Just as we are about to choose a winner for our LACE contest, we are pleased to announce that in celebration of the new bus ad we created with Options For Sexual Health we are launching a Sexy Summer Kissing Contest! Details on how to enter below.
Our new ad campaign "We've Got a Room For You" is a cheekier take on the bus ad we have created before to advertise the 1-800 SEX SENSE info line. What's more it's on nearly all transit buses in the province! Reflecting our philosophy of 'pleasure management" we are creating an effective alternative to just say no messaging. It's sure to attract attention with a young couple making out in a clinic waiting room (based on a true story set in the BC CDC's STI clinic!)
Opt’s 1 800 SEX SENSE Line, a toll-free in BC phone and email service, is positioned as a great way to hook up with a clinic or ask a burning sexual health question. Check out our Ad! We also made a behind the scenes video about the making of the ad.
Katherine Dodds AKA "Kat" is the founder of Good Company Communications and HelloCoolWorld.com. Trained in renegade advertising & branding through her work with Adbusters in the '90s, Kat's early induction into the possibilities of the web-world was inspired by the term hypertext, which she immediately found comforting. She is dedicated to cause-related communication and to the development and use of tools that promote democratic processes.
Well, as the whole world knows, there was a very big party last week in Vancouver, our humble headquarters are in the midst of it all. There's a history of problems with drink spiking and drug and alcohol faciliated sexual assault when big events like this happen. SafeVibe is a movement for everyone who wants to keep predators out of the bars and put an end to sexual assault. The more people who actively get involved (men, women, youth, everyone!), the closer we will be to making social change a reality.
So, we decorated our window for SafeVibe, and David and Lizzy hit the streets with the WAVAW street team, handing out coasters and posters. It was in the height of Oympic party mayhem, and they found a lot of folks on the street were happy to get the 'vibe'.
It's a time of reflection on where the need is, and on what one can possibly do to have any kind of impact. I prepared for the new year by having a donations frenzy yesterday afternoon for a number of alternative media venues that I regularly read. (List and links at the end of this blog). And thank you to all you HelloCoolWorld.com supporters that donated to GiveSomethingBig. If you missed the chance to send holiday cards, you can donate to Inter Pares anytime! We think they are worth supporting.
Now my thoughts my heart goes out to Gaza.
Last year around this time I was marching in the unusual Vancouver snow in protest against Israel's massacre in Gaza. This year I will head out in this grey drizzly Vancouver rain at 3pm to the art gallery in solidarity with Code Pink's Gaza Freedom March. Google Gaza or look on #Gaza, #gfm for an action near you. The international delegation experienced violence at the hands of the Egyptian police, who would not let them into Gaza.
One of the pleasures of working on the ‘GiveSomethingBig.com’ campaign for Inter Pares was meeting designer David Berman. He’s been working with the Ottawa-based social justice organization for 8 years. We had met on the phone during an earlier project -- but in the summer of ’08 we gathered in the IP board room, for a workshop with the data-boys from Exvisu, to talk about audiences, blogospheres and strategies to motivate giving.
I'm at the Making Your Media Matter conference in DC listening to a panel on Money and Mission. Interesting times to try to promote and produce social issue work. I'm networking to find support for our own Campaign 4 Corporate Harm Reduction, for our work with Bevel Up, and also to promote the recent Sundance hit, Prom Night in Mississippi.
With just a week left before Christmas, we are in the midst of our last big push to promote Inter Pares' "Give Something Big" alternative giving campaign. We'd love your help!
Colette joined Hello Cool World Team back in 2003 and was a key organizer for The Corporation and The Take's grassroots outreach efforts across North America.
After being inspired by the organizing and awareness building potential of the internet and social issue films, she returned to school to study Communications and sharpen her skills.
Having completed her studies last summer, she has joined Hello Cool World once again to assist with the Give Something Big campaign.
Hey! I just donated to the Inter Pares Give Something Big campaign because I wanted to send some of the cool cards we designed to my own friends and family. FYI, we here at HCW are also donating all profits from our online store and C4CHR donations to Inter Pares this season.
To find out more about The Corporation and Hello Cool World's involvement in the campaign check out our last e'Zine.
We're thrilled to be launching this project with Inter Pares and hope that all our supporters will help build a world of equality, social justice, and peace.
As we work on the new video for Chee Mamuk (STI Division of the BC Centre for Disease Control) with youth from the Sto:lo Nation (and a few others) I am feeling very privileged to get to work with such great people on projects that I really believe will have an impact. Don't Stress the Tests is an excerpt of the video we did last year with youth in Chemainus. The new video we are launching later this month is called "Strong Path".
When I started Good Company Communications eight years ago I had a vision for what the web could do for social causes that came out of my previous 20 years of activism. It really started with Manufacturing Consent* -- the film that pulled me from my "separatist" world of no TV, no computer, and the attempt to exist without plastic, into the realization that we need to BE the media, it's too powerful to leave alone.
I was already working with Mark Achbar during the early days of The Corporation when I started all this, so as to have a way to not only promote the film's launch, but to work on sustaining the desire it produced in so many people -- to get involved, to shape change and to prevent profit over people from prevailing.
As we prepare to send out an e'Zine next week to all our HCW members, I am thinking about the projects we take on and how they interconnect.
Short dating violence awareness messages directed by youth launch online. Meanwhile Canadian senate considers bills to censor violence on TV and to restrict tax credits to filmmakers whose content is deemed "not in the public interest'.Dialogue anyone??
Katherine Dodds AKA "Kat" is the founder of Good Company Communications and HelloCoolWorld.com. Trained in renegade advertising & branding through her work with Adbusters in the '90s, Kat's early induction into the possibilities of the web-world was inspired by the term hypertext, which she immediately found comforting. She is dedicated to cause-related communication and to the development and use of tools that promote democratic processes.
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