Best if he explains in his own words in this video:
It is the first in a series of YouTube videos put together by an
unusual alliance of Google, Hollywood, social-media creators and a
non-profit advocacy group, water.org. The campaign, which was launched on Tuesday and will build up to World Water Day on 22 March, hopes its combination of celebrity, social media and humour will appeal to young people and go viral on the internet.
"It
was Matt Damon's idea two years ago: how do we persuade people to give a
shit about toilets?" said Chevenee Reavis, water.org's director of
strategic initiatives, during filming of the sketch at Google's YouTube
complex in Los Angeles.
Shocking statistics – such as a child
dying from a water-related illness every 20 seconds – did not on their
own command attention, said Reavis, and water.org had just a five-figure
budget for its campaign. That would be enough, perhaps, for half a
second of advertising during the Super Bowl, where a 30-second spot
costs $4m.
The Kansas-based group, which Damon co-founded, decided
to focus on YouTube, in the wake of the stunningly successful Kony 2012
campaign, a short film about the Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony that was
made by the non-profit Invisible Children. Kony 2012 was viewed more
than 100,000,000 times and stirred a senate resolution. However a
follow-up canvassing campaign flopped.
Damon and his collaborators
hope their "strike with me" campaign will ignite the internet and
pressure Washington to revive the stalled Water for the World Act, which
would increase funding for projects in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean.
Showing posts with label toilets. Show all posts
Showing posts with label toilets. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 13, 2013
Saturday, January 26, 2008
Down In The Dumps
When I was born, the gobal population was about 2.4-billion, all in.
Today we've grown to over six billion and that's expected to peak to over nine billion by 2050. Yet of today's six billion, two out of five, 41% don't have access to a latrine. That's 2.6 billion people living their daily lives without sanitation, more than the entire population of the planet when I was born. In Toronto, that would mean upwards of 800,000 people going on the street or in alleys or subway stations or behind your house or beside your car. Try to imagine what that would be like.
Of course we don't have to imagine that, we don't have to think about it at all. This is Canada and pretty much everybody has a pot to... well you know.
It's estimated that 1.5-million children die every year from lack of sanitation and associated hygiene threats. That's a lot of kids, isn't it?
Why am I bringing this up? Just to point out that, while problems like global warming and nuclear proliferation deserve our urgent attention, we can't turn our backs on a host of additional problems just like this one.
Oh, by the way, this is the International Year of Sanitation. There'll even be a World Toilet Summit held in Macao this November to find ways of meeting the goal of reducing by half the percentage of people without access to sanitation by 2015.
Today we've grown to over six billion and that's expected to peak to over nine billion by 2050. Yet of today's six billion, two out of five, 41% don't have access to a latrine. That's 2.6 billion people living their daily lives without sanitation, more than the entire population of the planet when I was born. In Toronto, that would mean upwards of 800,000 people going on the street or in alleys or subway stations or behind your house or beside your car. Try to imagine what that would be like.
Of course we don't have to imagine that, we don't have to think about it at all. This is Canada and pretty much everybody has a pot to... well you know.
It's estimated that 1.5-million children die every year from lack of sanitation and associated hygiene threats. That's a lot of kids, isn't it?
Why am I bringing this up? Just to point out that, while problems like global warming and nuclear proliferation deserve our urgent attention, we can't turn our backs on a host of additional problems just like this one.
Oh, by the way, this is the International Year of Sanitation. There'll even be a World Toilet Summit held in Macao this November to find ways of meeting the goal of reducing by half the percentage of people without access to sanitation by 2015.
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