Alongside this project, we will design and build a giant robot on the roof of a Brooklyn venue. We will create it using discarded materials found around the city – wooden pallets, hubcaps, furniture… our design will be informed by what we find. The sculpture will meld and interact with its environment in a fun and unusual way, and aim to reignite a sense of play in its audience. It could be big enough to climb inside, or function as an exhibition space in its own right.

At the heart of the project is the intention to create public art that fully engages its audience and its surroundings with a strong positive message about responsibility and environment. Help ROBOTS>>>> invade!

This sounds like an excellent project, and you can read more here. I hope you'll consider helping out their Kickstarter campaign here to help them raise the funds they need for this worthwhile cause.

I mean, if nothing else, who doesn't want to see a giant robot sculpture on a Brooklyn rooftop, right?

Today, I'd like to talk to you about The Girl Effect. You see, The Girl Effect is not only an initiative started by The Nike Foundation, with global partners comprising of the United Nations Foundation, Coalition for Adolescent Girls, CARE, BRAC, and more, but it is also defined thus:

THE GIRL EFFECT n. -- The powerful social and economic change brought about when girls have the opportunity to participate.

"If you want to end poverty and help the developing world, the best thing you can do is invest time, energy, and funding into adolescent girls. It's called The Girl Effect, because girls are uniquely capable of investing in their communities and making the world better."

Basically, investing in girls causes a ripple effect, and this wonderful factsheet has lots of lovely statistics to show us this:

When a girl in the developing world receives seven or more years of education, she marries four years later and has 2.2
fewer children. (United Nations Population Fund, State of World Population 1990.)

An extra year of primary school boosts girls’ eventual wages by 10 to 20 percent. An extra year of secondary school:
15 to 25 percent. (George Psacharopoulos and Harry Anthony Patrinos, “Returns to Investment in Education: A Further Update,” Policy Research Working Paper 2881 [Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 2002].)

Research in developing countries has shown a consistent relationship between better infant and child health and higher levels
of schooling among mothers. (George T. Bicego and J. Ties Boerma, “Maternal Education and Child Survival: A Comparative Study of Survey Data from 17 Countries,” Social Science and Medicine 36 (9) [May 1993]: 1207–27.)

This is a fantastic campaign raising awareness of the need to invest in girls in developing countries if we are to save the world. Please do check the campaign's website (full of information about why investing in girls will save the world, and what barriers they currently face), donate to the cause, or join the Facebook page.

Of course, whilst The Girl Effect consists of many excellent organisations, it's also worth noting, of course, that this is the exact ethos upon which my sister & I are operating Arohon, our charitable project whose first mission is to build and run a brand new women's education centre in rural Bangladesh. The idea here is to promote girl power, in a place where there is a lot of cultural opposition, and provide women and girls with the education, skills, and empowerment they need in order to follow their own path.

Do check out this video from The Girl Effect about Shumi, in Bangladesh. This story is typical of so many girls in rural Bangladesh, and the video is a wonderful demonstration of what women's empowerment can achieve. This is exactly what we're trying to achieve in Nikrail, Bangladesh.

You can, of course, find out more about Arohon over at http://arohon.org.uk/ or even donate here if you want to help! (Remember, it's only two months till we climb Mt Kilimanjaro to convince you, too!)

GOOD.is reports on the Pollinator Pathway project, which is "transforming a mile-long band of grass in Seattle into gardens where various pollinating creatures can do their critical work".

The Pathway will run between Seattle University and a small wood. (Two garden patches have been finished already, with 16 more planned.) The idea is to connect two existing wildlife-friendly spaces with an uninterrupted run of enticing—and native—plantings. "Ecologically speaking, islands are isolating," says Bergmann. "Connectivity is key to biodiversity."

Unfortunately, although well-meaning urban planning means that we may focus on green space on our cities, what this doesn't ask is whether "green is the right hue" for pollinators, including birds, and bees, to do their important work. To address this, these gardens focus on favouring "certain colors and shapes, such as blue, which bees prefer, flat flowers, which butterflies like, and tubular flowers for hummingbirds" - so that plants may get on with the er, birds and the bees.

(Thanks to Jim Rossignol for the world-saving link suggestion!)

