Fuel Change

Bridgit’s Year End Giving Guide 2011

admin — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 18:55:00 +0000

Bridgit Antoinette Evans, Founder + President

Each year, Fuel has the rare opportunity to work with some of the leading social change leaders and organizations in the world as they address urgent human rights issues that effect us all. While we’re honored to lend our expertise and services to support their work, we also know that these organizations need something even more valuable in order to achieve their goals: you.

With your financial donations, these organizations can continue to amaze us with their innovation and impact. Whether it’s the global campaign poised to revolutionize the way men engage in preventing violence in the home, or the new play that could transform the national death penalty debate, the work these organizations are doing will truly rock (y)our world. I hope you’ll agree they are worthy of your support.

So, without further ado: Fuel’s Year-End Giving Guide. Please consider using your year-end donation to help these organizations. They truly are changing the world, improving lives, and protecting your rights and mine.

Breakthrough
Human Rights – It Starts With You

Breakthrough is a global organization using media, art and culture to inspire individuals to take bold action to bring dignity, equality and justice into every home. Fuel has supported this organization’s work for nearly two years, helping artists including Sharon Jones & the Dap Kings, Harold Perrineau, Margaret Cho, Victor Garber and Anthony Rapp engage in Breakthrough’s “America 2049″ human rights Facebook game and “I AM THIS LAND” democracy and diversity video contest. In India, Breakthrough is the creator of the Cannes Silver Lion Award-winning mass campaign Bell Bajao! (“Ring the bell!” in Hindi), which has reached over 130 million people with its empower content that engages men in the movement to end violence in the home.

Watch Their Latest Video | Donate to Breakthrough.tv

National Domestic Workers Alliance
Moving at the Speed of Love

The National Domestic Workers Alliance uses love to inspire domestic workers, parents, children and other allies to work together to create respect, recognition and labor rights for millions of domestic workers in the United States and around the world. Fuel is honored to work with NDWA on their current #BeTheHelp Campaign designed to inspire viewers of the popular motion picture The Help to become champions of the contemporary domestic worker rights movement.

Watch Their Latest Video | Donate to NDWA

Sauti Yetu Center for African Women
Advocacy + Community + Services

Sauti Yetu Center for African Women was launched in 1995 as a pilot project to address the specific needs and concerns of circumcised immigrant African women and girls in NYC. One year later, the program expanded its vision to address general women’s health issues with a particular focus on reproductive health and rights. Today, Sauti Yetu is one of the nation’s leading voices on issues concerning America’s burgeoning community of African immigrant women and girls, providing direct service programs in New York City and training and technical assistance programs across the country.

Watch Their Latest Video | Donate to Sauti Yetu

Girls Educational and Mentoring Services
Girls Are Not for Sale

Girls Educational and Mentoring Services (GEMS) empowers girls and young women who have experienced commercial sexual exploitation and domestic trafficking to positively make the journey from victim to survivor to leader. Since 1998, GEMS has served hundreds of girls each year with a range of programs and direct services including safe housing, counseling, educational mentoring, leadership and social action training and fellowships, and more. Founded by author and leading human rights advocate Rachel Lloyd (Girls Like Us; Harper Collins 2011), GEMS is also the producer of the national “Girls Are Not for Sale” Campaign. Fuel was very honored to produce their 2009 campaign’s, including the popular charity music single featuring Grammy-winners Sinead O’Connor and Mary J Blige with emerging artist and survivor Martha B; and artist collaborations with Beyonce Knowles, Demi Moore, and Sarah McLachlan.

Watch Their Latest Video | Donate to GEMS

Classical Theatre of Harlem
Changing the Face of American Theater

Since its founding in 1999, CTH has presented nearly forty productions that have included works by Anton Chekhov, Samuel Beckett, Euripides, Jean Genet, Langston Hughes, Adrienne Kennedy, William Shakespeare, Derek Walcott and August Wilson among many others. CTH combines non-traditional casting, original adaptations, music and dance in ways that render works from the classical canon as fresh, innovative, and essentially a new experience of world classics. It is CTH’s vision to create the next great American theatre company whose value to its community is inherent and essential, a company that is engaged in producing theatre that has the capacity to change lives and truly reflects the diversity of ideas and racial tapestry that is America. Fuel’s founder Bridgit Antoinette Evans is a direct beneficiary of CTH’s commitment to supporting artists of color, having starred in CTH’s recent Off Broadway premiere of Radha Blank’s SEED, co-produced by the Hip Hop Theater Festival this Fall.

