V-Day Blog Archive

The New York Times named “The Vagina Monologues” one of “The 25 Best American Plays Since Angels In America”

Full list and feature at The New York Times:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/05/31/theater/best-25-plays.html

Mamadi Doumbouya for The New York Times

The Vagina Monologues
Eve Ensler, 1996

No recent hour of theater has had a greater impact worldwide.

Eve Ensler’s solo show, a series of monologues linked by anatomy, has birthed its own theatrical and activist industry. As Ms. Ensler explains in the opening monologue, she conducted interviews with more than 200 women: “Older women, young women, married women, lesbians, single women, college professors, actors, corporate professionals, sex workers, African-American women, Asian-American women, Hispanic women, Native American women, Caucasian women, Jewish women.” Their words were then shaped into speeches.

You can quibble with the literary merits of “The Vagina Monologues,” its sexual politics, its essentialism.

But it’s hard to argue with its worldwide impact (performances in 140 countries, translations into 48 languages and counting), the money it’s raised, nor the starry array of actors who’ve performed it: Meryl Streep, Oprah Winfrey, Whoopi Goldberg, Kate Winslet, Glenn Close, Salma Hayek and on and on like so many rolling orgasms. Here are the now-famous opening lines.

– ALEXIS SOLOSKI

EXCERPT

I bet you’re worried. I was worried. That’s why I began this piece. I was worried about vaginas. I was worried about what we think about vaginas, and even more worried that we don’t think about them. I was worried about my own vagina. It needed a context of other vaginas — a community, a culture of vaginas. There’s so much darkness and secrecy surrounding them — like the Bermuda Triangle. Nobody ever reports back from there.

Awards:
1997 Obie for playwriting

Review:
Oct. 23, 1996

Hear:
An excerpt from Eve Ensler’s performance

Theatre Groundbreaker Eve Ensler Shares Her Vision to Sustain the Theatre (Playbill)

http://www.playbill.com/article/theatre-groundbreaker-eve-ensler-shares-her-vision-to-sustain-the-theatre

BY RUTHIE FIERBERG

The writer of The Vagina Monologues, In the Body of the World, Fruit Trilogy, and more shares her full acceptance speech for the 2018 Lucille Lortel Lifetime Achievement Award.

Eve Ensler changed theatre when she wrote The Vagina Monologues in 1995. Taking a journalistic approach to her writing, Ensler conducted over 200 interviews with women about their thoughts, emotions, and experiences surrounding sex, relationships, violence against women, and more and molded them into a collection of stories. The play has been something like a tornado–picking up followers and strength since its 1996 Off-Broadway run, its Madison Square Garden production, and now the hundreds of productions mounted every year in association with V-Day.

On May 6, she was presented with the Lucille Lortel Lifetime Achievement Award, but due to timing was unable to share her full acceptance speech. Now, she shares her complete thoughts from that occasion, including her arguments about the need for theatre, how we can support writers, and how we spin only forward in a world where art is not a given:

Greetings, dear theatre community. I am honored and grateful to receive this Lifetime Achievement Award and here to announce that my lifetime is not over. Really just entering the next, hopefully more radical stage.

Looking back at my years in the theatre I am grateful for so much.

I am grateful for my theatre mentors Joanne Woodward and Lynne Austin, powerful and brilliant women who saw something in me before I saw it in myself. Who nurtured me and pushed me. Who weren’t afraid of my politics or my passion or my voice. Who insisted it be funny, who made me be braver with form and structure and storytelling.

I am grateful for producers Diane Borger and Lynne Meadow and, particularly, David Stone who not only stood for The Vagina Monologues, but bravely and almost gleefully went into the face of all who opposed it with genius marketing and artistic courage and seeded the money through it to launch the V-Day movement.

I am so grateful to vaginas and women and The Vagina Monologues who taught me that plays can create political movements and build networks and radical consciousness and raise thousands of activists and lots of money to end violence against women.

I am grateful to directors who taught me less was more, to take off my shoes, to dig deeper. I am particularly grateful to the astounding Diane Paulus for her caring and brilliant work on In The Body of the World and for giving me a home at American Repertory Theatre.

I am grateful to astounding actors who have performed my shows, found heights that I never knew existed, took breathtaking risks, said vagina onstage where no one had said it before.

I am grateful to dramaturgs, particularly Ryan McKittrick, and stage managers and dressers and designers and props people and stage crews and the whole community of people who are essential to making theatre.

