You may have already heard of The Girl Effect. If you don’t know, it’s “the unique potential of 600 million adolescent girls to end poverty for themselves and the world.” In other words, it’s an organization dedicated to improving the lives of young girls and giving them the means of educating themselves and working towards making the world a better place.

“The Girl Effect is a movement. It’s social change in action. It’s about you using your voice, your talents, and your community to help girls help themselves—and, as a result, everybody else.

Created by people at the Nike Foundation, the Novo Foundation, the United Nations Foundation, and the Coalition for Adolescent Girls, its purpose is to spread the word about what girls can do and to recruit other powerful girl champions, like you. Armed with the tools and the network you need to raise awareness—and a little elbow grease—you can change the world.”

I won’t bore you with any more descriptions. Just watch this.

The Girl Effect

It’s a small ripple. Helping just one girl. But that ripple grows and causes more and that one, that one counted. It’s like the Starfish Effect. Every single one matters and it makes an impact on generations. You can make a difference too. It’s our responsibility to make the world a better place and we can do it. This isn’t just about giving one girl a few more years of schooling. This is about the small that makes up the whole. This is about HIV and poverty and it’s about Human Rights and the values we place on people that are seen as different from us. This is about saving a planet before it throws itself off the edge of the universe.

This is about doing what’s right. And it starts with one girl. That’s what the Girl Effect is.

What You Can Do To Help

Raise awareness. This post isn’t just from me. Starting today, bloggers from all over the world are blogging about the Girl Effect. It’s a campaign to make people see that this HUGE issue has a simple solution. Want to help? It’s easy. Write a blog post. You can find more information about what to write and what to include on Tara Mohr’s Girl Effect page, and you can see a lot more blog posts from other folks on the campaign page.

Please join us.

Find out more about The Girl Effect:

• Official Website
• The Big Picture
• Facebook
• Twitter
• YouTube

BREAK! I shall be scarce from the web this week as I prepare for BlogPaws 2010 West, a conference that has all to do with pet bloggers and celebrating the love for our furry friends. This is the second conference and this time I will doing a presentation about some tips and tricks for basic WordPress design. I’ll make sure to make it available after the conference. Ash and I are representing I Love Rescue Animals and will be gone from Thursday to Sunday to beautiful Denver, CO. Until then, we’ll be running around trying to get everything done and prepared in time for us to make our flight. We’ll get back on the normal blogging schedule on Monday. Be well, all!

Updated 9/16/10: We made it back from Colorado safe and sound, but the BlogPaws buzz has not died (and I have not had a chance to catch up on blogging here). I will write about it here next week after my life gets back to normal (and I catch up on emails and projects), but for now, please head over to the I Love Rescue Animals blog and read about our journey and all the people we met. It was incredible. Thank you to all who support our group and our mission!

We here at Snailbird (look at me sounding all professional) believe in the Earth and the good that it does for us. In return, we feel that we should give back in every possible way. Recently, Ash and I took part in Earth Hour, a yearly event to call for action on the hot topic of climate change. Of course, we do the best we can in our daily rituals as well. We recycle, we compost, the majority of our food is organic, our cleaning supplies are non-toxic or homemade, and lately we’ve been sharing one car (though that one is kind of forced at the moment). While we aren’t as extreme as some, I feel we do more for the world than most. So why not make my blog go green as well?

Make it Green!

The Make it Green! (German) project is a small but growing initiative in Germany that is attempting to get the blogging world involved in helping the environment and reduce their carbon footprint. How will this help?

“We are planting trees in cooperation with the Arbor Day Foundation in Plumas National Forest in Northern California for our project to neutralize the carbon footprint of blogs. Thousands of wildfires have burned in many national forests over the past ten years and 88.000 acres of Plumas’ were destroyed by two fires in 2007. For replanting this area we need help from bloggers all over the world! For every participating blog, we plant a tree. One blog – one tree.”

How awesome is that? I’m more than willing to do my very small part in this project. Are you? Visit the How You Can Join page (English) to find out more. Blog for a better world!

I don’t usually do this, but these are too cute not to pass up.

Gisele over at Gisele Jaquenod is doing this awesome contest giveaway where the lucky winner gets 100 MOO Minicards. I think this would be a perfect way to get our still new comic, The Family Menagerie, going at different events that are coming up. At any rate, enter the contest, or at least check out Gisele’s awesome blog. I love her style!