Invisible Children’s Chris Sarette wins Best Product Person of 2011 Award

We think that all of our staff members are impressive, but our VP of Business Operations Chris Sarette just showed us all up.  He was recently named The Best Product Person (TBPP) of 2011, which is the leading international award honoring excellence in Product Management.  Established in 2010, TBPP is awarded annually in association with The Product Guy and The Product Group, which gives our staff a year to step up our game until the next award is presented.

The purpose of the award (besides the awesomeness of digital praise) is a way for the Product community to get together to recognize excellence amongst the ranks, as well as to provide insights into that excellence in a manner we can all learn from and leverage.  There are countless things we could learn from Chris (how to mix cocktails, how to appreciate Russian-Georgian food, how to actually go to the dentist every 6 months) but the thing we’re most impressed with is his passion for the quantitative side of business.  He first signed on with Invisible Children to help with developmental strategy.  Chris then initiated and directed the Schools for Schools program before transitioning into his current position as VP of Business Operations.  He now manages IC’s core operations, including Technology, HR,  Shipping, Office Management, and Data Management.  In addition to those duties, he oversees Mend, IC’s social enterprise that produces high quality bags that are produced by Ugandan seamstresses that are former abductees, or wives to the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) rebel commanders.  Chris directly supervises the designs, prototypes, and supply lines.  We’re talking everything from threads, to buckles, to fabric decisions (read: this guy has great taste).

He started out as a self-proclaimed “numbers guy,” appreciating the math that accompanies sourcing, production schedules, and sales strategies.  He soon discovered an interest and affection for working in a hybrid creative/logistical space, and bringing a product from design, through sourcing and sampling, and into final production.

We are lucky to have him as our inspiring co-worker, and can only hope that his award-winning abilities will rub off on the rest of us.

-Krista

LRA Crisis Tracker wins “Best in Show” at Creative Media Awards

The LRA Crisis Tracker was the product of more than a year’s hard work and a collaboration between Invisible Children, Resolve, and Digitaria, launching in September 2011.

At this year’s Creative Media Awards the LRA Crisis Tracker won its category of “New/Emerging/Experimental Media.” The other two finalists in the category were campaigns for Yoplait and the CW Television Network.

The Creative Media Awards are sort of a big deal when you take into account that other award-winning campaigns were crafted for brands like Lexus, Audi, Zappos, etc.

But that’s not all. The LRA Crisis Tracker won the “Best in Show” award.

During his presentation of the award, Judge Mike Bloxham, Executive Director of Marketing for the Media Behavioral Institute, acknowledged that the judges agreed unanimously on the recipient, saying they had to strip each entry of its cause and budget to focus solely on the creativity of the campaign. “Every avenue, every channel that they chose to leverage, needs to be done consistently, coherently and to a very high standard and to reached the audiences they’ve stated in their target,” he pointed out.

Since its launch in September, the tool has been able to fill a vital information gap. Our Director of Programs in Central Africa, Adam Finck, presented the LRA Crisis Tracker at a conference for crisis mappers around the world. Watch the 5-minute video here to get a quick overview of the tool. And visit LRACrisisTracker.com to see it for yourself.

We are honored and humbled by the recognition the LRA Crisis Tracker is receiving, but ultimately we are just glad to know that it is being used effectively and to its purpose of filling the information gap–and hopefully hastening an end to LRA violence.

LRA Crisis Tracker featured at international conference

Invisible Children and Resolve were invited to present the LRA Crisis Tracker at the International Conference of Crisis Mappers (ICCM) in Geneva about a month ago.

This is a 5-minute video of Adam Finck, our Director of Programs in Central Africa, explaining the LRA Crisis Tracker to a room full of riveted crisis mappers (the best kind of nerd fest). He talks about the events that compelled us to create it and the inspiration that shaped it. He tells a story about how it works and he touches on our plans for Phase 2. All in 5 minutes. Maybe you should watch it.

I Am Not A Hipster

Here at Invisible Children we have a unique opportunity to be submersed in a community of creative individuals. And when i say “creative individuals” I mean people who can’t help but create art we’ve never seen or tell stories we in a way we’ve never heard before.

This summer a few of us got to work on such an endeavor with a friend of IC… Noelle and Kenny helped produce/coordinate a couple of scenes and if you keep your eye out you’ll see many Staff and Interns as extras and featured extras. The amazing news today is that we found out that it was accepted into the Official Selection of the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. Destin, Joel, Ron and the rest of the crew are amazing story tellers and we are grateful to have been a part of their film.

The music in the film is all from local peeps here in San Diego, including a whole album written exclusively for the film by CANINES. You MUST pay attention to the amazing lyrics, capturing all the angst the main character Brooks experiences throughout the film.

