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!

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!

Snailbird is proud to host its second contest! This time the contest is being sponsored by our lovely friends over at UPrinting. They will be giving 1 lucky winner 100 (ONE HUNDRED!) custom-made postcards for free! How awesome is that? Here’s what you need to do to enter the giveaway:

The Rules

01. Comment on this post, making sure that I have both your name and email address (we won’t share your email, no worries), and tell me what you would use these 100 custom postcards for. Be creative! Christmas/New Year/Holiday/Birthday cards? Letters to long lost relatives? Paper your wall with them? Let us know!

The Goods

The winner will receive 100 custom postcards from UPrinting.com. The postcards are 4″ by 6″ (standard postcard size), full color both sides, and printed on 14pt Cardstock Gloss. They can be used as notecards, invitations, thank you cards, or whatever you could possibly think of.

On January 1, 2010, I will choose a winner using the ever-useful Random.org generator. Only those with answers to the above question will be put in the drawing so don’t forget that part! One comment is allowed per person and don’t forget to tell your friends to join. Who wouldn’t love to get 100 custom-made postcards? It’s the perfect gift for a new year.

Don’t forget to tweet about the giveaway to your friends!

Come back on January 1, 2010 to find out who the winner is!

With a tagline like that, how could you not want to read the webcomic Girls with Slingshots? I know I was hooked. I started reading GWS about a year and a half ago and I’m pretty sure I read the first 500 comics in one night. The rest of it was done the next morning. The author, Danielle Corsetto, has a flair for pushing boundaries, but all with a sense of dignity – okay, maybe not so much dignity per se, but you have to admit, each strip is like a shot of vodka. You can’t stop yourself from taking another one just to see how far you can go. Or something like that.

Really, there’s just a lot of booze and sex, so dignity is probably not at all the word I’m looking for. Regardless, it’s an awesome comic drawn by an awesome artist. I got to meet Danielle for a very brief five minutes this weekend at Dragon’s Lair Comics for their webcomic weekend, and when I sadly lamented the fact that there was no McPedro button in the button pack I bought, she actually took the one off of her bag and gave it to me (and warned me not to smell it since her bag always comes into the bathroom with her – true GWS humor). So not only is she a great comic artist, but she’s a pretty freakin’ awesome person in general.

Want more of Danielle Corsetto? You can find her here:

Website: DanielleCorsetto.com
Comic: Girls with Slingshots
Twitter: @dcorsetto
MySpace: GirlswithSlingshots
Etsy Shop: DCorsetto
GWS Store: GWS Store

Previous Artist Showcases:
Lois van Baarle
Erika Moen
Anne Julie Aubry
Jason Chan

One of the things that drew me to Lois’s artwork is her attention to detail and the use of colors that is constantly exemplified in her digital paintings. While her primary subject appears to be cute girls (which I’m not complaining about in the slightest), it is her architectural illustrations – those that focus on tall buildings and different depths of perspective – that really blow me away.

Of course, my favorite image is still focused on a cute girl:

What can I say? I like cute girls. The fish are cute too.

Lois is a world-traveler. She’s lived in the US, Indonesia, France, Belgium, and was born in the Netherlands. She currently resides in Utrecht and went to school there for her Masters of Arts. She not only draws images, she also creates some beautiful animations as well (my favorite being a short film called Trichrome Blue). She says about herself: “I’m unemployed and my life has no structure whatsoever, but I’m as happy as I’ve ever been!” Not only is she a phenomenal artist, but she’s got a great outlook on life as well.

You can find more about Lois by clicking on the following links:

Website: Loish.net
Twitter: @loishh
Tumblr: Loish Blog
Blog: Loish Sketchblog
Deviantart: Loish (best place for Lois Art!)
Vimeo: Loish
And just for fun: Disney Fanart

Check out Lois’s galleries and drop her a comment. Her artwork is amazing and I’m sure she’d love to hear from you.

Previous Artist Showcases:
Erika Moen
Anne Julie Aubry
Jason Chan

As some of you may have noticed, I am a blogger. Therefore, I love to read blogs too (crazy, huh?). So because I enjoy sharing the happy little nuggets of good reads (and I haven’t done it in quite awhile), I thought I’d throw another blog at you to add to your feed reader.

Run Jen Run

Not only is Jenny a witty writer, but she’s a fantastic photographer, and a wonderful client to work with. She was one of my first (and still one of my favorite) blog clients to work with professionally and her feedback was fantastic as well. Anyway, as a blogger, she is charming, intelligent, and downright hilarious at times. I love her Photobooth Chronicles the best – who knew you could say so much in just four small pictures.

Jenny is also the founder of the ever-growing TequilaCon, which is something I hope to attend next year depending on where they decide to hold it (hey, idea! Austin? Seriously, I’m totally throwing it in the ring here, guys). Tattoos, tequila, and bloggers? There really is nothing better.

Anyway, check out Jenny and all of her awesome photos, blogs, and tequila love over at her snazzy blog Run Jen Run. You won’t be sorry you did (but you will be sorry if you don’t – just saying).