I am grateful to my tribe James Lecesne, Monique Wilson, Tony Montenieri, Nancy Rose and George Lane, and my V-Day family who are there to remind me not to read reviews and to trust who I am and to focus on the why of what we are doing.

I am grateful to audiences, particularly to women, who have come to see my shows and told others to see the show. When I first started performing The Vagina Monologues, a male journalist asked with a kind of pity, how I felt that only women were coming to see your show. I laughed: “Only women?! You mean only 51 percent of the population!” Thank you, women!

I am grateful for the struggle. I think the Lifetime Achievement Award should really be called the Lifetime Survival Award. I am grateful to have survived being called polemical, pornographic, prescriptive, in-your-face, out there, overly instructive, strident, militant, too political, extreme, controversial, message mongering, lewd, crude, and obscene. All this pushback forced me to create another path, to be true to my voice. To be a woman concerned with social justice, to be a writer who believes in breaking taboos and telling the stories no one wants to talk about, to write emotionally and overtly passionately, to write monologues and moans, to write about pussies and death and homeless women and bellies and cancer and poop and Congo and war and AIDS and orgasms and sex trafficking and freegans and mystical sexual divinity…well it’s been a hard road.

Now more than ever we need the theatre. Our species is on the verge of either perishing or being born anew. So let’s fight for the theatre. Let’s trespass the boundaries of the powerful, the deal and death makers, the racists and the misogynists, the transphobes and homophobes, the war makers, the immigrant haters, the earth destroyers. Let’s bring in the voices of the marginalized in the many. Let’s raise up each other by raising up artists, brown and black, Muslims and Mexicans, undocumented women and gender non-conforming who are telling the difficult stories, challenging us to reckon with our history, to face our present and pushing us to new altered states of consciousness. Let’s find money–real money–for theatre artists, and subsidies so they can be more daring and not become commercial entities in order to survive.

Let’s honor theatre actors who have given their lives to the theatre above celebrities. Let’s value theatre as much if not more than TV or film. Let’s create a system that doesn’t rely on going to the people who we are resisting or challenging in order to be loved, approved or to survive.

Let’s allow theatre artists–particularly writers–to have careers where they can write a show that resonates with many and others that challenge and disturb. It is the lifetime of an artist that matters, the body of their work.
Let’s make theatre something people can afford so all people can enjoy the theatre and learn from it and write for it and be transformed by it.

When I grew up in the theatre in the ’60s we didn’t even think of doing theatre for money. We didn’t do it to be famous, we certainly didn’t do it to build our brands or get more followers. We did it because we knew theatre was our radical church, our fiery temple, here to evolve the soul of humankind, here to help us come back into our bodies and feelings, here to employ our theatrical imaginations to the evolving of the new paradigm, to connect with each other, strangers in the dark.

The theatre is a holy place. Magic happens here, miraculous accidents happen here. It’s a place for dying and a place for being born, a place for grief and a place for exultation. It is of the moment, in the radiant and terrifying present. It is flesh and blood and sweat and tears where devotion and mettle are tested and revealed. It is the fortress against the virtual, against disembodiment, against disconnection. Where poetry reigns and real transformation is possible. Theatre is the place to make revolution.

Thank you for this award and for this glorious life in the theatre.

V-Day Talkbacks Announced at Abingdon’s Production of Eve Ensler’s FRUIT TRILOGY (BroadwayWorld)

https://www.broadwayworld.com/off-broadway/article/V-Day-Talkbacks-Announced-at-Abingdons-Production-of-Eve-Enslers-FRUIT-TRILOGY-20180530

V-Day, founded by author, playwright and activist Eve Ensler, presents the V-Day Talkbacks following select performances during Abingdon Theatre Company’s New York premiere engagement of Ensler’s Fruit Trilogy. The series, will feature activists, artists, and thinkers leading discussions surrounding the play’s central themes on the commodification and ownership of women’s bodies along with returning to and learning to love the body. Fruit Trilogy is a play that speaks to these explosive times and charts the journey of women, from the disembodiment that comes from violence to the embodiment that comes from self-love.

Talkbacks scheduled to date include:

Tuesday, June 12: Kiersey Clemons, film/tv/theater actor and one of the stars of Fruit Trilogy, on her role in the play, art and activism.

Wednesday, June 13: Liz Mikel, film/TV/theater actor, singer and one of the stars of Fruit Trilogy, on her role in the play, art and activism.

Thursday, June 14: Taina Bien-Aimé, Executive Director of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women, moderates a conversation with representatives from Sanctuary and GEMS, all leaders on the front lines in the fight to end sex trafficking, and who serve and support survivors every day.

