Tag: WAAI

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Voices We Love: Gina Crosley-Corcoran

This last week, Gina Crosley-Corcoran published a fantastic article on Occupy Wall Streets’s website.  Gina is a writer, activist, musician, doula, mother of three, and is currently working on her Masters of Public Health in Maternal Child Health.  Her website, the Feminist Breeder, is an eclectic website of tools, related articles on inclusiveness and bridge building, and humor to our insane lives; not to mention a recipe or anecdote.  It is a great site to get lost on for a bit.

Most recently Gina caught the attention of Project Kinect with her article Explaining White Privilege to a Broke White Person.  Privilege itself has a lot to do with the state of our society.  Understanding privilege then can help more specifically understand white privilege.  You can read the entire article here.

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Tools We Love: Social Media #’s #Good30

Hashtags are a great way now to bring awareness to your cause. If you are unsure why hashtags are useful, here are a couple reasons why.

1. Hashtags are an excellent way to search out who and when people are talking about the hashtag.  Just Google it, search it on Facebook or Twitter, or our favorite vehicle for hashtags, find it on Instagram.

2. Hashtags bring a virtual community together to find your cause/event/purpose and gives those followers the tools to help increase your impact. 

Hashtags really give us all though a tool to do a little bit more.  Right now, #good30 is accomplishing this.  Yes, it may not be a huge impact, and it may not be focusing on a systemic problem, but it is challenging people to do a little more.  Any time humans do a little more for the greater good,  it leads to positive social change. Our founder wrote an article around doing better.

#Good30 allows everyone to share something they are doing to help others out.  Take 30 seconds, create a video, and share what you are doing. The more participants in this campaign will create a greater awareness to how easy it is to #bebetter.  There is always room to provide a #good30 in our lives every day.  Why not start now.

Pass It Down just wrote an article with some amazing ways to #good30’s.  Check it out for some ideas or just to put a smile on your face.

Please add your #good30 videos in our comment section.

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Sites We Love: Funny or Die

Comedy is SO IMPORTANT for Positive Social Change.  It brings everyone to a common level and makes difficult topics more easy to discuss.  Last night, Russell Brand was on The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell.  They were discussing Brand’s new book, Revolution. Brand is best known for his comedy and acting, but more and more he is being seen through an activist’s lens.  Revolution definitely places him in that category.

  • Tool: Find Comedy in your activism.

A major point last night though was that Comedy is necessary to get everyone to a level where we can come together to see real change.  It is how an actual, real working democracy will begin.  Project Kinect understands that we all must find common ground to produce the type of social change we need to thrive.  One of the best websites that uses comedy and satire is Funny or Die.

This last week, an Andy Bush directed sketch was uploaded to the website called Here’s How You’re Getting F***ed. It has Adam Shankman and Brandon T. Jackson in it and makes fun of how unjust to minorities our society is.  It is funny and makes room to have a better rounded conversation.

We listed that video below, as well as some other videos we feel really “Say Something”.  Happy Watching! #WAAI

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Video of the Week

For humans, it is so easy to hide.  Avoidance and detachment of other humans can happen easy and becomes more simple the more attached to technology we become.  The problem with seclusion is that not only do people become void of us and us them, but we miss out on each other’s passion and art.  This video by Miike Snow, “Black and Blue”, demonstrates how better it is to be active in the world instead of just hiding away and selfishly keeping our greatness to ourselves.

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Causes We Love: Empowering Allies

Every marginalized community needs to know who their allies are and how to empower them.  Empowerment can only happen with patience and education. Patience is necessary for following new allies through the journey of becoming an ally. They may need time to learn the tools and vocabulary necessary to being a powerful ally.  This process often requires changes in the new ally’s behavior so patience is needed for that as well.

Education is a process and goes hand in hand with patience.  There must be different forms of education in order to best meet the learning needs of new allies.  Also, a list of resources and tools must be readily available for assisting new allies. For new allies, guidelines should be presented so they can visualize how best to be helpful and advocate for the marginalized group.  University of Missouri Kansas City has an excellent list of guidelines for becoming an ally.  This list is specific to being an ally for the LGBTQ community, but if can easily be adapted for other types of marginalized groups.

It may not be obvious to all, but the largest marginalized community in the world is women.  Men must learn how to advocate for women because men are the most powerful allies when fighting harassment, poorly created and hateful legislation, and basic equality issues. A cartoon recently created by Robot Hugs does an excellent job of illustrating what women go through and turning that into ways men can be allies and not perpetuate the problem.  Take some time on Robot Hugs page.  WE LOVE ROBOT HUGS! Here is a teaser of the cartoon.

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Additionally, organizations and corporations can become allies in this still male dominated world.  We sometimes do not recognize that it is happening when these large groups are being allies, but it happens. If we recognize it, then we become better allies.  Project Kinect believes we are all involved (#WAAI) and this is true when advocating for any marginalized community.  Here is an excellent example of a larger organization being an ally for women.  Thank you Buzzfeed!

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Projects We Love: The Gay Men Project

The Gay Men Project is a personal project by New York based photographer Kevin Truong. His goal is to create a visual catalog of gay men living across the world.

Every profile shares a story in the person’s own words. In Kevin Truong’s own words:

“This project is simple. Basically I’m trying to photograph as many gay men as I can. My goal is to create a platform, a visibility on some level, and a resource for others who may not be as openly gay. A visual catalog of gay men and their stories. When I think of my own experience, and all the time I spent in the closet and hiding the fact that I was gay–to be at a place now where I feel completely comfortable being on the blog and telling the world “Hey, I’m a gay man,” I think there’s a power in that, for me and for a lot of the men on the blog. So it’s kind of a numbers game, I think the more men I photograph, the more impact the project has.

My dream is to take the project to as many different cities as I can across the world.”

If you would like to participate please contact:

kevin@kevintruong.com

The Gay Men Project: the First 373 Portraits from The Gay Men Project on Vimeo.

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