When I was in Haiti last week for the #heartofhaiti blogger trip, we were touring around on the Saturday morning and pulled up in our van to the Palace (their version of the White House). As many people have seen in the news, it completely collapsed. So did their National Cathedral and Congress building. Ruins, rubble, dust, trash and in general disarray are everywhere you look. Directly across from the Palace is one of the biggest tent cities in Port-au-Prince. It’s a lot to process.

We step out of the van to take photos of the palace and suddenly a marching bands starts. The national marching band for Haiti was in procession to the flagpole and played their national anthem as they raised the national flag.

It was one of those moments of perfect timing that you couldn’t have planned if you wanted to.

While I was filming I looked over my right shoulder behind me and noticed an odd quiet. Everything had stopped in its place. Men were half stride, cars had come to a complete halt, women washing dishes or clothes had stopped, even kids running around were paused.

Everyone and everything paused to pay tribute to their country. It was one of the largest acts of patriotism I’ve ever seen.

So the video above is the view straightforward but imagine for a moment what it was like with a 360-degree view.

Calling all nonprofits who have made kick-ass videos this past year. See3, in partnership with YouTube, announced that this year’s DoGooder Nonprofit Video Awards are accepting entries.

This year, winners will again have the chance to win one of four $2500 grants provided by the Case Foundation, video cameras from Flip Video, a free registration to next year’s Nonprofit Technology Conference provided by NTEN and more. The winning videos will be announced at this year’s Nonprofit Technology Conference hosted by NTEN and featured on YouTube’s homepage in March.

For many nonprofit clients I worked with over the years, we’ve talked about the power of video. Video is a great way to share your mission, messages and goals. The medium educates, makes others aware of issues, progress that’s being made, and the work that still needs to be done. Awards like these, recognize nonprofits that see the importance in video and hopefully encourage others to extend into this medium as well.

I heard last year there were 750 entries, 17K votes by the public, and 150,000 views. Wow, right? Now it’s your turn. Here are some details to get you started:

• Submissions for Best Small, Medium, and Large nonprofit organization videos must be a video that was made in 2010. Entries for the Best Thrifty Video category can be for videos made any time before the end of the submission period. Each nonprofit can submit as many videos as they would like. No specific categories or missions are needed.
• Entries cannot exceed 10 minutes in length and are limited to nonprofits from the US, the UK, and Australia.
• You can submit your videos from February 4, 2011 until March 2, 2011. Starting March 7th, voting is open to the public.
• Your organization MUST be a member of the YouTube Nonprofit Program.

Good luck! If you enter let me know so I can help spread the word when voting starts!

Earlier this month, Kiva co-launched an exciting new campaign to help empower women, together with Dermalogica and other strategic partners called JoinFITE. FITE stands for “Financial Indepence Through Entrepreneurship” and is focused on helping women worldwide start and grow a business.

The campaign has since been covered in BusinessWeek, FastCompany, and the Huffington Post.

Jane Wurwand, the 52-year-old founder of skin-care product maker Dermalogica started 25 years ago with $14,000 and built a business with customers in 87 countries and more than $200 million in annual revenue. She’s an incredible woman I’ve heard speak through my involvement with Step Up Women’s Network. She is dedicated to helping women in business and support entrepreneurship and this is an amazing partnership and campaign to highlight that commitment.

Dermalogica is donating $500,000 to help fund microloans to women through Kiva. Wurwand just stepped down as chief executive officer of Dermalogica to focus her attention on the microlending campaign. According to Jane:

It’s so authentic to our industry. Every spa and salon owner has said it feels like their story. Each of them started with a small amount of money and built their success through that. They know as a woman what it means to be financially independent.

The project will involve promotions on five of Dermalogica’s top-selling products, including skin cleansers, microfolients, and eye creams, that consumers can redeem online to contribute $1 to a Kiva loan. Wurwand hopes consumers will add to the credits with donations of their own, and aims to facilitate microloans to at least 25,000 entrepreneurs in two years. Unlike on Kiva’s main site, loans made through FITE will only go to women. When people fund a loan on the site, starting at $25, they choose what country and what industry their money goes to. Kiva will then choose the borrower and send donors e-mail updates on the entrepreneurs who receive their funds. You can check out the campaign site too, at http://joinFITE.org.

JoinFITE is inspiring a movement and I can’t wait to see where it goes! Celebrities like Geena Davis and Julia Ormond, companies like Dermalogica and Seventh Generation, and thought leaders like Isobel Coleman and Nicholas Kristof (NY Times Columnist and best-selling co-author of Half-the-Sky) have all joined forces and are competing in the joinFITE Challenge. Learn more about it at JoinFITE.org.