Tuesday, June 19: Khaliah Ali, positive body image speaker and activist, and Regena Thomashauer, teacher and author and founder of Mama Gena’s School of Womanly Arts, on the themes of the body, ownership, and of loving one’s body raised in the play.

Wednesday, June 20: Jennifer Buffett, Novo Foundation Co- President and V-Day Board Member, and Eve Ensler, Playwright (The Vagina Monologues, Fruit Trilogy) and Founder of V-Day and One Billion Rising.

Thursday, June 21: Participants to be announced.

abingdontheatre.org

Trigger Warning: this play contains language about sexual abuse.

Twenty years ago, Eve Ensler’s play The Vagina Monologues gave birth to V-Day, a global activist movement to end violence against all women and girls (cisgender, transgender, and gender non-conforming). Since 1998, The Vagina Monologues and other works have been performed across the world by local V-Day activists, raising over $100 million dollars for grassroots anti-violence groups, rape crisis centers, domestic violence shelters, and safe houses in places like Kenya and Afghanistan. V-Day supports and launched the City of Joy, a revolutionary center for women survivors of gender violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which has graduated over 1000 women leaders. Activists look at the intersection of class, race, gender, environmental destruction, imperialism, militarism, patriarchy, poverty, and war, as women face abuse and exploitation across layers of systematic and societal oppression, with the most marginalized and excluded often facing increased levels of violence. In 2013, V-Day gave birth to One Billion Rising – the largest mass action to demand an end to violence against women in history. V-Day and One Billion Rising are a crucial part of the global fight to stop gender-based violence through attacking the silence – public and private – that allows violence against women to continue. With ingenuity and determination, V-Day activists around the world are tirelessly working to end harassment, rape, battery, incest, female genital mutilation and sex slavery.

Eve’s 65th Birthday Wish – Turn Pain to Power to Planting. Support a Collective of City of Joy Graduates

Photo Credit: Paula Allen

As we write, the next class is getting ready for graduation from City of Joy, the revolutionary leadership center for women survivors of sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo. These ninety graduates will join a growing cohort of incredible women who have survived some of the most horrific violence imaginable and – through their collective healing – are now thriving as leaders in their communities.

To celebrate V-Day Founder’s Eve’s 65th birthday, donate today to support a collective of women who will channel their healing power into planting and cultivating crops.

With your support, in regions throughout Congo, the City of Joy will purchase plots of land for collectives of these new graduates. By working their land these women will increase their financial independence. Projects like this have been very successful. Last year, with your support, graduating women received the gift of a plot of land, which provided them with economic independence and stability.

TURN PAIN TO POWER TO PLANTING by donating today: vday.org/planting

Together we are healing the earth, Turning Pain to Power to Planting – JOIN US!

BACKGROUND ON THE CITY OF JOY

The City of Joy is a transformational leadership community for women survivors of violence, located in Bukavu, Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Conceived, owned, and run by local Congolese, the City of Joy has flourished since it first opened its doors in June 2011. It is a place where women heal themselves from their past trauma through therapy and life skills programming while providing them with the essential ingredients needed to move forward in life – love and community.

Serving up to 90 survivors of gender violence aged 18 to 30 at a time, the City of Joy reached a historic milestone last year. With the graduation of the 12th class in December, over 1000 women leaders have graduated from City of Joy and are giving back to their communities!

Your donations in the US are fully tax-deductible. Please be as generous as you can to support this work.

MORE INFORMATION:

City of Joy: drc.vday.org

V-Day: vday.org

One Billion Rising: onebillionrising.org

Fruit Trilogy Talkback Series Announced, Hosted by V-Day, Featuring Actors & Activists

#ThisIsV20 continues with the announcement of a talkback series after select performances of Eve Ensler’s newest play – Fruit Trilogy. The series, produced by V-Day, will be led by activists, artists, and thinkers participating in discussions surrounding the play’s central themes on the commodification and ownership of women’s bodies along with returning to and learning to love the body.

Fruit Trilogy is a play that speaks to these explosive times and charts the journey of women, from the disembodiment that comes from violence to the embodiment that comes from self-love.

Presented by the Abingdon Theatre Company, directed by Mark Rosenblatt, the play features Kiersey Clemons (Dope, The Only Boy Living In New York, “Transparent”) and Liz Mikel (Lysistrata Jones, “Friday Night Lights”).

