Not on Our Watch
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Kang says, ‘Just personally, I’ve been really challenged in my limited view and faith. Being a part of this five weeks of worship for Sudan and Darfur has made a significant impact on my spirit and what I value as action, and I hope and pray that it continues to grow. I confess that I was one that thought of change really only on a large scale (in numbers and size), and I feel like I’ve come into contact with the power of passion and the power of a few, and I believe that is what is going to change the world. People who are passionate, and devoted, and will fight to change the world. In a small way, I feel completely blessed by this.’
Strategy Two
UNDERWRITING CHANGE—RAISE FUNDS
The organisations operating on the ground in Darfur and neighbouring Chad, where many refugees have fled, are in constant need of money to meet operating costs. For instance, nearly 3 million people in Darfur and on the border with Chad depend on food aid. However, in May 2006, the United Nations World Food Program (WFP), the largest humanitarian organisation operating in the field, announced that it was cutting its daily rations for the refugees and internally displaced (IDPs) because of a severe funding shortfall. That meant that the food ration would be less than the minimum required to stave off malnutrition, rates of which were already on the rise in Sudan.
It should not have come to that. According to WFP, throughout Sudan, more than 6 million people depend on food aid for basic nutrition at a cost of $746 million. Nicholas Kristof said about WFP in one his columns, ‘Without the World Food Program organising food shipments to Sudan and Chad, hundreds of thousands more people would have died. Those UN field workers are heroic.’ But as of June 2006, barely half the aid requirements were funded. The United States had given nearly $200 million, the EU $60 million, and the UK $90 million—that left a marked shortfall. One of Kristof’s readers contacted him to find out to which organisation he should donate a $1 million cash dividend from Microsoft. But you need not be a millionaire to have a direct financial impact. You can contribute money or you can write letters and advocate for more funding from your country. In this case, the latter activity led to a surge in governmental contributions to the relief effort around the world and to an increase in the WFP rations.
Much has been written about whether donated funds really get to the people for whom they are intended. The emphasis on improved efficiency over the last two decades has resulted in much better targeting of resources to the truly needy, and much less waste and overhead. Money magazine ranks these aid agencies according to how efficient they are at ensuring their money goes to the intended beneficiaries, and this has helped spark a real effort in the aid industry to make sure that each dollar that is contributed goes to helping people on the ground. The track record has improved enormously during these last 20 years. Today, your money will make a difference in saving lives, more than it ever has before.
You can also raise money for organisations that get at the root causes of the violence, so that endless appeals for food and medicine become unnecessary. Organisations like the International Crisis Group (www.crisisgroup.org) and projects like ENOUGH aim to end the conflicts and atrocities that produce extreme human deprivation.
Groups and individuals around the country have been doing creative things in the way of fund-raising for Darfur’s victims of violence. Traditional fund-raising methods (e.g., bake sales, T-shirt sales, dinners) and non-conventional ideas (e.g., CD sales, birthday party fund-raisers, etc.) are part of a widespread effort to assist humanitarian projects in Darfur, and even to help advocacy groups who try to get at the root causes of the violence. College groups have thrown parties at clubs and bars to raise money for Darfur relief. Many colleges have used money raised to support a project of the Darfurian-run Darfur Peace and Development organisation, which sets up schools in Darfur and Chad for children who are IDPs and refugees. Others have organised benefit concerts, like 15-year-old Spencer Wiesner from upstate New York, who raised $20,000.
Rachel Karetzky, a 13-year-old activist living in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, learned about Sudan while on vacation and started a fund-raising campaign to benefit the victims of Darfur as part of her Bat Mitzvah community service project. ‘I saw genocide on the news and thought, Why doesn’t the world do anything?’ she asked. ‘Everyone knows what happened to the Jews in the Holocaust, and I learned about it for so long in Hebrew school, etc. Then you realise the consequences afterwards, and that it shouldn’t happen again. And now it’s happening again and it’s wrong.’
With some initial guidance from the American Jewish World Service, she started her campaign. In six months, she raised almost $15,000 to benefit the victims in Darfur.
She initiated ‘Cans for Darfur’—collection cans in salons, bakeries, and shops for people to make donations. To raise additional funds, she held a raffle with donated prizes, sold green Save Darfur bracelets that said ‘Not on our watch: Save Darfur,’ and on the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah, she handed out flyers and asked people to make donations. She also spoke at her own synagogue, Beth El, and the Society Hill Synagogue along with Ruth Messinger, president of the American Jewish World Service. Aside from talking about her own project and how meaningful it was to her, Rachel spoke about what other Bar and Bat Mitzvahs should do to also get involved and make a difference. Rachel’s efforts did not just target her Jewish peers at her school. She also chose to do a curriculum project comparing Darfur to the Holocaust and was able to share her research at a fair and collect donations. Her hard work and efforts paid off, as she appeared on Nick News on Nickelodeon describing the comparison between the Holocaust and Darfur. She also got signatures for a petition that was sent to the president.
