In January 2012, we were honored to learn that a group of 77 experts identified V-Day as 1 of 14 high-impact nonprofits working in the field of violence against women internationally!
Some of reviews experts had about our impact were:
“As a global epidemic entrenched in silence and cultural norms, violence against women requires a nuanced public outcry, constituency-building at a broad scale, a shift in values/consciousness/behavior, and a major investment in resources for both local-level interventions and mass-media campaigns. V-Day is one of the only organizations I have ever seen be able to truly stake the claim to these accomplishments: mobilizing hundreds of thousands as community organizers of powerfully emotional awareness-raising events. combining art and activism and earned media. reaching across the globe to audiences young and old. and using an incredible combination of humor and pathos to reach people who might think they are otherwise unaffected by violence and make them feel the outcry, too. The brilliance of this is that it succeeds at celebrating and defending women’s sexuality while condemning sexual violence. quashing the typical backlash against women’s sexual activity that often accompanies public stories about rape, harassment, or abuse. V-Day has been empowering to women at a personal and political level, providing women a mouthpiece to express solidarity, indignant and outcry against VAW in local settings (of every country) as much as in specific international contexts such as Iraq, Haiti, and the DRC, and against our individual selves.”
“Through the 1990s and the 00s, violence against women (VAW) gained massive momentum among women’s organizations as the most primary of female human rights issues that required our hard work, advocacy, programs & services, and campaigns. And yet, it was consistently under-funded by foundations and the international donor community, and under-prioritized in government budget allocations. V-Day’s accomplishment of raising $80 million by local organizers for local VAW organizations in its first 10 years is a staggering, mind-blowing achievement. Leap-frogging the grant makers who have been slow to concede the need and importance of investing in this issue. Last, Eve Ensler’s ceaseless devotion to V-Day, globe-trotting and publishing op-eds and performing, has almost single-handedly created an awareness of international VAW issues in major publications that would have otherwise kept their readers oblivious to the depth and extent of VAW issues around the world and the heroics at work to intercede.”
“On of V-Day’s strength is its leadership. Eve Ensler, founder, president and artistic director, is a charismatic leader who can engage and “activate” diverse audiences. Also, V-Day’s original model/way of working is a strength. By making available a successful theatrical piece as a fundraising (and awareness raising) tool for local organizations around the world, and by emphasizing the creative and celebratory aspect of anti-violence work, V-Day has added a whole new dimension to VAW advocacy/activism.”
About Philanthropedia (at GuideStar)
Philanthropedia (at GuideStar) is a nonprofit organization working to help donors make smarter donations by connecting them with some of the highest impact nonprofits in a cause. They are different from other online rating sites or donation sites because they use experts to identify high-impact nonprofits.
All the information collected from the research is available on Philanthropedia’s website and will shortly be available on GuideStar Take Action’s website
This new year, V-Day presents you with a brand new event option to produce as part of your V-Week! Introducing OVER IT 2012. Eve told the world what she is “over” in this powerful new piece.
“There are approximately one billion women on the planet who have been violated.
ONE BILLION WOMEN.
The time is now. Prepare for the escalation.
Today it begins, moving toward February 14, 2013, when one billion women will rise to end rape.
Because we are over it.”
There are three ways in which you can incorporate OVER IT into your events.
Include OVER IT in your reading of “The Vagina Monologues” or “A Memory, A Monologue, A Rant and A Prayer.” The piece should be inserted at the very end of the script, after the 2012 Spotlight Monologue.
Speak Out. Use this piece to inspire a spoken word event during which performers treat OVER IT as a template to express what it is that they are over. Participants should stick to the theme of violence against women.
V-Team building workshop. Gather your cast and crew and read OVER IT out loud. Then, conduct a 5-10 minute writing exercise, during which everyone writes about they are over. Ask participants to share their rants with the group.
A world in which ONE BILLION women experience sexual violence is unacceptable. Register to host your OVER IT event now at vspot.day.org/signup. The time has come to get active, get OVER IT, and stand together to demand an end to the violence.
V-Day is proud to announce that V-Board member Pat Mitchell was named one of Women’s eNews “21 Leaders for the 21st Century”! The annual list features women leaders who have demonstrated throughout the year their commitment to improving the lives of women and girls and the capacity to continue to improve the future for all.
Pat Mitchell creates buzz wherever she goes and, dressed in a signature red suit and high heels, she gives off buzz too.