My stepdad is from Braddock, PA, a small working class town just on the eastern outskirts of Pittsburgh, but still within Allegheny county. Growing up we heard the classic, some over-inflated, some as real as the sky is blue, stories of growing up in a steel community. Getting an apple for Christmas if you were good, nothing if you weren’t. Braddock held a lure, a mystery to it, because when I was a kid it wasn’t “cool” to go into areas like that and revitalize and pump hope in the community.

All that has changed now. It is incredibly “cool” to find neighborhoods and help them along, and in many cases the artists that moved into these empty warehouses to make them into lofts are the new cowboys, the fearless ones letting the rest of us know “it’s ok” to go, settle, create commerce, opportunity and places to call home amongst the long-term residents who have seen-it-all.

When I first saw the video above, a single tear slid down my cheek. I’m serious! It’s such an incredible tribute to a town not just of survivors, but of people who continue to thrive, fight adversity and fight back. Part of Levi’s “Go Forth” campaign around their corporate social responsibility campaign that was recently named one of the best of the year by Forbes magazine.

Levi’s also partnered with IFC and the Sundance Channel to create “Ready To Work” which is about Braddock and has been airing segments on both networks, some of which you can see on Levi’s YouTube. The channel say, “We Are All Workers: Braddock, PA, a town of pioneers answering the call to mend what needs mending and build what’s theirs to build.”

Part of what the series talks about is the effort to repair and mend the Braddock branch of the Carnegie Library, another personal connection to me. So this whole campaign struck very close to home.

My favorite line in the video at the top of this post is, “People think their aren’t frontiers anymore, but there are frontiers all around us.”

I’ve been thinking about that the last few days. What is means to create your own frontier and look beyond the horizon to a horizon that you’re creating. Here’s my conclusion; these new frontiers don’t have to be completely new to be special. And they don’t have to be entrepreneurial or something that only a specific group (or clique) of people can do. A frontier is for the every man, and we can all work to finding our frontiers and horizons and share them with those we love.

At least that’s my, somewhat realist but deeply idealist, interpretation.

I came across the most remarkable woman running for Congress. Since I wrote about supporting professional women last week, I thought this was a good follow up.

Resham Saujani is running for Congress in the 14th district of New York City which encompasses the East Side and Queens. She is using social media to help spread the word about her campaign and being transparent every step along the way as she talks about her campaign on her website and on Twitter (you can follow her @reshma2010 or join her campaign by texting JOIN to 646-807-9932).

She writes about herself:

My name is Reshma Saujani. I am a dedicated Democrat, a community activist, a Yale University legal scholar, and an attorney in New York City. But first and foremost, I am the daughter of political refugees whose story embodies the promise of life in America. For questions or more info email info@reshma2010.com.

She is exactly the type of candidate I want to see. She has the experience to get the job done, the passion to want to and the background and family that make her a standup person and member of society. While I can’t vote for Reshma myself (I’m not registered to vote in NYC), I support her for Congress and will do what I can to support her from the sidelines.

What other organizations do you know about that support women in politics? Leave a comment or message me to help out with a future blog post!

Click here to view the embedded video.

CrisisCongress Photo Courtesy of Taylor Davidson on Flickr

As I’ve grown into my activist and humanitarian roles, technology has helped me find a place where I feel like I belong in the response. It’s not my primary profession, per say, in life. But it is a place where I feel like I can make a difference.

How?

Sometimes, from using our voice. Our voice online has the ability to multiply and make a bigger impact. Using your voice on the internet (and this could be Facebook or your own blog) is a way of standing up for what you believe, asking questions, and seeking answers.

That’s what happened to me in January. The earthquake happened and I turned to the Internet to see what the response would be. I had heard of Transparency Camps happening last summer, but only pieces, as I had been in the Philippines on my Kiva Fellowship. I had heard more about CrisisCommons from friends like Alex Rose and Chad Catacchio and with my incessant need for information learned more about the Camps. I started to see them pop up around the country and people were reaching out to me, since I now lived in New Orleans, asking to connect with people who had been instrumental in the response for Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and wondering when there would be a CrisisCamp in New Orleans.

From the bottom of my cause-filled activist heart, you could say this is how I was roped in to creating CrisisCampNOLA.

I was helped by Robert Fogarty, who himself has a nonprofit focused on evacuation techniques called Evacuteer.org and by Barrett Conrad, who leads up a monthly developer event in New Orleans and could tap into those networks to get developers to attend.

