Update on BREAKAWAY & Womanity Foundation

Dear Friends, Colleagues, and Supporters,

Those of you following BREAKAWAY know of its recent nomination for the 2016 Womanity Foundation Award for tackling violence against women through Information Communication Technologies. The Emergent Media Center (EMC) at Champlain College and Grassroot Soccer (GRS) South Africa are extremely proud to be one pair of four finalist partnerships selected from 41 original nominations.

A rigorous proposal process, including a field visit to South Africa, a video overview, prototyping, and a final presentation, offered multiple opportunities for our graduate and undergraduate students to be part of this international granting process. This included press interviews and reviews, including this quote from a review of BREAKAWAY in CatchNews, entitled “One Word: Revolutionary”:

“So for BREAKAWAY to not just do away with this bias, but also to intrinsically question it, thereby forcing the player to make the right choice, is downright genius.”

Yesterday in Paris, France, the Womanity Foundation announced that fellow finalist “Take Back the Tech” was awarded final funding. “Take Back the Tech” is an innovative campaign connecting grassroots movements around the world to take control of technology to end violence against women. We wish the Association for Progressive Communications and La Sandia Digital the very best and we look forward to following their project.

We are honored to be a leader alongside the other Womanity Award finalists who are driving innovation to prevent violence against women. We are especially grateful to Womanity Foundation Programme Manager Servane Mouazan for the opportunities this process offered and we look forward to continuing our connection in the #ICTforWomanity Network. Through this 10 month process, the EMC and GRS teams, with our longtime partner Population Media Center, collaborated to produce an impactful plan for including more youth in the BREAKAWAY Initiative. This plan specifically includes community-based programming in South Africa, but reaches further through the development of a mobile version of BREAKAWAY and an exciting multi-modal curriculum.

Through the deep work of a remarkable partnership team, we look forward to the future and new opportunities to make this vision a reality! We are grateful for your ongoing support!

Ann DeMarle
Director, Emergent Media Center
Champlain College

Learn more about BREAKAWAY:
Proposed partnership and plan: https://vimeo.com/164490748
Recent press: CatchNews, TechCrunch, TEDx talk by alumni Mahmoud Jabari
BREAKAWAY initiative: http://breakawaygame.champlain.edu/
Grassroot Soccer: http://www.grassrootsoccer.org/