Since 2006, Mitchell has led the transformation of The Paley Center for Media in New York and Los Angeles from a sleepy museum of the golden years of radio and television to a hot spot for discussions, screenings and conferences. Fueled by her career-long commitment to engaging media’s power to further empower women, she has created an unprecedented presence for women with a diverse series of initiatives called Women at Paley. It has included forums, a showcase of women who have helped shape the history of media and a current series of programs produced for PBS and hosted by Mitchell, called “She’s Making Media.”
Partnering with Springboard, Mitchell also offered the first venture capital forum for female media entrepreneurs and, with the Women’s Media Center, programs to raise awareness of the underrepresentation and misrepresentation of women and girls in mainstream media.
Growing up in Georgia, when women had very few mentors, role models or opportunities, Mitchell’s activism on behalf of women was formed early by her participation in the civil rights movement and the women’s movement. With a master’s degree from the University of Georgia, she taught college for a few years until recruited by Look magazine, which folded a year later. Unemployed, Mitchell successfully pitched a story to NBC’s local station news desk, and an unexpected career in television followed.
In 1974, Mitchell created a history-making event for women–24 hours of television programs about women, for women, produced and hosted by women. In the mid-1980s, Mitchell became the first woman to nationally syndicate her own show, “Woman to Woman,” which won an Emmy. For NBC’s TODAY, she reported women’s stories and produced documentaries like “Women in War” and “Century of Women.” Mitchell also led Ted Turner’s original production division, producing documentaries that won 34 Emmys and two Academy Award nominations. In 2000, Mitchell was named president and CEO of Public Broadcasting Service, the first woman and first producer to hold the position.
In 2010, Mitchell partnered with the TED, the premiere global conference and online organization, to curate the first ever TEDWomen in Washington, DC, followed this year by TEDXWomen which was convened at the Paley Centers in New York and Los Angeles and connected live to 117 TEDxs worldwide. The TEDTalks from these two conferences have been viewed more than 10 million times, spreading the stories, ideas and innovations of women and girls.
“I’ve strongly felt that media’s responsibility is to not just be the mirror of society, but also to engage its power to fully inform as well as entertain, to inspire as well as influence. I consider it a privilege to use my position in media to ensure that the ideas and stories of women and girls are more fully and accurately represented,” she says.
Mitchell, who has been on the 100 Most Powerful Women in Hollywood list and was inducted into the Broadcasting and Cable Hall of Fame, was named to Newsweek’s 2011 list of 150 Women Who Shake the World.
Who could have predicted what an effect a group of women talking about vaginas would have. Fifteen years ago, Eve Ensler, then a moderately successful New York playwright, opened the play she had been writing for two years, The Vagina Monologues. Drawing on interviews she had done with more than 200 women, the resulting monologues – delivered, over the years, by actors including Meryl Streep, Susan Sarandon and Oprah Winfrey – told of women’s experiences: sexuality, abuse, love, birth.
But Ensler didn’t stop there. Spurred on by the play’s success – and by the stories women would spill to her after performances – two years later she created the V-Day movement. Mission: to end violence against women. Now, fundraising performances of the play are staged all over the world, and the movement has raised $85m to fund women’s projects, including an ambitious centre in Congo, officially the worst place to be a woman, to support women who have been raped. Could she have predicted its longevity and influence? “It’s all been a wonderful mystery to me,” she says, with a laugh.
We meet in the busy bar of Ensler’s London hotel. Those who meet her always comment on her megawatt charisma – “You don’t just hook up with Eve,” Glenn Close, who performed in the show, said once, “You become part of her crusade” – but she is less showy, less boisterous than that implies.
For years, she had a recognisable sleek, dark bob, which made her look part comic book minx, part warrior in protective headgear, but she lost it after undergoing chemotherapy last year, following her diagnosis of uterine cancer. These days her hair is cropped short. We end up sitting in weirdly oversized chairs, which means neither of us can touch the floor.
There is something quite childlike about Ensler, who is 58. Despite the horror stories from other women’s lives she has spent absorbing – as well as her own struggles – she seems utterly uncynical. As angry at injustice as ever, but not worn down.
If The Vagina Monologues is starting to look a little tired in this country, it’s easy to forget what an impact it still has elsewhere. “Just this week Qatar has signed up, and there are going to be women in Qatar who get up to do it, and they’re risking their lives to do that,” says Ensler. “I’ve seen that time and time again, this desire to break taboos, tell secrets, open up silences – I just find it very powerful and inspirational.”
