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Telling Ourselves Stories

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• Global Fund for Women
• Liberia
• raffle
• video

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Have you been inspired by a woman leader? Moved by her voice in your own life? Maybe she's in your family or your community, or someone whose work you've read or admired, or applauded for her courage and innovation. Share your story with the Global Fund For Women, and you could win two free tickets to their 20th anniversary celebration honoring Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, president of Liberia, this summer.

Thanks to Britt Bravo over at Have Fun*Do Good for bringing this to my attention; she thought the PulseWire community would have a lot of stories to tell, and I know she's right.

Here's the rest of the details:

Submit your story (in 200 words or less) using this form. The winners will be drawn in a raffle on May 1, and a selection of stories will be published on the Global Fund for Women website.

The event:

June 5, 2008 at 6 p.m.
Cipriani 42nd Street
New York City, NY

Joining President Sirleaf will be other special guest women leaders from Colombia, South Africa, Malaysia, Liberia, Bosnia/Herzogovina and Egypt. The event will be emceed by Ann Curry, news anchor for The Today Show and co-anchor of Dateline NBC.

If you haven't seen Iron Ladies of Liberia, the behind-the-scenes documentary of President Sirleaf's first year in office, you can watch the 6-minute Independent Lens preview and hear updates from co-director Siatta Scott Johnson on how the country and her life have changed since the filming ended.

Here are some words from President Sirleaf to get you inspired:

"We have had many governments here in the recent past that have relied upon brute force, instilling fear into people. We say that you can still exercise leadership without repression. As far as I’m concerned, so far in this administration it’s working better than the use of force."

Also, if you haven't listened to Britt's podcast with Kavita Ramdas, president of the Global Fund for Women, check it out at Have Fun * Do Good. Here's the words that inspired me:

"I just saw a remarkable film made about a grantee organization that the Global Fund had supported for many years in Liberia. A truly remarkably story of very every day mothers and daughters in Liberia who were just so sick of the civil war between Charles Taylor, and then the rebels in Liberia, being funded with Sierra Leone diamonds essentially, that they mobilized an entire community of women around peace.

My favorite scene from the movie is these women, all ages, all sizes, going to surround the peace talks in Ghana, which were essentially going nowhere. They had been sitting for two weeks and nothing had happened, no one was willing to really make a compromise, and the women joined hands and they locked the men, it was all men who were actually in the peace negotiations, into this room and said, "We will not let you out until you come up with a deal."

When you hear something like that, I think you begin to get a sense of the power that women actually have to collectively mobilize. Even though they are the victims of violence, I think they are also the most creative in imagining solutions, and defining solutions to ending violence."