Join me and @GuyKawasaki on #GivingTuesday to Support #WomensRights

Every year since GivingTuesday has started, I’ve celebrated it with a fundraiser for a nonprofit cause that I care deeply about.   This year, on November 29, I will participate in a fundraising event with Guy Kawasaki hosted by Mozilla to help raise awareness and funds for Wake (Women’s Alliance and Knowledge Exchange).   If you are in the Bay Area, please join us – you can RSVP here.
WAKE gets technology and communications tools, training and support to women’s rights leaders and their organizations so they can accelerate their impact. They work closely with diverse partners to provide tools, products and volunteer advisors that will help advance the rights of women and girls. Women’s rights leaders in communities around the world are making progress addressing the most critical issues impacting women and girls: gender-based violence, human trafficking, child marriage, displacement due to conflict, and unequal access to healthcare, education, political participation, and economic opportunity. WAKE’s goal is to support and strengthen these efforts.

I’ve been involved with the organization since it started, traveling to Ukraine and Cambodia to facilitate training sessions. Last May, I was part of Wake’s Tech2Empower trip to Cambodia , accompanying a group of professional women who work in Technology.  We spent a week training women’s rights groups in Phnom Penh and Siem Reap.    In Siem Reap, we visited the Women’s Resource Center Cambodia learned first hand of the challenges facing women and girls in that country and how the nonprofit’s programs support them.
I am donating my book  royalties from my newest book,  The Happy Healthy Nonprofit to fund a fellowship through WAKE: Women’s Alliance for Knowledge Exchange to support the Women’s Resource Center Cambodia, a non-governmental organization based in Siem Reap Cambodia campaigning for women’s rights and welfare every day. Women’s Resource Center provides women and girls in Cambodia with emotional support, referral services, and informal education so they can be empowered to make informed decisions about their lives. Through this Fellowship, WRCC will, for the first time, hire a Khmer woman for a newly created position of Marketing and Communications Officer.
The royalties that I earn from my books have been donated to nonprofits to support women’s and girl’s empowerment work and given what happened last week, I am all the more convinced of the need to support such programs.
My first two books, The Network Nonprofit and Measuring Networked Nonprofit provided college scholarships to two young Cambodian women, Savon Keo and Leng Tharath through the Sharing Foundation.     Education in Cambodia is the path out of poverty and I am grateful that the modest amount of royalties from book sales have helped these young women make a better life.  Royalties from the Happy Healthy Nonprofit will continue to support a high school and college scholarship for a young girl in Cambodia through the The Sharing Foundation — the scholarship will be awarded at the end of the year, so stay tuned.
If you care about women’s rights, please support Wake by attending our Giving Tuesday fundraiser on November 29th or donate to WAKE