Ensler’s most recent work, I Am An Emotional Creature, was based on stories from teenage girls. When it debuted two years ago, she launched V-Girls specifically to engage girls and young women. “They don’t know what the word ‘feminism’ means, but their desires are feminist – they want to be free, safe, have opportunities and leadership roles. The trick is to find the language girls speak and support that, rather than say, ‘This is an ideology that has gone on for years that you all need to support.’ I’m a feminist, I grew up with feminism, but I also think there’s a way in which we need to shake things up so that we can push it further and in other directions.”
Another thing Ensler noticed with I Am An Emotional Creature is how ready men were to engage. She mentioned it to a (male) friend who told her, “Men have daughters; they feel they can actively be involved because they feel they can do something to change the destiny of their daughters’ lives.” Now there is a V-Men movement, “a cadre of men around the world who are stepping forward and saying, ‘Ending violence against women and girls means something to me.’ That is really exciting. Unless men are active allies, we’ll never end violence against women and girls. Most violence against women is done by men – we’re not raping ourselves – so unless men engage in this struggle and make this a primary concern, I don’t see how we’re going to end this.”
This approach won’t endear her to radical feminists, but then Ensler has divided feminists already. Germaine Greer, who appeared in a British production of The Vagina Monologues, called it a “much-hyped and fundamentally unchallenging piece of buffoonish American hoop-la”. Camille Paglia has attacked Ensler, writing that she represented a “painfully outmoded branch of feminism” in one piece, describing her as a “feverish charlatan and cultist” in another. About Greer, Ensler smiles and says she “felt sad, but she has a right to feel what she feels. There is much she has done that I really respect. The older you get, the more you are aware that everybody has a certain way of seeing things, which they have to honour.”
Ensler grew up in a wealthy New York suburb. Her father was a food company executive, her mother stayed at home. In her 2007 book Insecure at Last, written partly as a response to the US obsession with “security” after 9/11, but also as a memoir, she revealed the ideal to be an illusion. The reality was that her father physically and sexually abused her.
“I could never imagine life past 30, and I came close to making sure I didn’t get there,” she wrote. In her early twenties she was addicted to drugs and alcohol, getting clean when she met and married her husband and adopted his teenage son. In the following years she worked as an activist for homeless women, and in the anti-nuclear movement, and wrote plays that had a bit of success in New York. Then came The Vagina Monologues. It brought her awards, money, fame, celebrity supporters – and most importantly, she says, access to power and a platform.
Earlier this year, Ensler opened City of Joy, a centre in Congo that rehabilitates survivors of rape. The stories that have come from the women of this small central African country are unimaginable – women tied to trees and gangraped for weeks, women raped with sticks and bottles, even guns, women whose sons and fathers were forced at gunpoint to violate them. The centre is now home to 40 women who will have counselling, learn English, literacy and computer skills, become practised communicators and effective leaders. “It’s the most joyful place I’ve ever been in my life,” says Ensler. “In the midst of the worst circumstances, there is this city growing up, and I really believe these women will be the future of Congo. The Congo was a turning point in my life. I had been to many places where women were suffering, but the Congo was really shattering.” Because of the extremity of the violence? She nods. “To think that, in this century, any woman would be treated that way with the knowledge of the world just felt unbearable.”
She says it was the Congolese women who “got me through it” when she was diagnosed with cancer of the uterus last year. “We were building and opening City of Joy and my part of the bargain was to find the funds, so I had to live to do that. In that sense, they really saved my life, because I had to get up every day and keep moving forward.” Claims that life-threatening illness can be transformative can often seem trite, but Ensler, who says her prognosis is good, is convincing. “It was the worst experience that turned into a really kind of wonderful experience,” she says. “I have a lot of energy coming out of it and I don’t really understand it. I also love being alive, it’s fantastic – particularly when you come close to losing it. It was so momentous and so catastrophic that it changed me, and got me to finally let go of so much that I was holding on to.”
Her own experience of abuse, she says, “is deeply interlinked in what motivates me. I felt caught before in the rage and the drama and the proving myself and fighting my way out of [being] that ‘victim’, and that’s over, that’s not what’s driving me any more. When you’re raped, you are made to feel bad because you often absorb – literally – your perpetrator, and it becomes ‘your’ badness. It has taken me years to exorcise that.” A little later she says, in a quieter voice, “I realised that if I continued to live thinking I was a terrible person and had to prove that I wasn’t, I would die.”