(Eek, apologies for lack of updates, this week has been crazy, and I am still trying to get used to this whole "just post things" format without overthinking things; I have some terrible habits. Anyway!)

Following EVOKE by the lovely Jane McGonigal, I was very excited to discover Conspiracy for Good, another playful/fun/story-based project designed to save the world. Conspiracy for Good is a "pilot project for a first-of-its-kind, interactive story, that empowers its audience to take real-life action and create positive change in the world.", and calls itself "Social Benefit Storytelling" - on the website, it is described thus:

As part of the Conspiracy For Good you will join a collective of thinkers, artists, musicians and causes, creating a unified voice to fight the forces of social and environmental injustice. This is our site, where together we can follow the story and discuss our dreams, hopes and ambitions, all while building a community that focuses on changing the world for the better, one person and one action at a time.

My awesome Twitter friend @christydena was involved in the project, and, having registered for the first event in London next weekend, I am excited to see what comes of this. I will perhaps do a longer post either here or over at Mitu.nu proper in due course, but please do check this out, particularly if you live in or within reasonable distance of London.

Oops, so yesterday, I spent most of the day in London, and as a result did not get to post. However, whilst there, we did get Jenni Falconer to lend her support to Arohon, so do go check that out.

Today, my younger sister mentioned this awesome campaign by one of her fellow UK youth delegates for the G8/G20 summit, James Munnery. James points out that Free Newspapers Cost The Earth; 1.7 million free newspapers are distributed in London every day, and he urges the public and publishers alike to be aware of the environmental impact of this. Do check out his campaign, where he outlines a plan of action, and things that the public can do to help, such as remembering to recycle old newspapers rather than leaving them on the tube. You can even join the Facebook group here.

I should point out that this is one of 20 campaigns on Battlefront, a Channel 4 initiative for young people to engage with social and environmental issues alike. You can check out the other very worthy campaigns here: http://battlefront.co.uk/campaigns/

I also especially love the campaigners handbook on Battlefield, which is useful for anyone interested in "single-handedly saving the world", as they say. There is a lot of brilliant information her to guide you "through the marshes and minefields of the revolutionary landscape", from initial stages, to execution. I'm still reading, myself!

So, this is Mitu's Awesome World-Saving Blog (savingtheworld.mitu.nu), where I'll be posting daily (and perhaps even more!) about anything and everything to do with making the world a more awesome place. Simple, right?

The point of this is to serve as a kind of bastion of positivity about our future. I'll be linking to lots of worthy initiatives, cool people, and anything else I find relevant. Basically, if it gives me hope for the future, or any insights into how all the difficult problems of saving the world can be solved, it goes here. (Also, yes, I will occasionally talk about my own charitable initiative, Arohon, here as well, amongst many other things.)

I suppose I should disclose some of my world-saving interests here too; after all, what does 'saving the world' really mean to me? Things I'll be particularly focusing on include eradicating poverty, improving education, women's rights and empowerment, and of course, environmental issues. However, it doesn't stop there, of course.

Now this is partly here because originally (as you can tell from the subtitle), Mitu.nu was intended to cover this purpose too, but because I'm more comfortable using it as somewhere I ramble infrequently and at length (ahem), I am using this for awesome-world-saving-totally-not-spam instead. I hope you'll keep visiting, and please do subscribe if you can.

For now, I'll leave you with this from Monday's TEDxOilSpill event (mentioned in previous post), in which explorer-environmentalist Phillipe Costeau quoted (I think) his grandfather, the great Jaques-Yves Costeau:

We can find happiness in protecting the world around us not only because we cherish it for its awesome beauty, power, and mystery, but because we cherish our fellow humans, those who live today and those who will live tomorrow, living beings who like ourselves, will increasingly depend on the environment for happiness and even for life itself.

"There are no grownups in charge. We are the grownups here. We must take action." The first speaker and organiser, whose name I unfortunately did not catch. It's true, however, WE'RE the grownups, now. It's our turn to decide what that means (sorry, one day, I will stop speaking in XKCD references). I mean, It's time to take action. The fact that TEDxOilSpill is a community-organised, global event is a wonderful testimony to the kind of thing we can begin to do. Inspiring. Right, I am getting back to watching!