The Pixel Project is 16 years old today:

16 years of being the only anti-VAW nonprofit to specialise in working to raise awareness, funds, and volunteer power to end VAW at the very 21st century intersection of social media, online communities, new technologies, and pop culture/the arts.
16 years of our all-volunteer team across 6 continents collaborating to raise awareness, funds and volunteer power for the movement to end Violence Against Women (VAW).
16 years of conceptualising and developing our ongoing anti-VAW campaigns, projects, and programmes.
16 years of creating social media-based platforms that make it simple and accessible for everyone from the person on the virtual street to various online communities to get on board the cause to end VAW.
16 years of experimenting with (and implementing) positive, innovative, and effective new ways of using online tools, social media, and pop culture/the arts to get the conversation about VAW going amongst individuals and communities.
16 years of helping boost the signal for positive stories of people around the world working to stop VAW as well as the women and girls who survive VAW telling their stories.
16 years of building partnerships with allies that range from anti-VAW organisations and campaigns of all shapes and sizes, to award-winning bestselling authors, to livestreams with dads to sound the clarion call for an end to VAW.
16 years of bridging communication gaps to provide victims, survivors, and their families and friends with information for getting help for escaping any form of violence against women and girls.
16 years of constant creativity in our outreach work to educate individuals and communities who would otherwise ignore or deny the existence of VAW.
16 years of sharing expertise in VAW and social media campaigning with fellow activists/advocates, experts from fields as different as law and healthcare and doctoral/research students.
16 years of inspiring everyone from kids to celebrities to get on board the cause to end violence against women and girls.
16 years of working to accelerate the shift in the conversation towards including men and boys in helping stop VAW.
16 years of walking the walk to show that online activism can and does make a difference in the battle to end violence against women and girls, especially in this age of online VAW.
16 years of going to bat for and having the backs of women and girls facing online VAW.
16 years of standing up to sexism, misogyny, and the patriarchy in its myriad forms across countries and cultures.
16 years of battling every spike in VAW worldwide caused by everything from Donald Trump’s presidency to the COVID-19 pandemic.

It’s been 16 interesting and action-packed years, to say the least!

And now, onwards to our annual review of the year that came before:

An Overview of the Year 2024

2024 became the year we took a breather to take stock of what we had accomplished over the past decade-and-a-half of our anti-violence against women work and to set things in motion for the next phase of our work.

To do so, we took a break from our usual packed schedule of high-profile public-facing activities and campaigns such as fundraisers and livestream events in order to focus on behind-the-scenes preparations while progressing onwards with our ongoing social media and journalism work.

On the fundraising side

We took a break from running formal fundraising events after 10 years of twice-a-year Read For Pixels fundraisers.

Nevertheless, there were donors who continued to gift us one-off or recurring donations to help keep our work running. Thank you so much also to all the donors who have donated to our general fund to help keep us alive as an organisation – to friends, family, and VAW survivors who have donated what they can during these tough economic times – THANK YOU ALL SO MUCH! Even $10 helps so much in keeping our work alive!

On the awareness-raising side

Ongoing Campaigns, Programmes, and Initiatives

The Read For Pixels Campaign

In 2024, the team took a break from hosting livestream interviews, readings, and panel sessions with authors after a decade of running and recording almost 300 livestream sessions.

During this break, the Read For Pixels team began the massive task of reviewing, curating, and transcribing selected livestream recordings and past AMA (Ask Me Anything) sessions with Read For Pixels authors as part of the preparation for a major upcoming campaign in 2025.

1. Giving The Devil His Due – The Read For Pixels Charity Anthology

Throughout 2024, we continued raising awareness about the charity anthology in the run-up to the end of the initiative. Activities include:

(a) Special promotions in conjunction with major anti-VAW activism related events to encourage more people to download the audiobook:

March 2024 – $8 deal for International Women’s Day/Women’s History Month
April 2024 – $10 deal for Sexual Assault Awareness Month
October 2024 – $10 deal for Domestic Violence Awareness Month

(b) Domestic Violence Awareness Month 2024 Interviews with Anthology Authors including:

(c) Library outreach

Our team ran an outreach effort to encourage libraries in the U.S. and Canada to acquire the audiobook for their readers in order to reach as many individuals and communities as possible.

We wrapped up our two (2) years with the audiobook edition of the anthology on time on 31 October 2024. By the time the audiobook was taken off the shelves, the anthology had been available to individual readers and libraries in different formats for three (3) years in total.

2. Under Her Eye – The Pixel Project’s 1^st Charity Poetry Collection

Under Her Eye (UHE), The Pixel Project’s 1^st charity poetry collection in partnership with Black Spot Books, reached its first anniversary of publication on 7 November 2024. 113 poets wrote original poetry about violence against women for the book which is currently available in both paperback and e-book formats. All proceeds from the sales of the book go towards supporting The Pixel Project’s anti-violence against women work.

