I’m delighted to announce that again this year I’m raising funds for Crossroads International, which is a fantastic organization which creates partnerships with possibly-even-more-amazing organizations overseas. The focus of this campaign is girls and women, supporting organizations like WiLDAF in Ghana and SWAGAA in Swaziland which have smart, strategic, and compelling programs to tackle urgent and important issues.
I’ve met people who have founded and run these programs, and they’re inspiring and savvy and unbelievably impressive. They know what to do. They have scalable models. They involve the entire community as well as creating girl- and women-specific spaces and opportunities. But they’re operating in an environment where raising funds is increasingly tough, and where the needs aren’t going away.
Recently I got the chance to hear Bernice Sam, the Executive Director of WiLDAF in Ghana, and she described how the volunteers in her program advocate for women’s legal rights – they measure the size of farms and monitor the distribution of proceeds to support women’s right to inheritance, they produce plain-language booklets which are in demand from the police and the judges as well as the community, they take up the cases of women who are subject to domestic violence and are told that’s to be expected. She points out that once these women and men are trained by WiLDAF, they won’t ever un-know the knowledge and information they get in the training. She wants to expand the reach of the program to more areas in the country. And that’s where we come in.
Please consider giving – even a small contribution has a huge impact. If you’re interested, please click here. It’s a Canadian organization, so Canadians get a tax receipt for donations. The campaign is going on for all of March, and my target is $4,000 – you can help me get there.
If you have any questions about this program, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. And thanks!
Photos courtesy of Crossroads International.
