Meet the Activist and Intersectional Storyteller Developing Data-Driven Humanitarian Tools

Melissa Jun Rowley is a journalist, entrepreneur and activist focused on the intersection of storytelling, technology and social justice.

As the founder and CEO of Humanise, Inc., Melissa Jun Rowley is developing TheToolbox.org, a data-driven humanitarian initiative created by acclaimed musician Peter Gabriel. CATALYST had the chance to catch up with Melissa to learn more about Humanise in Detroit and Melissa’s path to social entrepreneurship.

How did your experience with TheToolbox.org inspire you to develop Humanise, Inc.?

TheToolbox.org is an online destination, founded by Peter Gabriel, that connects people to apps that can help them improve their lives and become everyday activists. I first became involved as an editorial consultant, and was developing stories while curating tools that promote social impact.

For example, there’s an app you can scan over a product’s barcode to see if human trafficking was involved in the product chain. While apps like these are interesting and useful, they’re under-utilized given their lack of commercial and entertainment value. 

We came to the conclusion that the site itself is a valuable database of tools, but in order to have an impact, we need to go into the field and get people on the ground using the tools, and providing feedback about how they can be improved. That’s where Humanise comes in: It was created to function as the parent company of TheToolbox.org. The tools we curate are now one of three pillars. We’ve evolved into an organization that promotes human rights through technology, storytelling, AND collaboration with local communities.

Can you describe some of the projects that Humanise has initiated since its founding?

We decided to take Humanise to Detroit, primarily because there’s a lot of data-driven development unfolding in the city. Also, I grew up an hour outside of the D and am in love with the entrepreneurial community there. They’re so spirited. They’re the genuine article. 

While money is being directed to development in certain districts, such as downtown, the neighborhoods on the outskirts are tragically deprived of funding and resources. Forty percent of the people in Detroit don’t have Internet access, and 40 percent can’t pay their water bills. It’s a first world city crawling with third world problems! 

In the year 2015, there are no excuses for letting people in our own backyard suffer like this. We need to meet them where they are, not where we think they should be, and we need to collectively solve the problems from the ground up — not the top down. 

So we started thinking of ways we can work with technology providers to foster digital inclusion. We’ve been working closely with community activists in the Detroit neighborhood of Morningside to understand the neighborhood’s needs and aspirations. We’ve connected them with a smart city advisory to see if the area is eligible for some pretty revolutionary technology. Some of the Detroiters we know are going to use TheToolbox.org as their own citizen journalism platform, where they can publish stories about their neighborhood and discuss the tools they find the most empowering. 

If we’re able to provide connectivity for this neighborhood, we may be able to do the same thing in some of Detroit’s other hardest hits zones. 

Before developing Humanise, Inc., you spent much of your career as a journalist. How did working in journalism influence your interest in social entrepreneurship? 

Being a journalist is the way I became an entrepreneur, really. I worked in TV when I was younger, producing business news updates for CNN and then covering entertainment in Hollywood. The red carpet was my second home.  But eventually, I started to feel like I was losing my soul. I became a journalist because I wanted to help connect people through storytelling — not perpetuate the dumbing down of the country, which is what I felt like I was doing half the time, particularly when I was asked to start quoting TMZ in stories. I knew that was the end. 

I left Los Angeles, and I started focusing on nonprofits and social responsibility movements. I quickly discovered that I couldn’t make any money that way. Two years later, I began developing content for companies that have a social mission. This was when I started to view myself as more of an entrepreneur. But I’m always going to be a journalist at heart, always looking for the truth and humanity in every story. 

Do you have any advice for future journalists or entrepreneurs? 

These days, if you’re going to be a journalist, you have to be an entrepreneur. By that I mean, you need to think like an entrepreneur. You need to be constantly thinking of different strategies, who you can connect with, and how you can build your brand and business. It was this mindset that led me to TheToolbox.org and Peter Gabriel. 