Watch Their Latest Video | Donate to CTH

New Black Festival
We Are the New Black

The New Black Fest is dedicated to uplifting the diversity of voices within the Black theater community. Each October, NBF presents a curated series of readings, music performances, high-profile panel discussions and other events that explore the state of Black theater in collaboration with its brightest emerging and leading creative voices. Fuel founder has been honored to moderate panels in 2010 and 2011 that both explored human rights and social action issues within the arts community.

View Their Latest Photos | Donate to NBF

Fuel | We Power Change
Art Fuels Change

We also hope you will consider donating to Fuel as part of your year-end giving plan. Your support allows us to amplify the voices of emerging leaders and organizations who we believe have the potential for significant impact but may not have the resources to produce a full-scale campaign or project. Each year, Fuel identifies and supports promising young leaders with free consult and strategic planning, artist partnering and production services. Projects funded by donors like you include our 2002 South African tour of Suzan-Lori Parks’ Venus, which raised R30,000 for domestic violence survivors in Capetown; our 2005 “Live for Darfur” Campaign launch featuring Don Cheadle and over 50 top music artists; and our 2011 Love/Youth Lab Day which brought together over 40 artists to explore the roots of LGBT youth bullying. In 2012, your contributions will support our work with Sauti Yetu Center for African Women; our production of the Love/Youth national theater and PSA project; and our production of benefit readings of Ugandan playwright Judith Adong’s timely play, Just You, Me and the Silence, about her country’s pending anti-homosexuality laws.

Watch Our Recent Videos | Donate to Fuel

Here’s to a wonderful 2012 for all our friends and partners.

Bridgit Antoinette Evans
President + Founder
Fuel | We Power Change

Harold Perrineau and More Join 2049

admin — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 13:14:38 +0000

LOST star Harold Perrineau welcomes game players in the futuristic '2049'

Breakthrough, a global human rights organization, today announced the launch of the groundbreaking Facebook-based game “America 2049” (Twitter hashtag #2049), in which players actively explore how the choices and challenges Americans now face will shape the future of the country, its democratic values and how we define ourselves as a nation. The game features appearances by Harold Perrineau (LOST), Victor Garber (Alias), Cherry Jones (24), Anthony Rapp (Rent) and Margaret Cho (Notorious C.H.O.), who generously donated their time and talents to help Breakthrough put a human face on complex social issues. America 2049 is the first Facebook game to integrate the social networking platform with many other resources, online and off: multimedia and interactive features, clues planted across the Internet and real-life events at leading cultural institutions nationwide, including International Coalition of Sites of Conscience members the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute and the Bosque Redondo Memorial in New Mexico.

“America 2049″ players are activated as agents for the Council on American Heritage, headed by Jefferson Williams II (Garber), and are tasked with the capture of alleged terrorist Ken Asaba (Perrineau). As the game unfolds and players make high-stakes decisions, they are immersed in a divided America of the near future: splintered by race and ethnicity, hostile to women, sexuality, and self-expression. “America 2049″ challenges players to ask: how close are we already to America 2049 — and how can we work together, in real life, to build a better future?

“‘America 2049′ entertains and enlightens about the real-world issues of acceptance and tolerance,” said Harold Perrineau. “The project resonated with me because I love the idea of people fighting at all costs for their right to pursue the life they choose without fear of persecution. I hope that through playing ‘America 2049,’ young people in particular will be inspired to help stop institutionalized hatred and intolerance — today.”

“‘America 2049′ is literally a game-changer,” said Breakthrough President & CEO Mallika Dutt. “It parachutes us into an alternate reality perhaps not so far from our own, where we find America poised at a crossroads, and where we are asked to make critical decisions about how we truly want to define ourselves as a nation. The game experience allows us to immerse ourselves in a future that could be — but also inspires us to envision, and recommit to, a real America built on pluralism, democracy, dignity, equality and human rights for all.”

Artist partnerships and talent production by Fuel.

For more info and to play the game visit America2049.com.

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The Quiet Americans

admin — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 15:32:15 +0000

An artist finds his calling and changes the world.

Geoffrey Rush portrays actor-turned-speech therapist Lionel Logue

By Bridgit Antoinette Evans

In viewing the trailer for the Oscar-nominated film, “The King’s Speech”, I assumed it was a film about a British monarch (Colin Firth) fighting to overcome a terrible speech impediment. On the surface, yes, but I soon discovered it’s also the tale of an artist – an amateur actor from Australia – named Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush) who applies his drama training to establish a fledgling speech therapy practice in London. In so doing, he discovers his true calling, and ultimately, his greatest purpose through an unlikely friendship with Albert, Duke of York (later King George VI) during one of the most dramatic periods in modern British history.

