Social Impact Social Media

itgetsbetter.org In September 2010 after a number of gay, lesbian and transgender youth taking their own lives as a result of bullying Dan Savage and his partner Terry Miller made a YouTube video to create a personal way for supporters around the world to spread the word and outreach to LGBT youth letting them know that it does get better. The It Gets Better Project is now a worldwide movement with more than 60,000 personally created videos  and shared stories that have been viewed over 50 million times. The project has received celebrity submissions including President Obama, Hilary Clinton, Ann Hathaway, Colin Farrell, Adam Lambert, Sarah Silverman, Ellen DeGeneres and many others. In March 2011 the It Gets Better Project book was released. The book, It Gets Better: Coming Out, Overcoming Bullying, and Creating a Life Worth Living is on-sale wherever books are sold.   It includes essays and new material from more than 100 contributors, including celebri...

Rachel Micah-Jones interned for Sen. Frank Lautenberg, Democrat of New Jersey, and then worked on the Senate campaign of Oregon’s Ron Wyden, which stoked her interest in the law. While working in the Washington, D.C., public defender’s office, she saw that immigration laws ill-served her foreign-born clients. She began to think about combining her knowledge of law with its impact on real people to craft better policy. fellows.echoinggreen.org In 2005 she formed Centro de los Derechos del Migrante, or CDM, an international nonprofit that helps migrants fight for better working conditions and shape policy in the United States and Mexico. Since its founding the group, whose headquarters sits above an eyeglass shop in Baltimore, has recovered more than $5 million in stolen wages for the workers it represents. In 2014, CDM unveiled Contratados, a system it calls "the Yelp for migrant workers" because it allows workers to rate employers and their recruiters anonymousl...

Sierra Leone Rising, formerly The Kposowa Foundation, is a 501c3 non-profit organization that was formed in 2005 by co-founders, Sarah Culberson and John Woehrle to  build and restore much needed educational facilities, provide safe clean drinking water, solar electricity and agricultural development in the village of  Bumpe Sierra Leone. While the nonprofit has plans for a much broader global impact over time Bumpe was selected because Sarah, adopted and raised by a white family in the U.S., traced her natural family and heritage there. Visiting Bumpe to trace her roots Sarah discovered human suffering and need that she could not turn her back on. The Bumpe high school, once a renowned boarding school with an enrollment of over 600 students from as far away as Nigeria, was destroyed by R.U.F. rebels during Sierra Leone's 11-year-long civil was from 1991-2002. The Civil war also caused serious and grotesque human rights violati...