Ensler has big plans. For the 15th anniversary of V-Day in 2013, she wants to get a billion women – the figure comes from the UN’s estimate that one in three women will be raped or assaulted during their lifetime – to come together, “to walk out of their jobs, to walk out of any situation where they have been violated, or just to walk because they were violated, and to join with whoever. If women could see the numbers, how many women we are who have been through this experience … ” She calls it a “general strike on life. If women stop, the whole world is going to stop – who is going to take care of patients, lead classes, run companies, lift things in the field, carry the children?”
Has she missed out on anything as a result of the life she has led? She sometimes thinks about what her love life would have been like “if I hadn’t been cast as a radical, scary feminist. Then I think, well so be it, I had a great love life.” After her marriage ended, she had a long relationship with Ariel Orr Jordan, an artist and psychotherapist, but is single now, and this seems to suit her and her nomadic lifestyle – she has places in New York and Paris, but spends much of the year travelling.
She doesn’t hold back in her predictions of what violence and abuse of women could lead to, likening the effect to global warming. Rape, says Ensler, has become “the modern weapon of warfare. When you destroy a population, once femicide happens, we’re going to see the end of humanity, because I don’t know how you sustain a future without vitalised women. We are seeing practices on the planet that are so horrific we can’t even imagine.”
And yet she seems so cheerful when she talks of a “woman spring” in the making. “On my good days,” she says with a sideways smile, “and there are many, I can see that it really is in sight. It was really the Egyptian women who led the uprising. We’re seeing all kinds of women activists across the planet. I look at Agnes [Pareyio, director of V-Day Kenya, who started two safe houses for girls escaping female genital mutilation] – she was exiled in her community, and she’s now running for parliament and has a very good chance of winning. Look at Dominique Strauss Kahn – it’s a terrible situation, but 10 years ago that would not have been front page news, he would not have been dragged off a plane. That’s huge. That is tangible change. We haven’t ended violence, but we have built the mechanisms to begin to combat it. The next step is ending it, going the distance. I look at women in Libya who are now organising to find ways to come into power, I look at the Liberian women who have elected a woman president.” She starts to gather her things. “There are signs everywhere you look.”
We get up. When I go to shake her hand, Ensler hugs me instead. “We do hugs in V-land,” she says. It catches me off-guard, but then strikes me as a very Ensler thing to do – warm, funny, barrier-breaking – and when I’m forced, out of politeness, to put my arms around this small woman, I’m struck by just how strong she feels.
Accountability project urges students to examine sexual assault policies
By Viviana Bonilla Lopez
One in four college women will be victims of rape or attempted rape before they graduate, according to a study from the National Institute of Justice.
But according to V-Day and Students Active for Ending Rape (SAFER), most colleges’ sexual assault policies don’t go far enough.
“The statistics are very real,” said Sarah Martino, Board Chair at Students Active for Ending Rape. “It is sort of a problem of epidemic proportions.”
To address the issue, the two organizations are teaming up to ask college students to review their schools’ policies and report their findings online as part of the Campus Accountability Project — an initiative to evaluate how colleges are responding to sexual violence on campus.
The Winter Break Challenge was launched December 15 with a goal of publishing 300 university sexual assault policies.
“We want students to know what is in the policy,” Martino said. “If they go through the process and are not happy with what they find, then they are armed with the knowledge for how to take action.”
To date, the website has recorded 233 campus sexual assault policies, mainly thanks to students who register online and follow a step-by-step policy review form. The project hopes to publish a report by 2013 that will summarize findings and make policy recommendations.
In the meantime, Martino said, there are basic things that all university policies should include. Chief among them are a clear definition of what sexual assault is and defining a process for reporting an assault and getting help.
She also said that primary prevention programs — in which students were guided in discussions about what sexual assault was and what consent looked like — should focus only on how students can protect themselves.
“We don’t really teach young people about what consensual sex looks like,” Martino said.
At the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, sophomore Mary Weiner said the sexual assault discussions at her first year orientation were centered on risk prevention.
“The only experience I have had with prevention through UNC was at CTOPS when they talked about what you can do to protect yourself against sexual violence,” said the nursing major. “Looking back now, I am disappointed with how they failed to break certain stereotypes and misbeliefs that surround sexual violence.”