Logue’s methods are unorthodox, and his irreverence for the etiquette of British royal life piques the curiosity of the would-be King, who Logue insists on calling ‘Bertie’. Logue understands, as most actors do, that our voices are the gateways to our inner life. In order to speak freely, on stage and in life, we must first liberate our minds and bodies from the deep and incidental traumas we’ve experienced in our lives.

No easy task. In her book, “Freeing the Natural Voice,” master voice teacher Kristin Linklater notes that newborn babies instinctively know how to express their wants and needs. Infants have yet to learn that sometimes love is withheld, that parents can be overbearing or even abusive, that peers can be shockingly cruel. Babies know only that when they are hungry, afraid, wet, sleepy, joyful, or sad, they should tell someone. And they do – often loudly.

But you and I, all grown up and marching defiantly through our messy lives, are survivors of these childhood betrayals. We’ve learned not to ask, speak, or reach out when the risks of rejection are too great. Our bodies, loyal servants, are happy to follow orders. Strangle those cries! we bark. Stop those tears! This is why our throat muscles clench when we’re angered, trapping rage behind our lips. Or why we hyperventilate when panicked, our chest muscles tightening to repress our need for help.

And in the case of the Duke of York, why he stammers when he has important things to say. Like pesky stains, painful memories stick to Bertie’s psyche. He will always be the ‘weak’, stammering boy tragically out of place in his royal family.

Enter Lionel Logue, with his nosey questions about Bertie’s childhood, his dilapidated office, and his insistence that shouting curse words at the top of one’s lungs is a legitimate mode of therapy. Together, these men break down barriers and ascend to their higher purpose. One becomes a voice of calm for the British people during the bloody and terrifying era of World War II. The other becomes his constant friend and advisor, coaching him through countless wartime speeches and public appearances.

Lionel’s journey from performer to valued servant of the royal court is both unique and all too common when you survey the ways artists routinely contribute to society though their work on stages, in films, in galleries, and, through less recognized work conducted in their communities. Whether it’s the recent drama school graduate who teaches poetry to teen girls in Harlem, the Pulitzer Prize winner whose play raises funds for rape survivors in Kinshasa, the rock musician whose iPhone app teaches youth to fight human trafficking, or the filmmaker in Queens who documents the work of a sculptor painting life-like prosthetic limbs for Iraqi war veterans, artists are shaping society, educating young leaders, and promoting greater humanity through their work.

Despite this legacy of public service, American artists once again stand at the center of a political battle, facing off with lawmakers who aim to eliminate all or most of the budgets of the National Endowments for the Arts and for the Humanities, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and virtually every state arts commission. Art is a frill, politicians insist. This is a ‘no frills’ season in America.

For actor-turned-speech therapist Lionel Logue, art was no frill. His artistic background helped him heal the wounds of soldiers returning from war, children silenced by their peers, women repressed by their social position, and finally, a monarch crippled by his past. He never boasted of his remarkable achievements, indeed few people knew of his service to the royal court and his impact on modern British history. Likewise, the average American may not recognize how deeply artists permeate our daily lives. But quietly, persistently, we are there. In schools, libraries, hospitals, nursing homes, places of worship, on Sesame Street and even in the White House – we are hard at work. Encouraging your imagination, improving your lives, and strengthening our communities.

Bridgit Antoinette Evans is a professional actor and the Founder & President of FuelChange.net. She is co-executive producer of the charity music single “This Is to Mother You” featuring Sinead O’Connor, Mary J Blige and Martha B; executive producer of the South African staging of Suzan-Lori Parks’ “Venus”; and creator of the Live for Darfur Artists Campaign chaired by Don Cheadle.

Sharon Jones: I AM THIS LAND

admin — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 11:43:49 +0000

Award-winning human rights organization Breakthrough.tv watched all the things that happened in 2010: From anti-immigrant actions and racial profiling to bullying and homophobia; from fear mongering to the extreme, divisive rhetoric of the mid-term elections. One thing was clear: it was time for a do over.

With I AM THIS LAND, Breakthrough is calling on young people across the nation to make a video using the words, “I am this land” while standing up for the values that are supposed to define this country – respect for one another and our differences.

