Philanthropy Spotlight: 100 Girls Back to School

What 100 girls in Asia have to do with Copa Cabana beaches, or why private-sector philanthropy is the real global game-changer.

In October 2007, Victoria Orizarska, a successful thirtysomething finance professional with a fantastic career, riveting social life and enviable wardrobe, decided to trade it all in for something completely irrational and unmarketable — the pursuit of a lifelong dream. So she armed herself with a backpack and a camera, and set out to travel the world.

But besides the incredible richness of experiencing new cultures, Victoria was struck with something else — the devastating poverty stifling certain regions of the world. So instead of tossing some spare change at some charity to alleviate her privileged guilt, she decided to start a philanthropic effort of her own — the 100 Girls Back to School Appeal was born.

Sitting at the beach at Copa Cabana, it was very difficult to ignore the kids that rush to collect my beer can as soon as I empty it, so they can make 1/20 of a $1 on it.

The effort aims to to raise funds for at least 100 school scholarships for girls in South East Asia, India and Nepal — some of the least-developed areas, where cultural bias and economic constraint prevent girls from getting the education needed to break the cycle. To put this in the context of numbers, it will take roughly $250,000 to achieve the project’s goal — $250 per girl per year, for 10 years.

But heartwarmingness aside, the effort oozes one very important takeaway — you don’t have to be, or work for, an NGO to make a tangible difference. The private sector holds formidable potential for solving global problems — just ask Acumen Fund’s Jacqueline Novogratz.

So far, the effort has amassed over $28,000. Learn more about it, see the other side like you never have before (did me mention Victoria’s photography goes well beyond her self-described hobbyist level?), and contribute to one of the best grassroots causes we’ve come across in a while.

Pick One: Hipsters Take on Culture, By Way of Helvetica

Start Trek vs. Russia, the 1970’s vs. Christmas, or why death is better than Uggs.

If there ever were a formula for cool, it wouldn’t be far from simplicity + social statement + Helvetica. And Pick One is just that. Part social experiment, part art project, part brilliant head-scratcher, it’s artist Ben Nyberg‘s clever stab at getting your priorities straight — and it’s as playful or as serious as you want it to be.

All you do is go through pairs of cultural items — from Google to guns to God, and everything in between — and pick the one you prefer within each pair, which gives it a score of 1 point.

After a couple of hundred clicks, we lost patience in trying to reach some sort of end — we suspect it’s an infinite loop that randomly pairs each item with every other, then starts all over again — and voyeured over to the Top 10 and the Bottom 10, based on the crowdsourced cumulative score of each item.

It’s a sign of the times when The Internet ends up amidst the most fundamental of human needs. Then again, if it were up to us, it would even rank four positions higher.

And a note to all the budding social psychologists and ethicists out there — you may want to rethink your career path: Morality, which appears in the pick-pairs, didn’t even make a cameo on the Top 10. Neither did art — ironic, in the context of an art project.

Pick One is also a testament to its own hipsterness — there’s no question about the psychographic composition of a crowd that hates Uggs more than hate itself, George W, or death.

HT @BBHLabs

Heart of a City: BioMapping

Why skin is the new heart and how your neighbors can change the way your feel about your street.

On the trails of yesterday’s fascinating exploration of cities as living organisms, today we look at another piece of high-concept urban portraiture that harnesses the power of art, sociology and technology to a brilliant end.

Since 2004, Christian Nold has been orchestrating Bio Mapping — a crowdsourced community mapping project, which wires people up to Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) devices, detecting their emotional arousal, and sends them on their merry way around the neighborhood. These states are then mapped onto people’s geographic location, creating a visualization of communal emotion.

Participants — over 1,500 of them to date — also annotate the data with personal observations, memories and thoughts they associate with each location, painting a rich emotional portrait of the social space of a community.

Perhaps most fascinating about the project isn’t the mere documentation of collective emotion, but how that awareness would change our perception of our community and environment.

Those who have been with Brain Pickings for some time may find Bio Mapping reminiscent of Swedish artist Erik Krikortz’s Emotional Cities project. But, as researchers, we love the idea of measuring emotional states via biofeedback rather than self-reporting.

After all, there’s often a gaping disconnect between how we publicly broadcast emotion and how we privately experience it.

via Very Short List

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Behind the Scenes of Project N.A.S.A.

From Jamaica to L.A., by way of the underground.

Five years in the making, the N.A.S.A. project — which stands for North America South America — made waves last year as one of the biggest creative collaborations between iconic “underground” artists across music, art, film and more.

One of N.A.S.A.’s most high-profile manifestations was the video for the track Money, featuring David Byrne, Chuck D, Ras Congo, Seu Jorge, and Z-Trip, directed by Syd Garon and Paul Griswold, and with artwork by none other than the now-iconic Shepard Fairey.

Today, we go behind the scenes, with background on the N.A.S.A. project and the unprecedented but excellent idea of pairing up music artists with animators.

N.A.S.A.’s first album, The Spirit of Apollo, is an equally impressive string of unlikely but brilliant collaborations, including Karen O, Method Man, Santogold, M.I.A., The Cool Kids, and many, many more — grab it now.