So I had Alex and Chad rooting me on, and Robert and Barrett partnering and helping shoulder the load, and the local New Orleans community donating space (LaunchPadNOLA), food (Naked Pizza) and press/promotion (New Orleans Tech) and all of the pieces were coming together. But more than all of that, all CrisisCamps would be remiss not to mention Heather Blanchard.

Heather’s passion for creating CrisisCamp and moving CrisisCommons into a viable entity were never far off from the overall goal of having a successful campaign.

Click here to view the embedded video.

We held CrisisCampNOLA, we invited local Haitians to come and tell their stories and we built a local response and also helped on the national scale. It was, by all means, a success.
Through the type of connections that we make online in this day and age (which makes me feel so old for saying this way but it’s true), Heather and I stayed in touch. In fact, we put together a CrisisCamp dinner during SXSW and we also put together a panel during SXSW about CrisisCamp. We talked many times after about how to move forward and then the Oil Spill happened.

That stupid Oil Spill. God, it makes me so angry and sad and frustrated and wondering what I could do to help. But to “help” I mean, we couldn’t clean the beaches and the catastrophe was so severe.

Again, there was Heather heading up a oil spill reporter app to help people create visuals of where the spill had hit and working with the technical resources at her disposal around the country to make an impact.

This leads me to two weeks ago when CrisisCommons held its first International Crisis Congress. City leads from around the world came together to meet in person (most for the first time) and talk about the future of CrisisCommons. Held in Washington DC on July 16th at the World Bank and travel grants graciously given by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, we all gathered for a full day of workshops. The mediator, Allen Gunn, for the day was the best, literally the best, I’ve ever seen. He kept us moving, laughing, engaged and thoughtful. We got up out of our seats and we interacted and asked the hard, tough questions necessary to build and grown CrisisCommons.

Would we be more open? Would we have more rules and legal protection or less? Where are we looking to go in a year or five years from now? We spared nothing to analyze those questions.

In the group, besides City Leads, were professors in emergency preparedness, social innovators, marketers and GIS professionals all bringing their perspectives to the table.

I walked away with a case of the “wow” at the talent that came together for a unified cause. We could have hit a dent in a “virtual conference” but to attend in person we accomplished much more than I ever would have fathomed.

I’d like to extend my sincere thank you and ever-admiration to Heather Blanchard for being the visionary around CrisisCommons. I’m honored to represent New Orleans, and truly moved to be part of the process and be able to flex my own creative muscles into being part of the vision moving forward.

I’m always looking for more passionate and talented people to help grow CrisisCampNOLA and if this is you, please send me an email to sloane@thecausemopolitan.com.

I’d also love to find a way to get training to be able to be a first-responder of some kind for future emergencies around the world. World Vision has people who jump in to assess the needs of an area (like a project manager) and other direct response agencies have people they train in mental health services to go in immediately and help people on the ground. I’m looking to combine my online experiences with real offline field work, so if you know anywhere I should look I’m all ears.

Until then, I’ll continue to search and seek out ways to help with disasters around the world through my contributions with CrisisCommons. I’m so happy to have found a place where I belong and where I can contribute to those in need during crisis.

(Topic for another time…defining crisis!)

Further Reading:

• CrisisCommons Roundtable Series + First International CrisisCongress from CrisisCommons
• How CrisisCommons Is Helping the Tech Community Help Others on Mashable
• UStream from CrisisCongress
• CrisisCongress Flickr Set from Taylor Davidson
• CrisisCommons and Congress on High Earth Orbit

I’m on tour! It’s not quite the Cause It’s My Birthday madness that Doug Campbell and I created last fall, but it’s an exciting opportunity to meet and connect with EXCEPTIONAL techies (along with friends new and old) in five cities this summer. It’s an opportunity to help promote a company and a product we believe in, and help make the launch as viable as possible by sparking conversation and creating content with influencers and those most apt to purchase and develop this product.

The concept went something like this. Erica O’Grady and I wanted to create a unique opportunity for a company to get in front of their target audience, minus the top-shelf sponsorship cost. After all, what does “sponsoring” an event mean? It’s creating a place to get in front of the people that matter to you, right? So if we could do that for you, circulate a room and find the influencers and voices you wanted to reach, evangelize your product, sing your praises and back your endeavors, provide your with leads to follow up with after events that can lead to the same quantifiable ROI, what kind of sponsorship opportunity would that create?