In this pivotal moment when women around the world have risen up to tell their stories and stand up against violence, Eve’s timely Fruit Trilogy is three short plays that give a voice to defiant, ordinary women: Pomegranate – two women for sale, another morning on the shelf; Avocado – a young woman on her chaotic, shocking journey towards freedom; and Coconut – from the bliss of her bathroom, a woman connects with the one thing she has never fully owned … her body. Woven together with dark humor and heightened theatricality, Fruit Trilogy explores the humanity behind the headlines.

Talkbacks scheduled to date include:

Tuesday, June 12: Kiersey Clemons, film/tv/theater actor and one of the stars of Fruit Trilogy, on her role in the play, art & activism.

Wednesday, June 13: Liz Mikel, film/TV/theater actor, singer and one of the stars of Fruit Trilogy, on her role in the play, art & activism.

Thursday, June 14: Taina Bien-Aimé, Executive Director of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women, moderates a conversation with representatives from Sanctuary and GEMS, all leaders on the front lines in the fight to end sex trafficking, and who serve and support survivors every day.

Tuesday, June 19: Khaliah Ali, positive body image speaker and activist, and Regena Thomashauer, teacher and author and founder of Mama Gena’s School of Womanly Arts, on the themes of the body, ownership, and of loving one’s body raised in the play.

Wednesday, June 20: Jennifer Buffett, Novo Foundation Co-President and V-Day Board Member, and Eve Ensler, Playwright (The Vagina Monologues, Fruit Trilogy) and Founder of V-Day and One Billion Rising.

A Talkback will also take place on June 21. Speaker to be announced. Stay Tuned.

This is a limited engagement. Get your tickets today,
VISIT http://abingdontheatre.org/fruit-trilogy/ or call Ovationtix.com at 212-352-3101. Special discount available for V-Day activists. Code: VDAY
Limit: 4 per order. All tickets are $33 plus $2.00 facility fee (standard price is $67). The offer is good only in standard seating areas of the house, for all performances except opening night (June 7). Facility fees for online and phone orders apply.

Trigger Warning: this play contains language about sexual abuse.

Statement from One Billion Rising & V-Day on the Violence Against Palestinian Protesters

We grieve with every Palestinian mother, father, sister, brother and grandparent who buried a loved one this week, at least 60 of whom were killed on 14 May by the Israeli military. We mourn acutely for the seven children among those killed, including Laila Anwar Al-Ghandour, a baby of 8 months who was overwhelmed by tear gas. We ache for the more than 2,700 wounded children, women and men, overflowing into the corridors of Gaza’s under-resourced hospitals, some with devastating injuries caused by exploding bullets, leaving them maimed for life. And, as women who have long been struggling for justice and equality, everywhere around the world, we insist on the right of every Palestinian to live in freedom, with their full rights – and dignity long denied them.

Monday’s horrifying violence came amid Gaza’s Great Return March. Since 30 March, tens of thousands of unarmed Palestinians have participated in protests along the barrier with Israel to demand their freedom and the right to return to their homes and land. The march was set to culminate on 15 May, the 70th anniversary of the Nakba, or ‘Catastrophe’, marking the expulsion or flight of over 750,000 Palestinians from their homes during the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. A Nakba that has never ended.

The Great Return Marchers are also trying to draw the world’s attention to Israel’s illegal blockade that has been strangling two million Palestinians in Gaza since 2007. 70% of Gaza’s population are refugees originally from towns and villages located in what is now Israel. Due in large part to Israel’s blockade, the United Nations has determined that Gaza will be uninhabitable by 2020. Gaza is barely habitable now; 96% of their water is undrinkable, electricity is available for just a few hours a day, and youth unemployment is at nearly 60%. The vast majority of Palestinians in Gaza are trapped inside the small coastal enclave, what has been repeatedly termed an “open air prison”, unable to travel to pursue their education, visit family, or seek medical treatment.

The Israeli military has responded to Palestinian protesters with sniper fire, live ammunition and tear gas, killing 109 people since the March began, 60 of them on 14 May, the single bloodiest day. 12,000 others have been wounded. In contrast, not a single Israeli soldier or civilian was killed.

55 miles away from the Israeli snipers shooting at unarmed Palestinian protesters, the U.S. government opened its embassy in Jerusalem. This Embassy move reversed decades of U.S. policy which had upheld that the future of Jerusalem must be agreed upon through a negotiated settlement. We reject the Trump administration’s unilateral decision, not only for the hubris and ignorance that it reflects, but because such a move – callously held on the day marking 70 years of Palestinian displacement – further cements their dispossession and the erasure of Palestinians from the historic city of Jerusalem. Since Israel’s illegal occupation of East Jerusalem in 1967, over 14,000 Palestinians have had their residency rights revoked because they are the wrong identity. This reckless US embassy move emboldens the Israeli government in their ongoing project to erase indigenous Palestinians all across their historic homeland. As many of us come from countries founded on the dispossession of indigenous populations, we cannot accept any government contributing to the unjust policies being enacted upon the Palestinians, who have suffered for 70 years.

