Wednesday, March 7, 2012

Stop Kony

Over the past few days this video has been spreading across the internets. It is about a half-hour long, but it is well worth it and it will probably make you think differently about the world and yourself. In short, Joseph Kony is a rebel leader in Uganda who moves from village to village capturing children and forcing them into his child army. But he has no motives or and ulterior other than just being in charge. Think Blood Diamond without the diamonds. Watch and see how you can help stop Kony. Put down your xbox controller or your text book for 30 minutes, because this is more important and well worth it.

If you are interested, there is already a UNH chapter on Twitter and a Facebook Event Page. Follow them for updates and more information about how you can help here at UNH.


6 comments:

  1. By all means support the effort to capture Joseph Kony and raise awareness about him, but be careful and be knowledgeable when it comes to financially supporting the organization behind the recent campaign. http://visiblechildren.tumblr.com.nyud.net/

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  2. It is very important to make sure that if you do decide to donate money, it goes to the appropriate place. Donating to the kony2012.com website would probably be the best way. There are a lot of awful people out there that capitalize on these kinds of things.

    I'm normally the type of person that is very much for the idea that the United States should focus on the United States and not every other country that "needs our help." But this case is different. Children are being killed and being forced to kill others. Kony needs to be stopped.

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  3. Please look at this information about the Invisible Children organization, who are the ones organizing the Kovy 2012 campaign.

    In no way am I trying to say that this is not an important issue, but please be more aware of what this organization, Invisible Children, supports. There are other ways of helping stop Kony. I do encourage everyone to read through this link below. Please.

    http://visiblechildren.tumblr.com/post/18890947431/we-got-trouble

    To give a few quotes:

    "Invisible Children has been condemned time and time again. As a registered not-for-profit, its finances are public. Last year, the organization spent $8,676,614. Only 32% went to direct services (page 6), with much of the rest going to staff salaries, travel and transport, and film production. This is far from ideal for an issue which arguably needs action and aid, not awareness, and Charity Navigator rates their accountability 2/4 stars because they lack an external audit committee. But it goes way deeper than that.

    Is awareness good? Yes. But these problems are highly complex, not one-dimensional and, frankly, aren’t of the nature that can be solved by postering, film-making and changing your Facebook profile picture, as hard as that is to swallow. Giving your money and public support to Invisible Children so they can spend it on supporting ill-advised violent intervention and movie #12 isn’t helping. Do I have a better answer? No, I don’t, but that doesn’t mean that you should support KONY 2012 just because it’s something. Something isn’t always better than nothing. Sometimes it’s worse."

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  4. http://ilto.wordpress.com/2006/11/02/the-visible-problem-with-invisible-children/

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  5. The point of the video is to raise awareness, no one knew who Kony was before this, now everyone does. Now you contact your representative in Congress and convince them that you want them to continue their support in Uganda to stop Kony. That video probably did cost a lot, all of the members of the organization have put a lot of time and effort into the cause. Not for profit means the employees still get paid, and if the organization stops Kony, that would be a huge success and quite frankly the employees deserve to be paid for that.

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  6. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=KLVY5jBnD-E

    This woman sums it up pretty well, and she knows a lot more about the issue than just a viral facebook video.

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