A second piece of advice is that the best way to develop an idea is to collaborate and find some common core or level of connectivity in the heart of why you’re doing what you’re doing. It’s only through that kind of commitment that you can build a business that has meaning. It’s not easy. But the people you meet along the way will change your life and expand your heart and mind in ways you’ve never dreamed of. I can promise you that. 

LEARN MORE ABOUT HUMANISE, INC. HERE.

Sarah Sutphin

Sarah is an undergraduate at Yale University and a content editor for CATALYST. As a traveler who has visited 30 countries (and counting!), she feels passionate about international development through sustainable mechanisms. Sarah has taken an interest in the intersection between public health and theater, and hopes to create a program that utilizes these disciplines for community empowerment. She is a fluent Spanish speaker with plans to take residence in Latin American after graduation. 

USA: One Stitch Closer with Veronika Scott

Get inspired by Veronika, CEO and founder of The Empowerment Plan, who empowers women to become more independent. #WomenInspire http://www.gap.com/onestitchcloser

Get inspired by Veronika Scott, the 24-year-old founder and CEO of The Empowerment Plan, a non-profit that empowers women to be live the lives they want to lead. 

Billions in Change Solution: Free Electric Overview

Access to electrical power is the first step toward economic advancement for billions of people living in poverty. Free Electric can light their homes and shops, make food storage possible, and usher them into the 21st century. #BillionsinChange Join us & learn more at: www.BillionsInChange.com Let's chat: https://www.facebook.com/billionsinch... https://twitter.com/billionsnchange https://instagram.com/billionsinchange

Access to electric power is the first step toward economic advancement for billions of people in poverty. Free Electric can light their homes and shops, make food storage possible, and usher them into the 21st century. 

8 People Who Broke the Law to Change the World

1. Nelson Mandela

Nelson Mandela is, hands down, one of the most important and celebrated figures of our lifetime.

Mandela represents equality, fairness, democracy and freedom in an often unequal, unfair and undemocratic world. But he wasn’t always seen like this…

Twenty-five years ago he was getting his first taste of freedom after being imprisoned for 27 years. Yes, you read that right. For what? What could he have done to get such a long sentence? Well, he stood up for what he believed. In 1942 he joined the African National Congress and fought against apartheid in South Africa, and was imprisoned for sabotage.

Without Nelson Mandela’s commitment to the abolition of apartheid in the face of oppression and imprisonment, the world could be a very different place. It is because of Mandela, and others like him, many more people live a free and fair life. 

To honor his bravery and determination, we take a look at 7 other brave and committed people who have been prosecuted or persecuted for standing up for what they believe in:

2. Aung San Suu Kyi

Aung San Suu Kyi has become an international symbol of peaceful resistance in the face of oppression.

Now the Burmese opposition politician and chairperson of the National League for Democracy in Burma, she spent 15 years under house arrest for advocating for democracy.

Suu Kyi, who was heavily influenced by Gandhi’s philosophy of non-violent protest,  helped to found the National League for Democracy. Because of her campaign for democracy in military-ruled Myanmar (Burma), she was detained and kept imprisoned by the government, as it viewed her as someone “likely to undermine the community peace and stability” of the country.

She was offered freedom if she left the country, but she refused to let her party down and stayed in Mynanmar.

In one of her most famous speeches, she said: “It is not power that corrupts, but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it.”

3. Liu Xiaobo

Liu Xiaobo is a Chinese writer, professor, and human rights activist who called for political reforms and the end of communist single-party rule. He is a political prisoner.

Liu was detained in 2008 because of his work with the Charter 08 manifesto, which called for an independent legal system, freedom of association and the end of one-party rule.

He was arrested in 2009 on suspicion of “inciting subversion of state power”. He was sentenced to eleven years’ in jail and two years’ deprivation of political rights.

During his fourth prison term, he was awarded the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize for “his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China.”

He is the first Chinese citizen to be awarded a Nobel Prize of any kind while residing in China and is the third person to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize while in prison or detention, after Germany’s Carl von Ossietzky (1935) and Aung San Suu Kyi (1991).

4. Mahatma Gandhi

India’s great independence leader first went to prison in 1922 for civil disobedience and sedition after a protest march turned violent, and resulted in the deaths of 22 people. The incident deeply affected Gandhi, who called it a “divine warning’.