We are outraged and heartbroken over the killings and further entrenchment of injustice and oppression of the Palestinian people. But–we are inspired by the courageous people of Gaza who refuse to submit to occupation, siege, and further displacement by risking their lives to secure a life worth living, for themselves and their children.

We call on the U.S. government and the Israeli government to fully end the blockade of Gaza and the occupation of the Palestinian people.

And, we call on all people of conscience to raise their voices with us, and with the people of Gaza, affirming the right of every Palestinian to live in full freedom, and with dignity. We hold the humanity of every Palestinian – every mother, sister, father, brother, daughter and son – and we insist that their humanity be universally recognized and defended.

#StandWithGaza   #FreePalestine   #RiseInSolidarity   #UntilTheViolenceStops

RISE for Mothers by Supporting the Movement to End Violence Against Women and Girls

Celebrate Mother’s Day by supporting the movement to end violence against women and girls. Make a donation to City of Joy or the V-Day Safe House for the Girls/Tasaru Rescue Center on behalf of your mother, friends, and loved ones, and V-Day will send the specially designed 2018 Mother’s Day V-Card of your choice letting them know of your unique gift in their honor.

Send a Mother’s Day card supporting City of Joy >

Send a Mother’s Day card supporting the V-Day Safe House for the Girls/Tasaru Rescue Center >

To send a V-Card on the donate page, check the box next to “Would you like to send an eCard?” labeled “Yes, I would like to send a V-Day e-card,” choose the design you would like to send, and fill in the rest of the information to finish designing your gift.

Give the Gift of Human Rights! Support the People of Puerto Rico

Many people on the island are lacking basic necessities. Through this continuing crisis, many in Puerto Rico are rebuilding their own communities one home at a time, one neighborhood at a time. V-Day and PR on the Map are thrilled to be joining forces to provide resources to three trusted community organizations the Puerto Rico Rising Fund, a response fund created by V-Day and PR ON THE MAP that will support youth, women and organizers in Puerto Rico as they work to take care of themselves and their community. Organizations supported include AgitArte, Feminist Collective and Boys and Girls Club of Loiza, read more about them here.

Give the gift of solidarity, by making a donation in the name of a loved one.

Fruit Trilogy, a New Trilogy of Plays by Eve, to Premiere in New York

#ThisIsV20 continues with the announcement of Fruit Trilogy, a new trilogy of plays by Eve Ensler. Abingdon Theatre Company presents the New York premiere production, directed by Mark Rosenblatt and featuring Kiersey Clemons and Ms. Liz Mikel.

Fruit Trilogy is a play that speaks to these explosive times and charts the journey of women, from the disembodiment that comes from violence to the embodiment that comes from self-love.

Presented by the Abingdon Theatre Company (Tony Speciale, Artistic Director; Denise Dickens, Producing Director) as part of its 25th Anniversary season, Fruit Trilogy is directed by Mark Rosenblatt (world premiere of Fruit Trilogy at West Yorkshire Playhouse, UK) and features Kiersey Clemons (Dope, The Only Boy Living In New York, “Transparent”) and Liz Mikel (Lysistrata Jones, “Friday Night Lights”). The New York premiere production launches a limited engagement Saturday June 2 at 8PM at the historic Lucille Lortel Theatre Theatre (121 Christopher Street, NYC) in Greenwich Village and runs through June 23. The official opening night is June 7 at 7PM.

Special discount available for V-Day activists. Code: VDAY
Tickets are currently on sale at http://abingdontheatre.org/fruit-trilogy/ or by calling Ovationtix.com at 212-352-3101.
Limit: 4 per order. All tickets are $33 plus $2.00 facility fee (standard price is $67). The offer is good only in standard seating areas of the house, for all performances except opening night (June 7). Facility fees for online and phone orders apply.

After select performances, V-Day will host a talkback series led by activists, artists, and thinkers; participating in discussions surrounding the play’s central themes on the commodification and ownership of women’s bodies along with returning to and learning to love the body.