That’s not to say that rape isn’t addressed on UNC-CH’s campus.
The university has two, four-hour trainings dedicated to teaching students about interpersonal violence and how to be allies for those who have experienced sexual violence. In 2011, approximately 1,200 students attended the trainings, said Robert Pleasants, Interpersonal Violence Prevention Coordinator at UNC-CH.
Other universities have similar programs, but according to a preliminary report published in 2009 by SAFER, prevention programs are still not as widespread as they should be.
The report found that colleges were doing a good job of providing crisis services for students who had been sexually assaulted. Of the schools in the organization’s database at the time, 85 percent offered 24-hour crisis services.
Prevention was a different story. Nearly half of the schools studied had a full-time staff member dedicated to education and prevention programming, yet only about 15 percent made awareness programs mandatory for students.
With recent news that the FBI could be changing its more than 80-year-old definition of rape to include all types of non-consensual penetration and/or oral sex, sexual assault may get more mainstream media attenion.
At colleges around the nation, however, Executive Director of V-Day, Susan Swan, said students are already tackling these issues in a big way.
“It’s not a small thing,” she said of student’s participation in the Campus Accountability Project. “This isn’t just clicking on a video or signing a petition, it’s really a research project.”
Vivianna Bonilla Lopez is a Fall 2011 USA TODAY Collegiate Correspondent.
In October, V-Day and MCR Productions brought V-Girls to France for thevery first time through curated workshop productions of Emotional Creature at Ciné 13 Théâtre. The sold-out performances were hugely successful and paved the way for the launch of the French translation of Eve Ensler’s bestselling book I Am An Emotional Creature: The Secret Life Of Girls Around The World.
The book has been met with rave reviews and has garnered local and international press in publications such as Elle, Paris Match, Le Monde de Livres, Livres Hebdo
and many more. The release of the French translation continues to bring international attention not only to the issues facing girls around the world, but to the V-Girls movement – a global network of girl activists empowering themselves and one another to change the world, one girl at a time.
CNN’s Becky Anderson speaks to V-Day Board member and BAFTA award-winning actress Thandie Newton about her work with V-Day, City of Joy, and the women and girls of Congo.
We are so proud to announce that our beautiful brave sister, V-Day’s Congo Director & Director of City of Joy Christine Schuler-Deschryver, was just named one of The Guardian‘s “Women of the Year 2011”! Christine, V-Day activists everywhere celebrate you and the women of Congo who are rising. We send you our love and our deepest admiration for your courage and vision and fierce mad mama self.
From November 22 – 24, V-Day held three events in London, bringing international attention to both V-Day’s work in Congo, and V-Day’s newest initiative, V-Girls. The hugely successful events were organized by long-time V-Day activist Monique Wilson and Rossana Abueva:
The Congo Monologues
On November 22nd, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer hosted “The Congo Monologues” – an evening where lawyers and legal experts based in the UK gathered to hear Tony-Award winning playwright and V-Day founder Eve Ensler, V-Day Congo and City of Joy Director Christine Schuler Deschryver, and Dr. Denis Mukwege, founder of the Panzi Hospital in the Congo, speak about the situation of women in the DRC and their work. The event was hosted to explore ways in which to provide legal assistance and justice to women of the Congo. A big thank you to Clarrisa O’callaghan for making this event a huge success!
Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer is a leader among international law firms, providing business law advice throughout Europe, the Middle East, Asia and the USA. They have over 2,500 lawyers in 27 key business centers around world.
The event was hosted by Lucy Reed, a senior partner at Freshfields and co-head of their global international arbitration group. The evening also featured performances of Eve Ensler’s two monologues on the Congo: “Baptized”, performed by acclaimed British actress Linda Marlowe, and “Ten Ways to Survive Sexual Slavery in the Congo” – performed by Eno Williams-Uffort, one of the original cast members of the Paris workshop production of Eve’s new play – “Emotional Creature”.
5×15 Fundraising Event for The City of Joy
On November 23rd, 5×15 hosted a fundraising evening for The City of Joy at the Tabernacle, Notting Hill – a 19th century Grade II listed former evangelical church. The evening featured Eve Ensler and Christine Schuler Deschryver as speakers. Joining them was Helena Kennedy, one of theUK’s great defenders of civil liberties and leading QC’s. Sandi Toksvig – comedian, radio and television presenter – was the evening’s brilliant auctioneer. A HUGE v-thank you to Rosie Boycott who produced and hosted this event which raised over 17,000 pounds for the City of Joy.
