Basically I want to organise a week of events surrounding international women's day on 8th March. Each day I want to fundraise for a different related charity and raise awareness of gender inequality issues from across the globe. I'm already starting to contact external organisations and charities to try and get a mix of folks to come in, offer workshops and hand out leaflets etc.
The 8th March itself will be devoted to championing the great work that women do around the world, and the amazing leaps and bounds forwards in gender equality we've seen over the past century. I've already started chatting to some prominent business women about getting involved and am going to start contacting various authors, politicians, charitable campaigners and all sorts of people too.
So where do University Societies come in?
I want University Societies to help out by running an event or events of their own during International Women's Week to raise awareness of/money for fighting the issues we're going to highlight. Or if they can't/don't want to get that involved just raise awareness of the event and promote it to their members.
I want all sorts of people from different social, cultural, ethnic, departmental, whatever, backgrounds involved. I believe these issues affect people across the board and the best way to get individuals interested is through first person contact. I can send a million emails about this, but nothing will persuade people to come and get involved more than word of mouth.
So you've decided your group might quite like to run a pub quiz/bake sale/sponsored something/play/performance/bar crawl/lecture/unusual fundraiser, what then?
We will put all of the information about your event in a nice shiney booklet detailing the programme for the week and short profiles on involved societies. These booklets will be distributed around campus and the info will also be readily available online so it's a lot of great publicity for your group! We will be asking for a donation (amount tbc) to go towards printing costs, and a minimum of 50% of your event's profits to go to selected charities but you get to keep up to 50% of the profits to put back into your groups own events. So it's a pretty good deal really!
The kind of issues I want to highlight are things like domestic abuse, the wage gap, the gendercide in China and India, sex trafficking and FGM...I don't think you just have to be a woman or a feminist to care about stuff like this and think it's wrong. That's why I want to work with as many different kinds of societies and people as possible.
The charities we are fund-raising for and the issues we're highlighting haven't been decided yet and will be voted on in a meeting with interested groups, so if you've got a particular issue or charity you want us to focus on, let us know!
So I hope you fancy getting involved! If you've got any questions, want to help out or anything at all email me at HXB916@bham.ac.uk and I'll get back to you asap!
ta
H.B.
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