As part of the project, Fuel helped Breakthrough engage popular big band artists Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings, MTV director of social responsibility John Jackson, award winning music video director for U2, REM and feature films Liz Friedlander, and publisher of SPIN magazine Malcolm Campbell to support the project.

The top winner receives a grand prize of $2500. Additional prizes include Activision games such as Guitar Hero, Band Hero, DJ Hero, an MTV gift bag, tickets to hit Broadway musical Mamma Mia and more.

Breakthrough is happy to have on board a list of key partners: Activision (makers of Guitar Hero and DJ Hero), SPIN Magazine, Change.org, WITNESS, Mobilize.org, Parlour Magazine, Hollaback, HeadCount, Women’s Media Center, F-bomb, See3, Latina Lista, Vivir Latino and 20,000 Dialogues.

For full details, contest rules, and prizes, please visit www.iamthisland.org.

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GEMS Joins Sarah MacLachlan’s Lilith Fair

admin — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 18:28:41 +0000

NYC concert will shine a light on America’s child sex trafficking crisis

Summer is officially here, and with it comes the return of the multi-city Lilith Fair tour created by Grammy Award-winning recording artist Sarah MacLachlan. With millions raised for worthy causes by previous tours, organizers this year challenged fans to vote for the local women’s charities that will benefit from proceeds at each tour stop.

We are thrilled to announce that Fuel partner organization GEMS has been selected to be the beneficiary of $1 from each ticket sold at the tour’s NYC-area show at PNC Bank Arts Center on July 31st. Staff and youth leaders from GEMS will also be on hand to provide info, t-shirts, buttons and other materials to the concert’s 15,000+ attendees.

With recent government reports estimating more than 100,000 American children victimized by sex traffickers, this forum to grow support and inspire action could not come at a better time. Fuel congratulates Lilith Fair for creating the “Choose Your Charity” contest and galvanizing so many artists and fans to make a real difference in the lives of women and girls.

To purchase tickets for any of the 30+ shows on this summer’s tour featuring Sarah along with Alicia Keys, Kelly Clarkson, Sheryl Crow, Mary J Blige, and many more, visit www.LilithFair.com.

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Dear Craigslist: Girls Are Not for Sale

admin — Tue, 18 May 2010 04:25:54 +0000

Most people in the United States don’t know that more than 100,000 American children – primarily girls – are victims of commercial sexual exploitation and domestic trafficking. But the incredible team at GEMS: Girls Educational and Mentoring Services, has been fighting to change this for more than a decade with award-winning programs, services for victims and survivors, outreach to detention facilities and group homes, training for law enforcement and other first responders, and numerous awareness-raising projects and campaigns.

Two years ago, GEMS released their first feature-length documentary, Very Young Girls, on Showtime to share the daily struggles of girls and young women served by GEMS as they fight to recover from the trauma of child sex trafficking and exploitation. With Fuel’s help, GEMS partnered with Netflix to make the film available on DVD and online. To date, the film has been viewed by over 3 million people in 8 countries.

But GEMS’ fight is far from over. Today, websites including the wildly popular Craigslist.org serve as a virtual marketplace for the buying and selling of girls through their ‘Adult Services’ ad sections. While Craigslist disputes the accusation that they are ‘the world’s richest and most powerful pimp’, a recent New York Times story projects that the website will reap more than $36 million in revenue from their sex ad service. A large portion of this revenue will come directly from the trafficking of children.

Join GEMS, Change.org and many other human rights organizations in telling Craigslist that the selling of children on their site is real and really unacceptable.

Sign the petition today.

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Artists Partnering

admin — Fri, 14 May 2010 23:37:40 +0000

Fuel develops smart, meaningful and long-term partnerships that extend the reach of your cause message, create real relationships, and produce concrete results for your organization and the cause that drives you.

Click to learn about our full range of expertise.

Campaigns & Movements

admin — Fri, 14 May 2010 23:28:38 +0000

Campaigns inspire us to care. Movements inspire us to act. Artists inspire us to believe. By partnering with artists from a range of industries for your campaigns and community building, you gain access to a world of new ideas, resources and outreach potential. Fuel develops national and international campaigns that directly seize on the unique talents and expertise that the creative industries have to offer – from masterful communication skills to innovative, fresh approaches that awaken your target audiences to the urgency of your cause.

Click to learn about our full range of expertise.

Creative Production

admin — Fri, 14 May 2010 23:18:52 +0000

Click to learn about our full range of expertise.

Strategic Communications

admin — Fri, 14 May 2010 23:11:13 +0000

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