5×15 is the brainchild of journalist Rosie Boycott, her daughter and book editor at The Lady Daisy Leitch and literary festival promoter Eleanor O’Keeffe. Running since January 2010, 5×15 is a series of evenings that feature dynamic thinkers from a wide spectrum of spheres. The concept of these evenings is to give five prominent people the opportunity to talk about their biggest achievement or passion.
V-Girl Workshop led by Eve Ensler at the East 15 Acting School
On November 24th, Eve Ensler led a V-Girl workshop at the East 15 Acting School with over 80 girls from all over the UK and 22 countries around the world. The students were 1st year BA students in acting and contemporary theatre, and MA postgraduate acting students.
East 15 Acting School in East London has been training actors, directors, producers, and theatre technicians for over 50 years. The school grew from the work of Joan Littlewood’s famed Theatre Workshop and is one of the few drama schools to have come from such a background. Theatre workshop broke new ground, commissioning new plays from socially committed writers, and creating an ensemble capable of inventing new work – an ethos the drama school adopts to this day.
The workshop was a creative life force of ideas where the girls, inspired by Eve, came up with creative, empowered and inventive ways to fully come into their power and voices and take V-Girls to their friends around the world.
The Amanda Keidan V-Day Collection consists of two styles, the V-Day Ring, and the V-Day Necklace. Both styles bear the V-Day symbol, which has come to signify V-Day’s global message to end violence against women and girls and to change the story of women. Both pieces come in either gold or silver, and can be adorned with diamonds or rubies. Prices start at $110.
Amanda Keidan Jewelry obtains diamonds from respected and well-established suppliers that comply completely with U.S retailer requirements.
Orders placed on or before December 22nd can be delivered in time for Christmas, overnight shipping fees may apply.
ABC Carpet & Home Gifts Of Compassion
ABC Carpet & Home continues its Gifts Of Compassion, a unique gift opportunity where shoppers can align their spending choices with their personal values. This year, through Gifts Of Compassion you can Transform Pain to Power for Survivors of War and Sexual Violence by offering a year of schooling at V-Day’s City of Joy for a survivor of sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Each gift is represented with a personalized certificate in a vintage silk sari envelope, consuming virtually no resources and creating no pollution while inspiring a lifetime of meaningful change.
V-Day is offering two designs for this year’s Holiday V-Cards. A V-Card supports the worldwide movement to end violence against women and girls and is the perfect gift for the Holidays!
Make a donation to V-Day on behalf of your friends and loved ones. V-Day will send a specially designed 2011 holiday V-Card letting them know of their unique gift.
To send a V-Card on the donate page*, check the box next to “Donate on behalf of a loved one?” labeled “Yes, I would like to send a V-Day e-card” and fill in the rest of the information to finish designing your gift.
This new year, V-Day presents you with a brand new event option to produce as part of your V-Week! Introducing OVER IT 2012. Eve told the world what she is “over” in this powerful new piece.
V-Day is proud to announce that V-Board member Pat Mitchell was named one of Women’s eNews “21 Leaders for the 21st Century”! The annual list features women leaders who have demonstrated throughout the year their commitment to improving the lives of women and girls and the capacity to continue to improve the future for all.
In October, V-Day and MCR Productions brought V-Girls to France for thevery first time through curated workshop productions of Emotional Creature at Ciné 13 Théâtre. The sold-out performances were hugely successful and paved the way for the launch of the French translation of Eve Ensler’s bestselling book I Am An Emotional Creature: The Secret Life Of Girls Around The World.
We are so proud to announce that our beautiful brave sister, V-Day’s Congo Director & Director of City of Joy Christine Schuler-Deschryver, was just named one of The Guardian‘s “Women of the Year 2011”! Christine, V-Day activists everywhere celebrate you and the women of Congo who are rising. We send you our love and our deepest admiration for your courage and vision and fierce mad mama self.
From November 22 – 24, V-Day held three events in London, bringing international attention to both V-Day’s work in Congo, and V-Day’s newest initiative, V-Girls. The hugely successful events were organized by long-time V-Day activist Monique Wilson and Rossana Abueva:
