"There's More to Me Than What You See" campaign calls on people to take a second look at the Youth

August 2010 marks the start of the International Year of the Youth, as declared by the United Nations. 

It was officially launched globally last August 12, 2010 with the theme "Dialogue and Mutual Understanding"- complete with its own microsite, Twitter account, Facebook page, YouTube channel, formal conferences such as the Fifth World Youth Congress (Jul 31 - Aug 13 in Istanbul) and World Conference for Youth (August 24-27 in Mexico City). 


The UN News Centre elaborates on the mission of this massive campaign:

The International Year is about advancing the full and effective participation of youth in all aspects of society,” UN Focal Point on Youth Nicola Shepherd said. “We encourage all sectors of society to work in partnership with youth and youth organizations to better understand their needs and concerns and to recognize the contributions that they can make to society.”

In its resolution proclaiming the Year, the General Assembly called on governments, civil society, individuals and communities worldwide to support activities at local and international levels to mark the event.

Under the theme ‘Dialogue and Mutual Understanding,’ the Year aims to encourage dialogue and understanding across generations and promote the ideals of peace, respect for human rights and freedoms, and solidarity.

As a response to this call for participation in the global dialogue on the youth, the World Youth Alliance's Asia Pacific regional office enters with a strong central message:  

"There is more to me than what you see."

Conceptualized to go against common stereotypes of the youth, WYA asks that people take a second look at all the young people in the world - to go beyond shallow representations and interpretations - and see that there are many vibrant, proactive and empowered young people all over the globe. 

As part of the campaign, they are featuring different dynamic members each month to showcase the variety of ways in which they can make a difference. There is also an ongoing call for people to come and join various WYA AP events and programs to learn about more ways that the youth can get involved in shaping society.


Read more about the campaign here, and more about World Youth Alliance Asia Pacific here.

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The World Youth Alliance is a global coalition of young people committed to promoting the dignity of the person and building solidarity among youth from developed and developing nations. They train young people to work at the regional and international levels to impact policy and culture. Founded in 1999, WYA now embraces over 1 million members from over 100 nationalities.

R2R's The Tree Bag Project reaches Cebu's ANTHILL Fabric Gallery

A message from ANTHILL Fabric Gallery:

The tree bag project is ANTHILL's first collaboration with the highly innovative and respected fellow social enterprise, Rags2Riches Inc.

RIIR gave ANTHILL the opportunity to have its first sustainable project for our 15 weavers in Bangued, Abra. This tree bags extends its reach not only to them but also to the R2R Nanays of Payatas (colored braided rug handle), the Woodcarvers of Pardo, Cebu (wooden buttons and rings) and the seamstresses of Minglanilla, Cebu (body assembly).

RIIR sees to it that in every tree bag you carry, a tree is planted to fill a watershed project!

RIIR has been an inspiration, a source of positive influence and a social enterprise model to ANTHILL as we move forward in pursuing growth and our cultural preservation advocacies especially among our indigenous communities.

Rags2Riches and the tree bag breathes life to our Indie Workers Trail!

Thank you R2R! :)

TREE BAG PROJECT

You carry an intricately handcrafted bag made from recycled scrap thread rigorously hand loomed in Kantinares pattern by the indigenous women of Bangued, Abra. These women celebrate their Tingguian origin by continuing their living traditions of fabric weaving in the hopes of passing it on to younger generations. Their valued skill is also the source of their sustenance. Despite aching backs and cramped up space, these women choose to work in the bounds of their homes for they are first loving mothers to their children and caring wives to their husbands. They finish an average of 5 meters a day on antique looms while juggling household chores and putting food on the table. Though Tinngians now wear contemporary clothing and live like their neighboring Ilocanos, the core of their social and cultural world retains its indigenous flavor.

The wood craftsmen belonging to a small urban community in Pardo, Cebu City shape these perfect cut wooden rings and hand carved buttons out of native wood. Each letter is carefully chiseled creating that embossed effect with a raw finish. Working with wood have taken these men out of their idle mood in the streets transforming them into responsible fathers aiming to provide better for their families.

ANTHILL Fabric Gallery is a socially responsible business where culture meets style. Through our Indie Workers Trail, we advocate the preservation and promotion of weaving traditions in the Philippines, providing indigenous groups, local artists and craftsmen market access that in turn will cultivate heritage and support livelihood. In every purchase, you help sustain a life! Here's one sustainable totes for the earth-conscious shopper!


SUSTAINABLE LIFE. SUSTAINABLE STYLE!
Thank you for sharing our advocacy!

#helpDOT

The beginnings of a crowdsourced tourism campaign for the Philippines?

Search #helpDOT on twitter and watch it unfold.

I first caught wind of this #helpDOT when I saw my friends Edgar and James, fellow CouchSurfers, tagging their tweets with it. 

Help our Philippine Department of Tourism? As a travel enthusiast with nationalistic leanings, how could I resist? 

My involvement with YTRIP (Youth Tourism Response in the Philippines) has ingrained in me the belief that knowing myself as a Filipino is tied to knowing my Philippines. As they declare on their website: "Sa amin, ang pagkilala sa sarili ay kasabay sa pagkilala sa bayan, ang Pilipinas." 

Plus, I’ve met my share of foreign visitors who have fallen in love with our country. 

I know of and have seen a lot of the beauty in the Philippines. We have a pretty good product, that’s for sure. The question now is, how do we market it better? 

So I went online and tried to hunt down the roots of this whole #helpDOT movement. 

Carlos Celdran's July 28 entry on his "Walk this Way" blog recounts how it all began. DOT Undersecretary @entengromano took one of Celdran's tours, @carlosceldran tweeted some "thinking out loud" tweet, and @TeamManila saying "I want to help the DOT". Pretty soon, the #HelpDOT hashtag appeared, done by the team of @jillaquino. And Team Manila did come up with their creative response - fresh Philippine tourism posters, featured on their Flickr site.

And the rest is - well, it's history continuing to unfold this very second. To think, the whole thing just started a couple of days ago. Don't you just love technology? :D

The Department of Tourism is listening to your #helpDOT tweets. Here's your chance to give them a piece of your mind, tell them how you could help, or just share what you've already done. 

So I ask two things from you -
1. Think about this: What do you want to say to them?
2. Tweet it, blog it, upload it, and most importantly, tag it with #helpDOT.

As my personal start, I went back to my Flickr travel photos and started tagging them properly, with "Philippines", "#helpDOT" and the correctly identified provinces and destinations. 

It’s time the world finds out how beautiful the Philippines really is :D 


Let's do our part to make it happen.

Book Review: Corporate Social Responsibility: Doing the Most Good for Your Company and Your Cause (Philip Kotler & Nancy Lee)

Corporate Social Responsibility: Doing the Most Good for Your Company and Your Cause by Philip Kotler


My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I ended up just skimming through this book as it's a bit too basic for me now. But it's a good read for the beginner still looking for basic info on the world of CSR as it gives a very good overview and loads of examples.


 In "Corporate Social Responsibility", Kotler takes you through what he calls the six options for doing good:
1. Corporate Cause Promotions
2. Cause-Related Marketing
3. Corporate Social Marketing
4. Corporate Philanthropy
5. Community Volunteering
6. Socially Responsible Business Practices


I say it gives a good overview as the focus throughout the book is on differentiating each type of CSR tactic, complete with an analysis of pros and cons of how each one can affect your brand. He doesn't really go into in-depth case studies, but he mentions a lot of examples done by major companies such as The Body Shop, ben and Jerry's, AT&T, McDonalds, and many many many more.


I'd recommend this to brand managers and other marketing department people who are well trained to push products, but find the world of CSR very foreign. This book will help you link different types of CSR to things more familiar to you - equity building, creating brand preference, driving traffic, and yes, even increasing sales. (I think I got you guys with that last one, didn't I? Heheh)


And to my friends over on the other side - the nonprofit managers and heads of fundraising - you better read this too! Because it helps a lot when you can speak the same language as your corporate partners and funders. This is a painless way to learn the principles and jargon, all within a context that makes sense to you. It's hard to transpose learning from a commercial setting into a nonprofit setting, trust me. I've done a few workshops with NGO people, trying to teach them marketing, so I've seen my fair share of blank stares and confused faces when I keep putting commercial brand examples in front of them. So please, read this book.




