How Does A Bumper Sticker Stop Genocide?

During Friday's morning's session with Lina Srivastava at the New York Influencer Conference , she posed this question to the audience during a discussion about the stages and methods behind raising awareness, engaging an audience and carefully guiding them through the spectrum of engagement to action. She went on to explain how raising awareness can be easy. Any worthwhile cause has a compelling story behind it, but telling the story about the systemic problem, being honest with the audience about how messy, complicated and tiring the actual solution will be is the challenge. When telling a story, it may be tempting to focus on the subject's similarities with the audience but one should tightrope the dichotomy of wanting to relate and being accurate and honest. Srivastava's urged the audeince to watch this TED talk which addresses the danger of telling a single story.


Inspired, Overwhelmed & (Finally) Focused

Mashable.com

I am still decompressing and digesting all of the facts, ideas and initiatives that were presented during the

Social Good Summit

. It was an overwhelming reminder that there are so many smart people, with great ideas working to change the world in realistic, measurable and creative ways. Towards the end of the day, Chrysula Winegar, who writes

When You Wakeup A Mother

touched on "cause fatigue". It was comforting to hear someone else mention this because by that time I had heard Desmond Tutu talk about the urgency to end child marriage, Dr Muhammad Yunus talk about the urgency to ease poverty through microfinance, the CEO of Skype talk about the urgency to use digital technology to improve education, Melinda Gates talk about the urgency to eradicate polio, Chef José Andrés talk about the urgency to distribute proper stoves, the First Ladies of South Africa and Kenya talk about the urgency of women's health in developing countries and the onset of cause fatigue was lingering. Chrysula went on to urge each of us to be aware and engaged, but to find our own connections and put our energy and time behind issues that resonate within our selves. With that in mind, I was originally drawn to the event to hear Dr Yunus speak on microfinance, and as I reflect on my experience, it is his insight, advice and passion that will have the most influence on my post-summit actions.