In the US alone, $14.6B is spent annually on Mother's Day for "stuff" that could just never say what's in our hearts. What if instead, we all just unleashed that love on the world? How would it impact our world if we stopped using stuff as a surrogate for love? What if we invested that love to make the world a better place for Mamas & children everywhere?
This Mother's Day, we aim to find out...
ABOUT TO MAMA WITH LOVE
To Mama With Love is a collaborative online art project that honors moms across the globe and raises funds to invest in remarkable women who are transforming our world. Scheduled for May 3-8, 2011, the site invites participants to create socially shareable "heartspaces" that include words, videos, photos & investments in honor of mamas they love.
ABOUT THE MAMAS
To Mama With Love supports Epic Change's mission to amplify the visibility and impact of grassroots changemakers around the world. Funds raised will be invested to expand the efforts of four extraordinary women:
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"Mama Lucy" Kamptoni sold chickens in her Tanzanian village & turned her income into a
primary school that now serves over 400 children. Her students consistently score at the top of over 120 schools in the Arusha district of Tanzania. Mama Lucy is an
Epic Change fellow, and has been an invited speaker at the
European Summit for Global Transformation.
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At 19, New Jersey native
Maggie Doyne used her life savings from babysitting to start
Kopila Valley children's home in Nepal, which has grown to a home for over 40 children, and a school serving over 200 students. Now, at just 23 years old, Maggie's work has been featured in the New York Times, and her remarkable story has earned her the
DoSomething &
CosmoGirl awards.
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Renu Shah Bagaria is the founder of
Koseli, a center for children in Kathmandu, Nepal, who, due to their economic circumstances and the country's recent civil war, live in the city's streets and slums. Koseli, which means "gift", provides education, food and tender loving care for over 75 young students, and, in the evenings, hosts an adult education program for local women.
The goal is to raise at least $65,000 USD to invest in Mama Lucy's secondary school in Tanzania, Renu & Maggie's schools in Kathmandu & Surkhet, Nepal, and Suraya's women's shelter in Afghanistan.
Over 95% of funds collected through heartspace sales will be invested directly in these remarkable women. The remaining 5% represents PayPal & wire fees associated with donation processing & disbursal.
ABOUT EPIC CHANGE
To Mama With Love was created by
Epic Change, the innovative US 501c3 nonprofit behind
TweetsGiving, one of the first events to harness Twitter for social good, and the
TwitterKids of Tanzania, a classroom of remarkable seventh-graders who blog & tweet from their village near Arusha. From cultivating tweetsgiving as the #1 trending topic on Twitter, to the organization's vast coverage in the blogosphere and at innovative technology conferences like
South by Southwest and
TEDx, Epic Change has consistently demonstrated an ability to successfully harness the social web to drive attention and investment to grassroots changemakers.
Our work has appeared in:
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
You can participate by creating a heartspace in honor of a mama you love, and giving in her honor. You’ll personalize your heartspace with photos, video, poems and artwork – anything you want to share your love for a mama. Heartspaces can be shared with your friends and family so that they can contribute additional funds in honor of your mama and even write comments on the wall of your mama’s heartspace. Click here to get started with creating your own heartspace.
To Mama With Love will officially run for from May 3 until Mother’s Day on May 8, 2011. Of course, you’re more than welcome to honor a mama beyond Mother’s Day by contributing or creating a heartspace after the event has officially ended.
A heartspace is an online space dedicated to a Mama that can be personalized with content including images, video, words & artwork. Check out this heartspace as an example:
Epic Change is building a social media "mama mob" of bloggers, and avid members of the Twitter and Facebook communities to pledge to spread mama love online from May 3 - May 8, 2011. If you'd like to support this global celebration of remarkable women with your online presence, request membership to our stealth social media team on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/groups/EpicChange & sign up for a few secret social media missions at http://bit.ly/Xmissions.
Share it on
Facebook,
Twitter, or your blog.
Wanna badge for your blog? Copy and paste the following code to insert a badge like this one on your blog or website:
<a href = ”http://www.ToMamaWithLove.org”> <img src=”http://tomamawithlove.org/blog-badge.png”> </a>
If you want the official To Mama With Love background design for your twitter account,
download it here.
Just click “Show a Mama You Love Her” and fill in your payment information on our PayPal form. You’ll receive an email about how to create a heartspace. Don’t wanna create a heartspace? Just ignore the email ;)
Your mama will receive a customized ecard from you (which you can send on or before Mother’s Day) with a link to the heartspace you created for her. She’ll be able to browse through all of the heartful content you added and see all of the different people who contributed in her honor and left comments on her wall.
Feel free to contact event organizers and Epic Change founders, Stacey Monk (stacey[at]epicchange.org) and Sanjay Patel (sanjay[at]epicchange.org), with any questions as well as media inquiries. You can also hit us up on Twitter at @StaceyMonk and @sanjspatel.
