Bringing Awareness, Making the Change: Women as Game Changers Summit Interview with Diana Mao

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Diana is the co-founder of Nomi Network, a non-profit organization that creates economic opportunities for at-risk women and survivors of human trafficking. In this “Women as Game Changers” summit interview, Diana tells about the path that brought her create a strategy to end modern slavery.

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How Many Amazing Young Women Are Tackling Climate Justice This Year

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Grassroots experiences are steadily shifting the awareness of climate change, from an abstract phenomenon of carbon levels and future impacts to an ever-more tangible, multi-layered issue that brings together all kinds of social, environmental and economic struggles. With this perspective, youth groups globally are engaging in critical, transformative activism for climate and environmental justice.

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International Women’s Day Photo Essay: A Day In The Life Of Women

Teachers, farmers, businesswomen, politicians, mothers, law enforcers — women and girls contribute every day in many visible and invisible ways. In honor of International Women’s Day, we share this glimpse into their lives.

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Svetlana Alexievich’s Nobel Win: The 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature

Alexievich has consistently chronicled that which has been intentionally forgotten: the Soviet war in Afghanistan, Chernobyl, the post-Soviet nineteen-nineties. Svetlana Alexievich’s book “Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster” begins with a woman’s account of watching her husband, a firefighter, physically disintegrating in a hospital bed in the days following the April, 1986, nuclear-plant explosion. “It’s as good as Shakespeare,” she said of the quality of the woman’s words when I asked her about that part of the book, years ago. “But do you know how long it took to get her to produce those two pages of text?” The first hours—and subsequent hours and hours—of an interview, Alexievich explained, are always taken up by the rehearsing of received memories: newspaper accounts, other people’s stories, and whatever else corresponds to a public narrative that has inevitably already taken hold. Only beneath all those layers is personal memory found. The Swedish Academy, which announced today that Alexievich will receive the Nobel Prize for Literature, cited the writer for inventing “a new kind of literary genre.” The permanent secretary of the Academy, Sara Danius, described Alexievich’s work as “a history of emotions—a history of the soul, if you wish.” […]

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Can You Do the Minimalist Fashion Challenge?

Project 333: Minimalist Fashion Challenge

Dress With Less! Starting October 1st: The Minimalist Fashion Challenge. If you are tired of finding nothing to wear in your jam packed closet, try this 90 day challenge. Invite a friend to join you, and see what happens when you dress with 33 items for 3 months. You’ll be very surprised with the results. Check out the rules here. Welcome to Project 333. This page will tell you everything you need to know to get started. After living with only 33 items every 3 months for more than 3 years, I can say that with confidence. Do you want more evidence that living with less is easier than you think? Ask these people! The Basics When: Every three months (It’s never too late to start so join in anytime!) What: 33 items including clothing, accessories, jewelry, outerwear and shoes. What not: these items are not counted as part of the 33 items – wedding ring or another sentimental piece of jewelry that you never take off, underwear, sleep wear, in-home lounge wear,  and workout clothing (you can only wear your workout clothing to workout) How: Choose your 33 items, box up the remainder of your fashion statement, seal it with […]

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Yang Lan: MAKERS Celebrates 20 Women of the 1995 UN Conference on Women

Yang Lan

  To celebrate the 20th anniversary of the 1995 UN Conference on Women in Beijing, MAKERS is featuring 20 incredible women who participated in the largest ever international gathering of women. Yang Lan, a television journalist and entrepreneur, is the co-founder and chairperson of the Sun Media Group, a Hong Kong-based multimedia company. Yang created the first current-event program in China, and has been a successful media personality in China since her days as a university student. Often compared to Oprah Winfrey, Yang has built a substantial media empire that includes the television shows “Yang Lan One on One and Her Village,” as well as an online magazine and website that attracts nearly 200 million Chinese women a month. In 1995, Yang was a graduate student studying at Columbia University in New York when she returned to Beijing over the summer to act as a master of ceremony for the Welcoming Ceremony of the UN Fourth World Conference on Women. Be sure to watch the trailer for the upcoming documentary, “Once and For All” and join the conversation with the hashtag #OnceAndForAll. Source: MAKERS Team  

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How Giving Up Refined Sugar Changed My Brain

Giving Up Refined Sugar

Consuming refined sugar can impact mood, decision-making, and memory. Here’s how good it can be to give it up.

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Warrior Mom Con: We are warrior moms

Warrior Moms Conference

Postpartum Progress is a non-profit dedicated to helping all the at least 1 in 7 women – Warrior Moms- who will deal with perinatal mood and anxiety disorders, and those who love them. It has helped, and will continue to support many in our Mom 2 community. This past July 11th and 12th, the first Warrior Mom Conference took place in Boston.

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Atomic Moms, Radium Girls, and Hiroshima Maidens: Part 3

Hiroshima Maidens about to board plane

Here is a little-known piece of history about Hiroshima: the story of how twenty-five young Japanese women, crippled and disfigured by the effects of the atomic blast, banded together to fight against their despair. They were brought to the United States in 1955 for plastic surgery – lodged in American homes and operated on at New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital – in a remarkable humanitarian effort that is itself an epic.

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Atomic Moms, Radium Girls, and Hiroshima Maidens: Part 2

Radium Girls painting watch dials

The Radium Girls were so contaminated that if you stood over their graves today with a Geiger counter, the radiation levels would still cause the needles to jump more than 80 years later. They were small-town girls from New Jersey who had been hired by a local factory to paint the clock faces of luminous watches, the latest new army gadget used by American soldiers. The women were told that the glow-in-the-dark radioactive paint was harmless, and so they painted 250 dials a day, licking their brushes every few strokes with their lips and tongue to give them a fine point.

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