He was released from prison after serving 5 years of his 6 year sentence, and went on to become the most famous advocate of peaceful protest and campaigning in the world.

Gandhi famously led Indians in challenging the British-imposed salt tax with the 400 km Dandi Salt March in 1930, for which he was imprisoned for a year without trial, and later lead the Quit India Movement, calling for Britain’s withdrawal.  He was arrested many times but never gave up. An advocate until the end, Gandhi sadly paid for his beliefs with his life when he was assassinated by a militant nationalist in 1948.

5. Martin Luther King Jr.

 

Martin Luther King had a seismic impact on race relations in the United States, as the face of the Civil-Rights movement in the 1950’s.

Through his activism, he played a pivotal role in ending the legal segregation of African-American citizens, as well as the creation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. King received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, among several other honors.

King was arrested 5 times, and wrote his second most influential speech whilst in prison in 1963 for protesting against the treatment of the black community in Birmingham, Alabama. Letter From Birmingham Jail, which was written on the margins of a newspaper and smuggled out of the prison, defends the strategy of nonviolent resistance to racism, arguing that people have a moral responsibility to break unjust laws.

Tragically, in 1968 he was assassinated in his hotel at the age of just 39.

6. Rosa Parks

 

Rosa Parks was an African-American Civil Rights activist who became famous when she stood up for what she believed – by sitting down. On the evening of December 1, 1955, Parks was sat on a bus in Alabama, heading home after a long day of work.

During her journey she was asked by a conductor to give up her seat to a white passenger, but she refused, and she was arrested for disobeying an Alabama law requiring black people to relinquish seats to white people when the bus was full. Her arrest sparked a 381-day boycott of the Montgomery bus system. It also led to a 1956 Supreme Court decision banning segregation on public transportation.

7. Susan Brownell Anthony

Or Susan B as some gender studies students know her as, was an American social reformer and feminist who played a pivotal role in the women’s suffrage movement.

Actively involved in social justice from a young age, Anthony and friend Elizabeth Cady Stanton, founded the Women’s Loyal National League, which conducted the largest petition drive in the nation’s history up to that time, collecting nearly 400,000 signatures in support of the abolition of slavery.

In 1866, they initiated the American Equal Rights Association, which campaigned for equal rights for both women and African Americans, and in 1872, Anthony was arrested for voting in her hometown of Rochester, New York, and convicted in a widely publicised trial. Although she refused to pay the fine, the authorities declined to take further action. In 1878, Anthony and Stanton arranged for Congress to be presented with an amendment giving women the right to vote. Popularly known as the Anthony Amendment, it became the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1920!

8. Roxana Saberi

Roxana Saberi is an American journalist who was arrested in Iran and detained for 100 days after being falsely accused of espionage. She had been living in Iran for six years, doing research for a book that she hoped would show a more complete and balanced picture of Iranian society. Under pressure and being threatened with a 10-20 year sentence or even execution, Roxana falsely confessed to being a spy. She quickly realized this was a mistake and recanted her confession – knowing this would jeopardize her freedom. Instead of freeing her, her case was sent to trial, sentencing her in eight years of prison.

 “I would rather tell the truth and stay in prison instead of telling lies to be free.”

After her trial, she began her hunger strike – only drinking water with sugar. After two weeks, Roxana’s attorney appealed her conviction. She was released from prison after an appeals court cut her jail term to a two-year suspended sentence.

 “I learned that maybe other people can hurt my body, maybe they could imprison me, but I did not need to fear those who hurt my body, because they could not hurt my soul, unless I let them.

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON ONE.ORG 

 

CLEA GUY-ALLEN

@PerfectlyClea

Clea hails from Brighton, United Kingdom and was the UK Global Citizen Editor. Now she works as the digital coordinator for ONE, a campaigning and advocacy organization to end extreme poverty and preventable disease. 

Education of Girls in the Developing World & How Le Dessein Helps

If women in the developing countries completed secondary education, 3 million children under the age of 5 would be saved every year.

