In a post on her blog, copied here, one of our volunteers talks about how she got involved with The Pixel Project and what it means to her.
Starting from last year, I’ve been volunteering to tweet every Tuesday for The Pixel Project.
This is a project that I got involved in when I met Regina at the Great Women Of Our Time Awards presentation ceremony.
Regina is the founder of The Pixel Project, an initiative to raise US$1 million for Malaysia’s Women’s Aid Organisation and the U.S.A.’s National Coalition Against Domestic Violence by getting a global audience to collectively unveil a million-pixel mystery collage of Celebrity Male Role Models at US$1 per pixel.
She contacted me a few months after the event and we got talking about violence against women and this pet project of hers. Regina mentioned that the global recession was hitting NGOs hard, particularly our own Women’s Aid Organisation. She wanted to do something to help and asked me if I would like to contribute our company services and do something for women worldwide.
For one, I’ve always been supportive of women’s issues.
Even when young, I had wanted to be a lawyer but then I changed my mind when I realized just how much studying that involved! (My best friend did law and even she got disillusioned by the state of law-lessness in Malaysia. She decided to teach law instead of practise law.)
Anyway we volunteered our services first to help The Pixel Project get its website up and running.
This was one of our pro bono projects last year. I always feel that doing good is its own reward (in fact, we don’t even have the customary “Designed by Redbox Studio” at the footer of the website).
Initially it was designed to be a HTML website. When I realized that the Pixel Project team was growing bigger and bigger and everyone had their part in updating the website, we had to make a quick decision to switch to WordPress. It was a headache because of the huge amount of content. We were basically struggling with a growing mini-portal!
Anyhow, we managed to change over the design from the backend. From a HTML website to a WordPress blog, content, images, banners and all. Tiffany and Vern worked side by side to port it over completely from the ground up as a WordPress blog. They both worked hard despite it being one of our busiest times last year.
Right now, the Pixel Project team spans a few continents and different timezones. The Pixel Project website is now in the able hands of the team and I’m on the team still but as a volunteer tweeter each week. We play twitter tag where we have round the clock tweets going out as we are assigned our time slots. My time slot is Tuesday afternoon till 6pm. When I clock out, Emily in the UK clocks in for her session. This is how we go round the clock, tweeting news about violence against women, hotlines, helplines and more.
I can tell you that I’m still doing this because our tweets do help women leave their abusers. Just a few weeks before we heard great news. Someone emailed and said our tweets had helped their family leave an abusive relationship. She sought help finally.
It is this kind of news that gives me hope that what we do does touch someone out there. Especially when we combine it with technology and social media tools like Twitter and Facebook.
If you want to volunteer with the Pixel Project team, please do so. You can help tweet, like me. Or you can help in many other ways. But whatever you do, you are contributing positively to help raise awareness about violence against women.
Sometimes we may not know the effect of our volunteering but you may have helped prevent a woman from dying in the hands of her husband-boyfriend-lover-abuser.
You would have saved a life.