Day 6
V-Day
Submitted by janetc on Thu, 11/22/2007 - 17:06.
Every year, groups of women at universities, colleges, women’s groups, community groups, theatre companies and clubs all over the world come together to stage performances of Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues. 90% of the money raised from each performance goes towards supporting local grassroots projects that work to end violence against women.
The remaining 10% goes towards supporting the V-Day Spotlight Campaign. Every year, V-Day spotlights a particular group of women that have suffered or are suffering from violence and abuse, using the campaign’s publicity and momentum to focus the world’s media to raise awareness and funds for groups that working specifically to address this. Women of Iraq, Afghan women, ‘comfort women’ and the missing or murdered women of Juarez have all been focuses of the V-Day Spotlight in previous years. In 2008, V-Day spotlights the women of New Orleans. The Katrina Warriors have suffered, and continue to suffer from, racism, economic hardship, high levels of violence, including sexual violence, and the effects of the failure of public structures to protect them.
One V-Day participant from a London university said, “We used to have a mailing list but that got really unmanageable, especially when you were getting lots of e-mails and you couldn’t keep track of the conversation. Having an e-group makes everything a lot easier because I can just read bits of the conversations that are relevant to me but still be in the loop on what everyone else is up
to. It means that we all have a say in making decisions. As we all have access to the group anyone can post stuff and everyone will see it. This year, one of the e-groups from the other colleges let us join their e-group. It was really useful for us to see what was going on and how they were planning their event. We were so impressed that we eventually decided to throw a joint fundraising night. Although we did V-Day last year, we still use the group to share information about other campaigns, which was really useful when I was writing my dissertation on human rights.”
An e-group is simply an online forum. Members can sign up and circulate information to other members in the group. Various universities staging V-Day performances have used e-groups as a way of communicating between themselves to work out rehearsal schedules, make decisions on venues and costumes and decide on their recipient organisations. Some university groups that set up a new e-group every year have referred back to conversations in previous e-groups in order to inform their decision making.