The awareness-raising activities that we did in collaboration with the book’s award-winning editors Lindy Ryan and Lee Murray and some of the contributing poets included:

Releasing one YouTube video recording of a UHE poet reading her poem per day starting on 1 March 2024 for Women’s History Month, International Women’s Day, and Women in Horror month and ending in 1 April 2024 which was the start of Sexual Assault Awareness Month. A total of 32 poetry readings were broadcast and shared via Facebook and YouTube. Check out the poetry readings in the UHE playlist on YouTube here.
Sharing pictures of six (6) poets and their pets via our People and Pets campaign throughout Domestic Violence Awareness Month in October 2024.
All awareness-raising efforts had calls-to-action to buy or download the book integrated in them in order to reach more people among our community of donors and supporters worldwide.

Our Social Media Programmes

1. Our Facebook page continues to remain stable at over 53,000 Followers and over 54,000 Likes with a very lively community respectfully discussing the various posts and news.

2024 is the first year that we began uploading memes and posters that provide food for thought instead of just sharing them from other pages. In doing so, we have gained much better traction with our Facebook community members and the general public.

This led to us going viral with an illustrated meme by Lainie Molnar emphasising the importance of consent which logged 5.6K comments and 11K shares in July 2024. And in early December 2024, we were notified by Facebook that we are now deemed eligible to become a recommended page.

2. Our Twitter account is now permanently inactive. On 24 June 2023, we formally stopped tweeting because Twitter (now called X) closed their API to organisations who cannot pay their astronomical access fees. We have pinned a tweet with information about where to find us elsewhere.

However, we have kept our Twitter (X) account as a placeholder for the following reasons:

To prevent bad faith actors from taking over our handle and impersonating us which may in turn endanger any victims attempting to reach us for help and run the risk of spreading misinformation in our name.
To be used as a back-up communication channel for reaching activists, journalists et al who remain active on X but not on any other social media platform.

We have now officially replaced Twitter with Bluesky (see below for further details).

3. Our 13^th annual People and Pets Say NO photo statement campaign on Facebook and Instagram continues to run steadily with 11 people from all walks of life submitting pictures of them and their pets saying NO to VAW during Domestic Violence Awareness Month.

Sadly, our longtime People and Pets mascot, Holly the Miniature Pinscher who belonged to award-winning bestselling Horror author Paul Tremblay went to the Rainbow Bridge in 2024 before she could take this year’s picture. We posted her 2022 picture in memory of her support for our work and we will miss Holly always.

The Fathers For Pixels Campaign

As part of our efforts to continue finding new ways of engaging fathers worldwide with the cause to end VAW, the 30 For 30 Father’s Day campaign has been revamped as the Fathers For Pixels programme in order to give us more room to develop and expand our collaborative efforts with individual male allies and male ally organisations.

The short written interview programme has been renamed the Dads Against VAW interview series and is now open to fathers worldwide all year round. In 2024, two (2) dads participated in the blog interview:

On the Blogging/Journalism/Website Content Side

(A) Our Annual/Ongoing Blogging Campaigns

1. The “16 For 16” blogging campaign in honour of the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-based Violence continues to grow as we accumulate an archive of positive articles packed with shareable ideas, information, and solutions for inspiring individuals and communities to take action to stop VAW. We welcomed two guest contributors in 2024 including our long-time partner MenChallenging as well as SVRI whom we had profiled via our Inspirational Interviews series in 2023.

The 5th edition of our “16 Male Role Models Helping To Stop Violence Against Women” honour roll article unexpectedly went viral starting 12 December 2024 when Pop Core, a popular Twitter/X account, posted that Kim Nam-Joon (RM) – the leader of BTS, the biggest K-Pop group in the world – had been included as one of the 16 male role models.

Pop Core’s tweet amassed over 19 million views over the course of 4 days as ARMY (BTS’s massive global fanbase) became aware of the news and began sharing it across all major social media networks including Twitter/X, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, and Threads. ARMYs also translated our write-up about RM into 7 languages including Bahasa Indonesia, French, Japanese, Portugese, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish.

RM’s inclusion in our male role model list was reported by various entertainment media such as Koreaboo, Sportskeeda, and MSN because K-Pop fans who dislike BTS and RM vociferously objected to our selection of him for our list, triggering fierce debates on Twitter/X with ARMYs who defended RM and our decision to include him. RM’s inclusion also sparked discussions about misogyny, violence against women, the type of man who would qualify as a worthy male role model and the role of men in helping stop violence against women. We received hate and protest messages from K-Pop fans who disliked RM’s inclusion but this was outweighed by donations from ARMYs which outnumbered the hate mail.

Thanks to going viral, our website also received a major spike in visits with 12,000 new visitors and over 8,000 views of the male role model article.