After raising all that money, Rachel says, ‘I felt overjoyed, happy and excited. I felt like I was really making a difference, so I continued. At times it got hard, but I like to speak in front of people.’ The advice she would give someone who wants to get involved would be to ‘always think that you’re making a difference. Keep on trying and raising money even if you pass the Bar Mitzvah. Don’t stop your campaign, because you are making a difference.’
When Miles Forma, an 18-year-old student from New Jersey who has cerebral palsy, saw the movie Hotel Rwanda, he was so moved that he started a fund-raising campaign for a special school programme in Rwanda. He organised an African dance workshop and then gave a PowerPoint presentation on the Rwandan genocide. Miles had family members who perished in the Holocaust, and he kept asking himself how the world could turn its back. Only the idea that he would make a difference was comforting to him.
Speaking through his DynaVox, Miles said the movie made him feel ‘sad and angry and inspired.’ In his presentation he paraphrased the philosopher George Santayana, ‘People who ignore the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them.’ And he explained to the audience that one of the lessons of what happened in Rwanda is not to turn our backs when a country needs our help. About 35 to 40 friends, students from Crotched Mountain, a centre for people with disabilities, and individuals from the community came to Miles’s event. His goal was to raise $1,000, but he has raised almost $2,500 to date.
Miles followed that with a fund-raising campaign for Darfur in November 2006. He researched the issues and interviewed a young man from the region who works at his school. He also put together another PowerPoint presentation and had a chance to meet Paul Rusesabagina as well.
Rebecca Bernstein is an investment counsellor at a money management firm in San Francisco who in March 2005 organised a benefit event at a bar to help increase awareness of what was going on in Darfur. Rebecca had been reading a lot about the crisis there but felt that little was being done about it, that the atrocities were simply being ‘swept under the rug.’ After getting an e-mail from her sister that said how important it is to speak up when no one does, she decided to organise an event to try to get people involved. Aside from collecting donations at the door, Rebecca also sold raffle t
ickets for donated restaurant gift certificates. A speaker came from the American Jewish World Service, and Rebecca put up photos and distributed literature about the crisis. After raising nearly $2,700, she said, ‘I would do it again and it wasn’t that hard to organise. If anything, I would hope to do a better job and raise more money next time.’
Jesse Brenner had the benefit of an internship with Afropop Worldwide, a radio programme, website, and database that help to raise awareness about music prod-uced by the African Diaspora. Afropop works to ensure that the benefits return to the artists and their home countries. While updating Afropop’s website, Brenner learned about the developments in Darfur. Appalled by the lack of mainstream media coverage of the genocide, he and fellow ‘co-conspirator’ Eric Herman founded a production company and record company called Modiba Productions to help raise awareness. Brenner cites his Jewish heritage and horror at past genocides as his motivation. He recalls watching the killing unfold in Rwanda and ‘feeling very angry. I remember screaming at the TV.’ Seeing genocide in Darfur a decade later, Brenner felt impulsively, ‘I need to do something. Genocide is man-made. There is a moral imperative to act. We can’t stand idly by.’
Through Modiba, he and Herman released the Afrobeat Sudan Aid Project (ASAP) to benefit the internally displaced in Darfur. They talked with Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry’s, and through him, they were sponsored by Truemajority.org, a grassroots education and advocacy project. They also teamed up with iTunes. As we went to press, Modiba had sold over 8,500 copies, raising more than $135,000 for Save the Children in Darfur. As Brenner puts it, ‘People should use whatever talents they have to take action. They should realise the fate of these people [in Sudan] is tied up with their own fate as fellow citizens of the globe.’
Raise Awareness: Actions You Can Take
1. Educate yourself about Darfur and the world’s other most urgent crises at www.enoughproject.org.
2. Talk to your family, friends, and colleagues about these crises and what we can do to help end them.
3. Host a screening of a documentary about Darfur such as Paul Freedman’s Sand and Sorrow (www.sandandsorrow.org), Darfur Diaries by Aisha Bain, Jen Marlowe, and Adam Shapiro (www.darfurdiaries.org), or Brian Steidle’s story captured in Annie Sundberg’s film The Devil Came on Horseback (www.thedevilcameonhorseback.com).
4. Write a letter to your newspaper or local TV news asking for more coverage of Darfur and other areas that need our help.
5. If you are a blogger, blog to end genocide on leading blog sites!
6. Invite a speaker to your house of worship to talk about Darfur and what must be done to end genocide and mass atrocities worldwide.