The Party Crashers was born. And for our first project, we are party crashing Mashable’s 5-city SummerMash where awesome-super-amazing-client Microsoft has sponsored us to promote the Windows Phone 7. At each party in Seattle, San Francisco, Washington DC, New York City and Chicago, we’re asking the question (and capturing your answer) to the question:

We’re posting updates on The Party Crashers site, but we’d love you to  Follow Our Adventures on Twitter, Fan Us on Facebook, and please if you’re in Seattle, San Francisco, DC, NYC, of Chicago come to a Mashable Event and say hi (we’d love to get an interview with you)!

You can also leave a comment below with what your dream mobile application would be, we’d love to hear from you!

Does running make you high? What do you think about when you run? Usually, for me, it’s the greatest endorphin and adrenaline high. I get thinking, creative, have big juicy ideas and in general feel any clouds lifting from my shoulders and feel like I’m back in charge. Back in control.

So yesterday when I went running, and found myself conflicted, I had to wonder why. And it was because I was thinking about the oil spill, thinking about what I could do, more ways that I could give back now that Gulf Coast Benefits has wrapped (and we successfully raised just under $50,000 for Gulf Restoration Network).

My friend Jolie worries that people are burning out on the topic, Citizen Effect is creating a platform where we can participate in ways to keep the topic current and on Monday (as I mentioned in my post yesterday) Pepsi’s Refresh Everything projects launches a special Gulf Coast edition giving out $1.3 million in loans.

I ran along the Mississippi (listening to Obama’s Hope speech as a DJ-mashup) and thought to myself, “I love New Orleans and American too much not to keep fighting and pushing forward in the name of humanity, of cause-filled living and of helping people.”

And so I shared those thoughts, raw and unedited, while they were fresh from my mid-day run.

A huge thank you to Jill Foster, Geoff Livingston, Dan Morrison, and May Yu. Through Citizen Effect’s #CitizenGulf campaign, they came to explore the Gulf Coast, meet with nonprofits and find out how they could best help the efforts going on here for recovery and to encourage citizen philanthropy (a favorite topic of mine you all know).

Since I’m smack in the middle of co-producing tomorrow night’s Gulf Benefit Concerts (85 and counting in 11 countries), I couldn’t be with them during the day as they went to St. Bernard Community Center, to visit Catholic Charities and other wonderful groups, but we did get together for dinner last night at Cochon to talk about giving, New Orleans, my experiences here (and frankly travel stories I hadn’t told in awhile including tales from my Burma trip last summer).

To be around such incredible minds, giving souls and dedicated citizen philanthropists was engaging and inspiring. And then it was even better because they were able to help promote tomorrow’s events through the iReport above and also through an exciting blog post tomorrow (publication TBD) and their own social networks.

They kept saying, “Thank you so much for taking time away from the benefit shows to have dinner with us, we know you have so much to do!”

But really, it’s a thank you to them. For coming here and learning. For being open to the experience and being emotionally drained and exhausted, for wanting to keep giving and find more ways for their communities (online and off) to be engaged down here. It was the least I could to do give them my 110% (the very best Sloane I could be) because the emails, the follow up, the Gulf Coast stuff – that was there waiting for me when I got home to my place in the French Quarter last night.

Offline comes before online always. Remember that.

If you like what I’m rapping about in the video above, I hope you’ll attend a benefit concert in YOUR area tomorrow night (or get some friends together for an awareness party if your city doesn’t have an event) AND MAKE A DONATION to support our efforts. After all, 100% of donations are going to Gulf Restoration Network and it all then goes directly to the communities in need. No loopholes. No delay.

Tomorrow isn’t just the day of the benefits, and it’s not the end of this effort by any means. It’s only the beginning.

Yours,
Sloane

Chandeleur Islands Balloon Aerial Imagery from Grassroots Mapping

President Obama made a stop in the Gulf Coast region two weeks ago to survey the damage and while he was here issued a 6-month moratorium on new offshore drilling. Major news organizations have extended their stay on Louisiana’s coast, citing what residents already know, that the environmental and economic impact are far greater than anyone could fathom or dare imagine.

The “Crude Awakening” as it’s been called is causing a lifetime of damage to the Gulf Coast, spurring over 45 rallies nationwide to demand BP step up and take responsibility for its actions and that the government pass stricter regulations on offshore drilling. The spill, which occurred on April 20th, still hasn’t been stopped, and crude oil continues to spill into the Gulf Coast region.

In the mayhem and despair, citizens and activists are in a constant state of emergency and disaster mode. Anne Rolfes, Founding Director of the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, told me, “Our office is bombarded every day by phone calls and people who walk through the door wanting to help in the face of this impossible situation. We are putting them to work to document the problem – gathering data, making the people-to-people connections that will help the real story be told. When the spill stops BP has a public relations machine ready to minimize this and pretend it didn’t happen. We don’t have a machine but we have something better – real people who are passionate and determined.”