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A slight caveat to my friends here in the Philippines. I got this book back when i was still in NYC, so I can't guarantee that you'll find this in your friendly neighborhood National Bookstore / Powerbooks / Fully Booked. I'm sure the special bookstores can order it for you; But from experience, waiting time is usually a month or so. If you're really really nice to me and promise to be really really nice to my book, I can maybe lend it to you. Just don't mind all the highlights and notes on the margins :D


View all my reviews >>

Book Review: How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas

How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas by David Bornstein




My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I remember feeling very self-conscious whenever I read or carried this book around in public. Friends, whenever they see you carrying a book, will always ask "What are you reading?" I'd sheepishly show them the cover, anticipating what I know was coming next.. An "Emily, are you really trying to change the world?" or "Oh Em, you know you can't save the world, right?"


Had I read Novogratz by then, I would have retorted with a "Probably not, but I'd be happy enough if I could manage to give it a nudge." But I haven't read 'The Blue Sweater' by then, so I usually just smiled back and kept quiet.


Anyway, on to my review..


David Bornstein's "How to Change the World" traces the beginnings of the Ashoka Foundation, starting with the vision of its founder, Bill Drayton. Through a series of case studies on the different Ashoka fellows, Bornstein outlines and illustrates Drayton's principles of how Social Entrepreneurs can change the world.


I was intrigued by the concept of a Social Entrepreneur. I've always wanted to figure out the best way that I can merge advertising/marketing and advocacy. In the Social Entrepreneur, I saw that Drayton has found a way to merge business principles and social change. I wanted to know how he did it.


So I absolutely loved the fact that Drayton is a practical sort of man. As with anyone with a strong advocacy, he values passion and empathy in people. But at the same time, he acknowledges that it takes a certain kind of personality, skills and thinking to be able to make a real difference. He specialized in sifting through people with good hearts to separate the theorists from the real change agents. The "particular type of actor who propels social change." And this book covers everything from how to spot those people, how to support them, how to breed a whole generation of them, and a blueprint of how to replicate successful models all over the world.


Bornstein puts it this way:


"Over the past century, researchers have studied business entrepreneurs extensively..


In contrast, social entrepreneurs have received little attention. Historically, they have been cast as humanitarians or saints, and stories of their work have been passed down more in the form of children's tales than case studies. While the stories may inspire, they fail to make social entrepreneurs' methods comprehensible. One can analyze an entrepreneur, but how does one analyze a saint?"


And realizing this, Bornstein and Drayton gave us the Ashoka Foundation and "How to Change the World" so we have a practical map to change instead of another lovely fable.














View all my reviews >>

Book Review: Social Marketing- Improving the Quality of Life (by Philip Kotler, Nancy Lee & Ned Roberto)

For those of us who took up Marketing Communications, Philip Kotler and Ned Roberto are no strangers. Kotler was most probably the author of your Marketing 101, Comm 101 or Advertising 101 book. And Roberto, on the other hand, was probably a demi-god to your market research professor.

So put them together and add Nancy Lee (whom I only later learned is a social marketing guru of sorts, since the 70's), and you've got one really great resource book with practical guidelines on how to market your advocacies.

The book takes you through a different kind of thinking, starting even from the point of defining your "product", and who you should see as your "competition". What I found very interesting was how they defined a social marketing product as mainly composed of three parts - a core product, actual product and an augmented product. And how your positioning then not only becomes how to leverage yourself against the competition but also how to balance between all three levels of your own product.

The strength of this book, I think, is how the authors really impress upon the reader that social marketing campaigns are all about creating change - and so they walk you through the process of how to craft your campaigns in a way that will result in behavioral changes as opposed to mere awareness or buzz-generation.

Complete with the usual textbook offerings - tons of examples of social marketing campaigns, practical templates, models and case studies to illustrate all their points - you can't go wrong with this book. I think any NGO that's trying to up their efforts in the marketing and communications side should have a copy of this in their office.

But having said that, I will have to warn you that I got my copy back in New York so I can't guarantee that you will find this in your friendly neighborhood National Bookstore or Powerbooks (although I'm pretty sure Powerbooks can import it for you by special order). But if in case you really really can't find it, drop me a message and maybe I can lend you mine (if you promise to take really REALLY good care of it!).

One last note - this book was written more for people in NGO's than for brand or advertising people. If you're looking for good commentary on the best ways to link your brand to CSR efforts or how to build brand equity using advocacies, well, this isn't the book for you. I'm still on the hunt for something like that so if you do know of any, I'm very open to recommendations :-)


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Photo from Amazon.com
Average customer review: 5 stars
Citations: This book cited in 100 books

A re-post from my multiply account.