In this pivotal moment when women around the world have risen up to tell their stories and stand up against violence, Eve’s timely Fruit Trilogy is three short plays that give a voice to defiant, ordinary women: Pomegranate — two women for sale, another morning on the shelf; Avocado — a young woman on her chaotic, shocking journey toward freedom; and Coconut — from the bliss of her bathroom, a woman connects with the one thing she has never fully owned … her body. Woven together with dark humor and heightened theatricality, Fruit Trilogy explores the humanity behind the headlines.

LEARN more and purchase tickets >

SIGN TODAY! Urgent Appeal Calling For an Independent International Inquiry into Sexual Violence Cases in Jammu and Kashmir

Dear Activists –

We have just launched an urgent appeal demanding an independent international inquiry into sexual violence cases in Jammu and Kashmir. Please join us, sign the appeal, and share widely with your friends and networks.

Activists are calling for an independent, impartial investigation of cases of sexual violence and a United Nations fact-finding team to investigate human rights violations perpetrated on a massive scale by Indian Armed Forces in Indian Occupied Kashmir.

On 10 January 2018, an eight-year-old Muslim girl belonging to the Bakarwal community of nomadic shepherds went missing from the vicinity of her home in Rassana village of Kathua, a Hindu-majority district of the State of Jammu & Kashmir. Seven days later, her mutilated body was found in the forests of Rassana. The girl, who the world today knows as Asifa, had been raped and then bludgeoned to death. The Crime Branch investigation has revealed that the child was kidnapped and held captive for five days in a local Hindu place of worship, where she was sedated and repeatedly raped.

The rape and murder of 8-year-old Asifa needs to be understood in the paradigm of widespread militarization in Jammu and Kashmir, which is the densest military occupation in the world today. The conflict has claimed more than 70,000 lives so far, and continues to generate a vast range of unimaginable forms of violence, including tens of thousands of victims of severe torture. The systematic use of sexual violence as a weapon of war by the armed forces is a common feature of this militarized violence. Accompanied by legal and political impunity and zero records of prosecution of crimes by the armed forces, non-state actors too have felt emboldened to perpetrate sexual violence as a tool of hegemonic politics.

One Billion Rising and V-Day is calling on our network to sign on, for Asifa – who was tragically raped and murdered – and for the countless other women and girls who have been killed and assaulted in Jammu and Kashmir. Already hundreds of activists have signed on including Eve, Anthony Arnove, Rosanna Arquette, Noam Chomsky, Jodie Evans, Jane Fonda, and Naomi Klein.

To sign, visit onebillionrising.org/asifa

In solidarity,
All of us at V-Day, One Billion Rising & City of Joy

PS – Sample social media posts are also on the page, as well as downloadable images.

RISE TO END GUN VIOLENCE. #MarchForOurLives This Saturday

On 24 March, the kids and families of March For Our Lives will take to the streets of Washington, D.C. to demand that their lives and safety become a priority and that we end gun violence and mass shootings in our schools today.

RISE IN SOLIDARITY and stand up for an end to gun violence. Let’s make the connections between the issues of ending violence against women and ending gun violence and march as V-Day and One Billion Rising activists in support of these student-led marches on Saturday, 24 March in locations across the US and the world.

Student-led and organized by #NeverAgain, March for Our Lives has three demands:

1. Pass a law to ban the assault weapons frequently used to carry out mass shootings.
2. Stop the sale of high-capacity magazines, restricting the amount of ammunition.
3. Close loopholes in America’s background checks and implement laws that require background checks on every gun purchase, including those that occur online or at gun shows.

Sign the petition.

Need a poster? Download here.

Hashtag #MarchForOurLives and include our 2018 hashtags:

#RiseInSolidarity
#RiseResistUnite
#ThisIsV20
#UntilTheViolenceStops

Locate solidarity marches and events near you >

Gun violence in the United States* is a systematic issue that repeatedly endangers and devastates entire communities through school shootings. Gun violence in the US is also an issue of racism and misogyny, as it disproportionately affects Black communities who are impacted by police brutality.

The accessibility to arms perpetuates a cycle of domestic violence against women; the presence of a gun makes it 5x more likely that domestic violence turns deadly. Domestic violence often precludes mass shootings, “perpetrators of domestic violence accounted for 54 percent of mass shootings between 2009 and 2016″ (Every Town for Gun Safety).

* “America has a unique problem,” – Vox, 21 FEB 2018

According to the Gun Violence Archive, in 2018 there have already been 34 mass shootings, and in 2017 there were a total of 346. The Guardian

“The racial divide in America’s gun deaths” – The Washington Post, 19 SEP 2014