The first week of June marks another important date for the Gulf Coast region. It’s the official start of hurricane season. With wetlands and marshes already under attack, meteorologists and hurricane experts warn this year’s hurricane season is more dangerous than ever. Imagine cities not only suffering water damage but covered in oil.

It’s hard not to be despondent, and worse, not know what you can do to help. Listed below are organizations making a difference and bringing together technologies being used to stop the oil spill from spreading and tracking the spill, providing a dataset open to the public.

Consider supporting these organizations and finding a way to get involved.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Grassroots Mapping, a creation of Jeffrey Warren from MIT Media Lab’s Center for Future Civic Media, is producing imagery created by volunteers and owned in the public domain. By using balloons and kites equipped with inexpensive digital cameras, these “community satellites” are able to georeference and create maps with 100x higher resolution than what is available on Google to be used in the environmental battle and litigation proceedings in the coming years. Orientation sessions are being offered in New Orleans or a DIY wiki is available on their website.

What you can do: Grassroots Mapping is currently running a Kickstarter project to raise money for more kites and helium tanks to put in the hands of volunteers in New Orleans. They are looking to raise $5,000 in the next 20 days. A donation of $10 or more gets you a print of any photo in their public domain dataset.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Matter of Trust – When hair can mean more than hair. Salons all over the country, and internationally from countries including the UK, France, Germany, New Zealand, Japan and Brazil, have been taking hair to drop-off points or sending discarded piles of hair to Matter of Trust to make booms by stuffing hair, fur, wastewool and other applicable material into the donated recycled nylons and mesh to absorb oil and stop the spill from spreading.

What you can do: Donations aren’t coming only from “people” salons but from pet groomers, and farmers sheering alpaca and llamas. The most recent call to action? Nylons. You can send nylons new or used (with runs) to their warehouses to help make booms. There are over 2,600 oil spills every year, so this otherwise discarded waste will continue to have a usage for other spills. Sign up here to get involved or make a donation.

Real time reports from Oil Reporter

Oil Reporter – The folks from CrisisCommons and Ushahidi (and scores of volunteers) have created free iPhone and Android applications that enables citizens on the ground to upload photos and videos and notes to report sightings of oil, harmed wildlife and conditions of the wetlands and beaches. Oil Reporter data is open and available to anyone via its open API. A team from San Diego State University’s Visualization Center will be the data repository for Oil Reporter. Oil Reporter will be hosting an Adopt-A-Beach initiative for virtual volunteers to adopt a span of beach along the Gulf Coast.

What you can do: Through the use of high resolution imagery, volunteers will be provided a specific location and training to map data elements of what they see such as perimeters of oil presence and injured wildlife in remote areas where physical assessment access is limited. Details and dates are being announced later this week.

Image courtesy of the Community Center of St. Bernard

Community Center of St. Bernard – St. Bernard Parish was overshadowed by the mass media post-Hurricane Katrina for the Ninth Ward. A working class community, only 2 homes in St. Bernard were not affected during Katrina. Many of these families still haven’t been able to return to their homes, almost five years after Katrina and are still struggling with debt and repaying their SBA loans, yet this community is being hit again by the oil spill. Commercial and recreational fishing bans are currently in effect, and as many of these residents rely on the fish and seafood industries, they are now being forced to sign up for food at the food pantry so that they will be able to feed their families until they can find other work.

What you can do: Donations go towards food, clothing and services for families in need.

More ways to get involved: A recent Gulf Aid concert in New Orleans on May 16th raised over $300,000 for families in need and included performances by Lenny Kravitz, John Legend, Ani Difranco, Allen Toussaint, The Voice of the Wetlands All-Stars and The Preservation Hall Jazz Band with Mos Def. Donations are still being taken through the Gulf Relief Foundation or you can text “GULFAID 10” to 27138 to donate $10 to Gulf Aid.

There are discussions that another series of concerts will be held on July 1st with all proceeds benefiting Gulf Coast families. If you’d like to be involved or create a fundraiser of your own, it’s easier than you think. Identify an organization to direct your donation and contact them. The first point of contact is sometimes all we need to get started.

Don’t know where to start? Leave a comment below and we’ll help you. This is too important for us all not to jump in and find a way to contribute.

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Editor’s note: This post originally was posted on Pop Tech with the byline: Sloane Berrent currently resides in New Orleans. She co-founded NOLAlicious, a weekly e-newsletter about New Orleans and organized the first CrisisCampNOLA.