7. Join/start prayer groups or promote interfaith events.
8. Organise a vigil, fast, or protest to support stronger action to stop crimes against humanity.
9. Wear the cause: purchase T-shirts or green wristbands and give them as gifts.
Raising Funds: Actions You Can Take
1. Make an individual or family donation to humanitarian, human rights, or advocacy organisations. (You can find a list of these organisations on the ENOUGH website—www.enoughproject.org)
2. Urge your employer to make a contribution to one or more of these organisations, or place one of these organisations on its United Way designated charities.
3. Organise a fund-raiser in your community by hosting a dinner, a concert, an auction, a fun run, or a fast.
4. Link to the organisations you support from your personal home page or your blog.
Strategy Three
WRITE A LETTER—SAVE A LIFE
It is worth reminding ourselves what Senator Paul Simon said back in 1994 about the Rwandan genocide: how a mere 100 letters to each member of Congress could have changed the outcome.
Our democracy is taken for granted. We forget that our congresspersons and parliamentarians are our representatives—not unreachable decision makers. Often it is as simple as clicking on an e-postcard already prepared by an organisation devoted to Darfur. But e-postcards are not nearly as effective an advocacy tool as an impassioned, personal letter addressed to your local, state, and national representatives, or even to the president or prime minister. A personal letter tells elected officials that you care about the issue enough to take 15 minutes out of your busy day to put your thoughts on paper. Indeed, Amnesty International has shown through the decades the success of impartial letter-writing campaigns in freeing political prisoners. As Professor Eric Reeves emphasises, ‘People don’t realise it, but members of Congress are very responsive.’
However you choose to do it—fax, e-mail, phone, postcard, letter—the few minutes it takes to write and send a message could mean the difference between collective action and continued atrocities. Personal, impassioned letters are more effective, ultimately, than clicking on a website, if you are willing to take the extra few minutes. That is what makes politicians take notice: constituents taking time out of their day to write letters themselves.
Here is an example of what a letter might look like. Be aware we are writing this in early December 2006. You will need to update your letter by going to www.enoughproject.org.
Dear Representative/Senator/MP/TD/ etc _______:
I am a taxpaying and voting constituent and am writing to appeal to you as my elected representative to do more to help end the genocide in Sudan. As you may be aware, since 2003 the Sudanese government has orchestrated and waged a deliberate campaign of murder, rape, and displacement against the people of the Darfur region. More than 400,000 people have died, thousands of women have been systematically raped, and more than 2 million people have been displaced and forced to live in squalid refugee camps. I appreciate your leadership and ask you to do more to help end the crisis in Darfur.
First, our government must continue to support measures designed to protect the civilians in Darfur. We provide significant humanitarian assistance to Darfur, but that is not enough. Parliament must urge the Administration to rally more UN Member States for a stronger, more robust international peacekeeping force. It is also critical that parliament continue to adequately fund an international peacekeeping force in Darfur until the perpetrators of these crimes are brought to justice and the civilians can return to their lives in peace.
Secondly, our nation must play a stronger role in finding a political solution to the conflict. Representatives and/or delegates to Sudan must continue to engage directly with the relevant parties, including the rebel groups who have not signed the Darfur Peace Agreement, the African Union, the major stakeholder groups, and the Sudanese Government of National Unity to reconvene talks on how to make the Darfur Peace Agreement more inclusive. The Darfur Peace Agreement resulted in part from international engagement, but we have failed to secure the level of inclusiveness required for a peace agreement to succeed.
Lastly, we should impose targeted sanctions on National Congress Party officials responsible for crimes against humanity in Darfur. The orchestrators and perpetrators of genocide must be held accountable and there must be pressure on the ruling National Congress Party until the genocide is brought to an end. I urge you to ask (insert relevant country head) to ensure that the government cooperates with the investigation of the International Criminal Court into crimes against humanity in Darfur. Punishing those responsible for atrocities is necessary to achieve justice for the victims and prevent similar crimes from occurring in the future.
Thank you so much for your time and I look forward to your response.
Sincerely
The Golden Gate Community helps rebuild lives of at-risk youth in San Francisco. Despite their local focus, the community created and distributed postcards on Darfur for Congress, handed out informative bookmarks at book fairs, and held a benefit concert that informed attendees about the crisis, raised funds, and offered petitions for people to send to President Bush.
Write a Letter: Actions You Can Take
1. Write letters to urge your representatives to take specific actions for Darfur and other crises.
2. Ask your family, friends, and colleagues to write letters to their elected officials. And hound them until they do so.
3. Sign or start a petition calling for greater accountability for those responsible for genocide and other crimes against humanity. And present it to your local congressperson.
4. Think big! Start a letter-writing campaign at your high school, university, house of worship, or office.