October 15, 2008

A conversation on poverty

In the true spirit of this blog - "a celebration of great ideas" - today we are celebrating a really good one: Blog Action Day.
"Blog Action Day is an annual nonprofit event that aims to unite the world’s bloggers, podcasters and videocasters, to post about the same issue on the same day. Our aim is to raise awareness and trigger a global discussion."
Its goal is to change the conversation on the web for one day and have everyone zero in on one discussion topic. This year's topic is poverty.

With this blog focusing primarily on advertising, marketing and design, I've decided to showcase work on this topic that has moved me most. It started with the "Miniature Earth" project which, when I first watched it several years ago, blew my mind. It was inspired by the text "The State of the Village" written back in 1990 by Donella Meadows and was shortly thereafter turned into a Cannes Lion winning TV spot.

Here's the Miniature Earth version (I'm posting the version with John Lennon's Imagine added by some YouTuber - it's just so much more meaningful that way)



Now here's the Cannes winning TV spot by TWBA/Neboko


Really puts things into perspective huh? Kinda makes me feel like a tool sitting here in my comfy chair in my warm office wondering what restaurant I'm going to eat lunch at. It's nuts to think that 0.2% of our wealth could END POVERTY!

Well, I for one am taking action right now. I'm going to knock off a ton of items on this list:

88 Ways to DO something about poverty

Some of them are so frickin' easy. There are SO MANY of them we all can do... right now. Maybe you can come up with some of your own ideas. What are we waiting for?






Also check out:
www.kiva.org
www.netaid.org
www.one.org/international (Who have the best line: "Make Poverty History")