#YourVoiceHere: Calling All Survivors!

One of my classes this quarter is Gender, Violence and Social Change, and one of my assignments is a social activism project. Honestly, when I saw that on the syllabus, I cringed. I'm not much of a get-out-there-and-doer. I'm more of a sit-in-my-cave-and-writer. But then I woke up one morning with an idea. What if...I gathered the stories of survivors, as told in poetry and drawings and other art, onto a dedicated page on my blog, and got the word out that way? Yes? No? Maybe? I submitted the proposal to my professor, he liked it, and here I am, calling all survivors.

I want to publish your awesome and powerful art on my blog.

It's my goal to represent as many "isms" as possible. This is your chance to speak as a survivor of sexual assault, child abuse, incest, or domestic violence. Have you been bullied, at school or at work? Take the time to tell of your experience with discrimination because of your gender, sexual or gender orientation, disability, immigrant status, social class, language barrier, age, religion, race, or any of the myriad things bigots love to hate. The imperfect world we live in needs to hear what you have to say about it, in the hopes that we can build and spread the compassion and empathy we need to make it more perfect.

Because this is intended to be an easily readable collection and we live in the world of the 140-character communique, I am interested in things that take up relatively little space for assembly into a blog page collage: poetry, artwork, flash fiction or essays of 500 words max.

I will not be taking credit for your work - I'm just the curator and distributor. You will have full artistic credit and a link back to your own site. You can also be anonymous if you like. If, after the end of the quarter and grades are in, you decide you want your work taken down, just let me know and it shall be done.

Also, this blog generates no income. I will not be making money off of your work, and I can't pay you for your work.

Last: I am a student, always learning, and this is my first venture  into organizing any kind of campaign ever. If you see that I'm about to go over a cliff with how I'm doing this, let me know! If you have a suggestion as to how I can make it better, let me know! I believe in learning from the wisdom and experience of others.

If you're interested, email me at 99MonkeysBlog@gmail.com, and put #YourVoiceHere in the subject line.

Photo credit: ashley.adcox/Flickr/Creative Commons License