This unfortunate statistic by the I.M.F. is just one the many plights young girls and women in general are facing in parts of Africa, Asia and Latin America. 

Here are some more startling facts:

1) More than 115 million 6 to 12-year old children are not in school in the developing world; three-fifths of them are girls.

2) When a girl in the developing world receives seven or more years of education, she marries four years later and has 2.2 fewer children.

3) A woman with six or more years of education is more likely to seek prenatal care, assisted childbirth, and postnatal care, reducing the risk of maternal and child mortality and illness.

4) When women and girls earn income, they reinvest 90 percent of it into their families, as compared to only 30 to 40 percent for a man.

5) Today, the U.S. invests in its future by spending about $6,800 a year per primary student on public education. In Iran the figure is $156 per student per year, in India $64, in Laos $30, and in Rwanda, $30.

6) An extra year of primary school boosts girls’ eventual wages by 10 to 20 percent. An extra year of secondary school: 15 to 25 percent.

Young girls in developing nations have not been given the attention they highly deserve in education. Yet they have the undeniable power to help uplift their communities out of poverty through education and the earning power it will generate. 

Through fashion, art, and socially responsible actions, we’ve designed a way to get involved. Le Dessein is a fashion line aimed at funding the education of underprivileged girls around the world by featuring their designs on our fashion. We then contribute 25% of our proceeds to the girls’ yearly school tuition.

The nature of our effort is not just monetary – our ultimate vision is to create independence and freedom through the empowerment of our girls. A critical component of this whole vision being self esteem – we were adamant on making sure that our girls would be intimately tied to the creation of the designs which would end up on garments. The success of their artistic journey through their participation and engagement would create a profound sense of OWNERSHIP, which is essential in affecting one’s self-esteem. Indeed, we wanted to demark ourselves from the traditional form of aid towards developing countries, which has consisted mainly of charity, and instead have “ownership” be the driving factor in maintaining this self-sustaining endeavor.

Creating an impact in these young girls’ lives will take collective effort from various committed parties. Inculcating the notion of “Ownership” though noble, can be an arduous task and required collaboration. And we’ve had the fortune and pleasure of being aligned with the More Than Me Foundation – “The More Than Me Foundation is on a mission to make sure education and opportunity, not exploitation and poverty, define the lives of the most vulnerable girls from the West Point Slum of Liberia.” Its motto is: “When she graduates, she will decide what comes next for her life.”

Indeed, for our girls, this is about reclaiming and redefining their own sense of self. For far too long, girls and women from the developing world have been subjected to a strongly patriarchal society – a society where their “value” was unilaterally decided by men – So “Ownership” to us is simply the final destination defined by an effort that consists of arming our girls and presenting them with opportunities susceptible to make this journey a worthy one.

Our fashion linehiis elegant and sophisticated and aims at serving a market that for too long has had to sacrifice quality and design for purpose and mission.

Learn more about Le Dessein. 

ERIC COLY

@Le_Dessein

Eric is the founder and CEO of Le Dessien. Eric grew up in Dakar, Senegal, where he was influenced by his mother's passion, drive, and fashion sense at a young age. His mother would eventually inspire him to start Le Dessein. He attended UCLA Business School and began his career in investment banking.

USA: Skateboarding with Lakota Youth

‘Skateboarding In Pine Ridge’ chronicles a skatepark build and the life of the Lakota youth in Pine Ridge, South Dakota. After watching it, we hope you are moved by the incredible work of the Stronghold Society - an organization dedicated to empowering youth through skateboarding, art and music. #skateboardingsaveslives www.levi.com/skateboarding Directed by Greg Hunt Original Score by David Pajo Additional Track by Cat Power Special thanks to Imprint Projects http://strongholdsociety.org

'Skateboarding in Pine Ridge' chronicles a skatepark build and the lives of Lakota youth in Pine Ridge, South Dakota. The director hopes to put a spotlight the hard work of the Stronghold Society, an organization dedicated to empowering youth through skateboarding, art, and music.

LEARN MORE HERE