Check out a teaser for the film ABOVE and if you so inclined show them some FB “Like” love.

http://iamnotahipster.com

LOVE.. Noelle, Kenny & The IC Team

Invisible Children wins Most Effective Awareness campaign at Stay Classy Awards

This past year’s Stay Classy Awards awarded Invisible Children with the award for the Most Effective Awareness Campaign. Watch toward the end of the presentation of the award to hear COO Chris Carver give the credit for winning to the volunteers, particularly the Roadies. This is just one of the many reasons we love this guy. -NS

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Bob Barker donates $2 million to help injured soldiers

He’s still got it. Giver of happiness and all things good (all things good being lots and lots of cars), Mr. Bob Barker donated $2 million to the Semper Fi Fund. Thank you for your heart Bob and also please come back to your show. It needs you. Drew Carey? Really? – Jordan

Huffington Post: Bob Barker Donates $2 Million To Semper Fi Fund, Helping Injured Soldiers

LOS ANGELES — Former TV game show host Bob Barker is donating $2 million to a charity that helps injured members of the military and their families.

The former host of “The Price is Right” will donate to the Semper Fi Fund, which assists Marines, soldiers, sailors, and Air Force and Coast Guard members who are injured during service. A press statement says the donation was made Wednesday at a ceremony in Hollywood.

Exchanging for Change

Above:  Students wait for class to start in a classroom in Layibi College

Riddled with holes like some sort of structural Swiss cheese, the ceiling in one of Layibi College’s older classrooms stretched out over us, offering those below glimpses of the building’s innards above.  The physics students—all sixty of them-didn’t seem to notice:  their eyes were focused on the teacher before them.  With chalk in hand, Melody Russell, 33, moved back and forth in front of the chalkboard.  As she wallpapered the board with equations, the students scribbled away in their notebooks.  Each question she asked was met with a field of raised hands.  For ninety minutes, students gave her their undivided attention.  No one passed notes; no one whispered to his neighbor; no one did anything but think, write, and answer questions.  Amazing as this sort of sustained, class-wide focus sounds, it’s par for the course among students working with Invisible Children’s Teacher Exchange teachers.

Above:  Physics students in Melody’s class

This past summer, 45 visiting teachers from the U.S. and Canada team-taught for six weeks with their Ugandan counterparts.  Working for free and paying for their flights and expenses themselves, the visiting teachers sacrificed large chunks of time and money to help students at all of IC’s eleven Ugandan partner schools.  Class after class, students enjoyed the charged, high-energy  classroom atmospheres that team teaching creates.  Students, however, aren’t the only ones who benefit from the summer teacher exchange.  Like the kids they instruct, teachers, too, draw inspiration from the experience and head home with added arrows in their academic quivers.

*****

Melody has been teaching for 10 years.  In that time, she’s walked thousands of students—in both public and private schools—through lab experiments and countless chemistry equations.  I wasn’t surprised when she told me she didn’t have a single major struggle during her six weeks of team teaching this past summer—she’s a pro.  What I was surprised to hear, however, was how her partner teacher, a Ugandan named Robert, was able to command a class of 105 students with little more than raw charisma.  Robert, she explained, supplemented his lecture-heavy, resource-light classes with smiles and jokes—things that, thankfully, are far cheaper and easier to issue to students than textbooks.  “Even with so many students, he’s able to create warmth in his class,” Melody explained.

Because most students in Uganda don’t have their own textbooks, teachers spend large portions of class time copying information from a textbook to the chalkboard.  (“Here, with so few textbooks, dictating is what needs to happen,” said Melody.)  Robert knows this style of teaching isn’t ideal.  For what he lacks in lesson diversity, he compensates for by making himself available to students outside of class hours.  Homework is easier when you know your teacher wants and is available to help you.

I asked Melody about the lessons she’ll take with her back to the states once her time in Uganda comes to a close.  She told me about how the experience has raised her confidence level and shown her that she’s capable of teaching high-level physics.  (In Uganda, she’s teaching high school students who are studying at university level—something she’d never done before.)  She told me about how amazing it’s been to talk over her lesson plans with Robert, to get advice from a peer on a regular basis.  Perhaps most powerful, however, has been the perspective she’s gained from her students.

Above:  Melody doing her thing

“I’m teaching kids in Uganda whose hopes of going to university are lofty dreams,” said Melody.  “I can’t wait to tell my students back home about the kids here; about how students work so hard to do well in school; about how they don’t take their education for granted.  Who knows what my American students will do with this type of news?”

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Rock Music and Invisible Children: Working Together to Change the World

Last month, IC’s artist relations gurus, Kenny Laubbacher & Alex Collins, took it upon themselves to swing together an inspiring night of acoustic music at The Troubadour in Los Angeles. It was dubbed A Very Merry Benefit Concert and very merry it was indeed. An eclectic group of guys took the stage that night. Before the show went on, we sat them down for one big interview. What came out of it was an honest conversation about rock music, social activism, and a lost horse.

In the order they performed for the show, we want to introduce you to each of the musicians and share some of the stories we took home from them. (more…)

TRI’s a Winner

Our iconic TRI podcast from the spring 2007 tour just won a judge’s award for Best Fundraising Video from the Progressive Source Awards.

Watch it again, sing along with Camille, and join TRI.

Angelina Jolie can’t do everything.

For the recent Webby award that Invisible Children won, acceptance speeches were limited to 5 words. IC’s speech created some recent buzz in The NonProfit Times.