Additionally, the popular male feminist influencer and professor TheSpeechProf shared our post about his inclusion in the male role model list, garnering 1.4 thousand likes from his fans, a number of whom said that they were impressed by the diversity of the male role models on the list:

2. Survivor Stories interview series: This blog series which features interviews with survivors of any form of VAW perpetuated by men and/or patriarchal culture/systems welcomed a powerful interview with Dr. Tamara MC from the United States of America, a cult, child marriage, and human trafficking Lived Experience Expert who advocates for girls and women to live free from gender-based violence and coercive control.

3. Inspirational Interview series: We had an almost full roster of interviewees as we interviewed 11 anti-VAW activists/organisations from 10 countries including Egypt, India, Indonesia, Lebanon, South Africa, Tanzania, Uzbekhistan, Ukraine, the United Kingdom, and the West Indies.

(B) Our Website:

New resources added to our website in 2024 include:

A primer about bride kidnapping and bride trafficking
A primer about online violence against women
A new and clearer exit button on every page

Additional Updates

As always, we’ve achieved all that we have achieved as a team and in 2024 we welcomed the following new team member:

Graphic Design and Video Editing team – Preston Myers (USA)

The Year Ahead

As always, we will continue developing and running our annual and ongoing campaigns with established campaigns changing formats or expanding to different platforms in order to better serve the cause.

2025 will see us return to holding livestream events and fundraisers on a limited basis as we continue preparing new campaigns and initiatives for the next phase of our work.

Here is what to expect in 2025

(A) Our ongoing campaigns

We will still be running most of our campaigns online including:

The return of Read For Pixels in September 2025 including a full livestream series as well as our first fundraiser in two (2) years.
Sharing recorded poetry readings by UHE poets from time to time to boost the signal for the poetry collection.
Running more in-depth interviews with various anti-VAW and women’s human rights activists for our monthly Inspirational Interview campaign.
Encouraging more people and pets putting their best foot/paw forward for Domestic Violence Awareness Month via the 13^th year of our “People and Pets say NO!” photo statement campaign (October 2025).
Writing and publishing our 13th annual 16 For 16 Blogging campaign (December 2025).

(B) The launch of a major new initiative

The Pixel Project team has been working behind-the-scenes on a deep dive into our huge and formidable campaign archives to transform the best and most powerful of our livestreams, AMAs, and Inspirational Interviews of the past 16 years into awareness-raising materials and tools in shareable short-form formats such as reels and memes that will:

Help us get the message about violence against women out faster and stick better in people’s minds in the fast-changing social media landscape
Appeal to young people
Boost the signal for activists, advocates, allies, and organisations who are doing the work to end VAW

More details about the new campaign will be announced in February 2025 and it will be launched in 2 phrases:

March 2025 (Women’s History Month and International Women’s Day) – Posters/Memes
April 2025 (Sexual Assault Awareness Month) – Video Public Service Announcements

(C) Continued development of website resources

From adding more primer sections about different types of VAW to developing a better safety button, we will continue to build our website resources for the general public.

(D) Our return to microblogging

In 2023, Our Bluesky account was set up while Bluesky was still in beta invite-only mode to ensure that:

We were able to grab our Bluesky handle while the microblogging alternative to Twitter was still closed to the public.
We are able to begin familiarising ourselves with how it works.

In the second half of 2024, Bluesky finally opened their API for developers to create Bluesky-linked apps and we will be officially re-starting our daily helpline retweet sessions on Bluesky later in January.

Coming soon on Bluesky:

We will post any interviews and articles we publish as well as breaking news and important news articles about VAW via Bluesky.
Once more third-party scheduling apps that include Bluesky become available, we will select one that suits us and gradually return to sharing 1 news headline per hour, 24 hours per day throughout the year.

If you prefer to donate, you can donate in 2 ways

You can donate directly to us to help us keep our work alive. To donate to us and for more details about how your donation will be used, visit our donation page.
Buy our 1st poetry collection, Under Her Eye. All donations and net proceeds from audiobook sales go towards supporting our campaigns, programmes, and initiatives.
You can hold a fundraiser for us which could be anything from holding bake sales if you’re a baker or donating a portion of your profits if you run a business to running a marathon and getting folks to sponsor you by donating to us. Get in touch directly with us at info@thepixelproject.net if you wish to raise funds for us or with us.

Here’s to The Pixel Project surviving and thriving to continue fighting for the cause for as many years as it takes to eradicate violence against women. May we live to see the day when our work is no longer needed – the day when violence against women is no longer the norm in communities and cultures worldwide. Just as it takes a village to raise a child, it takes an entire community to work together to effectively eradicate violence against women and girls for good.

It’s time to stop violence against women. Together.

– Regina Yau, Founder and President, The Pixel Project

It's Time To Stop Violence Against Women. Together.

The Pixel Project Turns 16: Starting the Next Chapter in the Battle to End Violence Against Women