I am sitting at my computer, thinking about the food crisis in the Horn of Africa and the arson attack in Mexico and how lucky I am.
I want to be useful to the world--I want to fight AIDS and world hunger and work for women's rights. My quest to help people begins now.
This weekend, my troop and I finished the Journey that was required for us to earn our Gold Award. We hosted an overnight Dove Real Beauty workshop for about 35 girls from all over New Mexico! I had been to a Dove workshop my sophomore (I think) year in high school, and was inspired by what Dove had to say to girls and women about beauty. We talked to the girls about eating healthy, sleeping well, body image, and how to stay healthy in general. We split into groups according to groups (Daisy, Brownie, Junior, etc.) so that we could go over the things that were requirements of each group's specific badge that they were earning. In my group, one of the things we did was looking through magazines and talking about the photo-editing practice. At the end of our session we had the girls each find a photo in their magazine that they considered "beautiful", and we were pleasantly surprised by the results. Instead of saying "She has pretty makeup", the girls were saying things like "She plays soccer and I love soccer!" and "This girl is beautiful because of her smile". It was really inspiring to see the girls' mindsets shift as they realized that beauty comes in all shapes, colors, heights and weights. I hope that we changed everyone's perception of beauty for the better, but if all we managed to do was inspire one girl, I will still consider it an exceptional use of our time and talents.
Instead of being just a requirement for our Gold Award, this Journey was something that I'm going to remember and be proud of for a very, very long time.
Want more information? CLICK HERE to find out more about what Dove's all about.
My mission is to get people to care.
And related to changing the world:
Click here to find out how you can alleviate some of the need for food in the Horn of Africa, and save lives.
Kaya from CS here to play the devil's advocate.
ReplyDeleteDo you think it is insincere for Dove to be campaigning to make people realize people are beautiful when they feel beautiful, not because of what media says, when Unilever, the company with owns Dove, also sells a skin-lightening cream (Fair and Lovely) using commercials that suggest dark skin is a hindrance and markets a body spray by showing men who use it being chased by stereotypically attractive women unable to control themselves (Axe)?
Now I do; I didn't know this when we started the project (which was why I suggested the Dove workshop in the first place), but Dove also does a substantial amount of airbrushing on their advertisements for the Real Beauty Campaign. Now that I've researched it more, I know how hypocritical they are, but I still think that the women I worked with and I managed to manipulate the workshop so that we made it not about Dove and all about the girls and their self esteem. I think that makes it worth using Dove as a base for our workshop, even if they are just as corrupt on the inside as other companies when it comes to selling and advertising their products.
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