Current Projects By Our Partners
In addition to projects being undertaken in partnership with The Media Alliance, many of our partners have organised their own public awareness campaigns on issues ranging from human trafficking to hunger amongst schoolchildren in developing countries.
Links to some of these projects are shown below. Unless otherwise stated, The Media Alliance is not directly involved in these campaigns, but will be providing additional distribution of content for some of these campaigns in 2012.
The CNN Freedom Project
http://thecnnfreedomproject.blogs.cnn.com/
CNN International is the international directorate of CNN Worldwide, a division of Turner Broadcasting System Inc and a Time Warner company. It distributes news via 14 services in seven different languages, and can be seen in more than 37 million households and hotel rooms across the Asia Pacific region.
The CNN Freedom Project is a campaign aimed at raising awareness of human trafficking through investigative journalism and the production of reports on the trade and exploitation of human beings.
The project is running throughout 2011 and 2012 and involves CNN’s international correspondents reporting on the horrors of modern-day slavery and efforts being made by various organizations and individuals to stop human trafficking.
As well as the regular reports on CNN International, the project involves a collaboration with CNN.com to increase the scope and reach of the campaign to embrace viewer involvement and first-hand accounts.
CNN.com’s ˜Freedom Project blog’ provides a platform where the audience can dig deeper into the issues and participate in the global discussion and debate around modern-day slavery. The blog features a diverse range of voices, from celebrity activists to anti-slavery campaigners.
Twitter (http://twitter.com/CNNFreedom) and Facebook pages (http://www.facebook.com/CNNFreedom) provide other channels through which users can connect directly with CNN about this cause, learn more about the organizations standing on the frontlines and see how they are affecting change.
CASBAA Cares ECCD Project in the Philippines
http://www.casbaa.com/casbaa-cares/sustainable-projects/
CASBAA Cares, the CSR initiative of the industry association, CASBAA, has launched a television Public Service Advertisement (PSA) to raise funds for an Early Childhood Care and Development (ECCD) project in the Philippines.
The project is a partnership with Plan International and aims to improve to improve the lives of young children in the province of Masbate. CASBAA members are being asked to include the PSA in their on-air schedules.
The CASBAA Cares committee evaluated proposals from several charitable organizations to identify a social issue which the industry could support and impact on a sustained basis through 2011 and 2012.
The partnership with Plan International was chosen to support children’s development and alleviate child poverty in the Philippines. A CASBAA spokesman said: œThis initiative should enable the industry to pool its resources and influence to achieve material results for a worthwhile regional cause.
A component of the ECCD project is a Supervised Neighborhood Play (SNP) program to improve different aspects of a child’s development and prepare the child for school using various supervised play activities. A form of home-based ECCD service is organized to provide interventions that facilitate the holistic development of children aged 0-6.
To improve their role as primary caregivers and educators of their children, the program also serves as a means for parents to strengthen and sustain their interest in providing enrichment activities for their children.
MTV Exit
MTV is a 24-hour music and entertainment network with localized programming in eight different languages across ten MTV channels and numerous branded programming blocks across the Asia-Pacific region. The company’s localization initiatives were pioneering and contributed to its rapid growth in Asia.
MTV EXIT is a campaign about freedom — about our rights as human beings to choose where we live, where we work, who our friends are, and who we love. Most of us take these freedoms for granted, but hundreds of thousands of people throughout the world have had these basic human rights taken away. They are victims of trafficking – modern-day slaves — and criminals have forced, defrauded, or coerced them into various forms of labor, or prostitution.
MTV EXIT aims to increase awareness and prevention of human trafficking through television programs, online content, live events, and partnerships with anti-trafficking organizations.
The UN’s International Labour Organization (ILO) estimates that worldwide about 2.5 million people are victims of trafficking. Over half of these people are in Asia and the Pacific. Criminals earn an estimated US$10 billion every year through buying and selling human beings.
Through the MTV EXIT website, MTV audiences can learn more about trafficking and access facts for individual countries. The site also contains information on live events that MTV EXIT is producing around the region, enabling audiences to get involved in the fight against trafficking.
Celebrity-presented documentaries as well as the short films and promos which have been screened on MTV can be viewed through the site or downloaded.
MTV Staying Alive
The MTV Staying Alive campaign was one of the first large scale public awareness campaigns to use an international broadcast platform across the whole of the Asia-Pacific region. It was part of a global multi-media campaign that evolved in 2002 from an award-winning documentary of the same name in 1998.
Staying Alive’s aim is to reduce HIV infections among young people globally. It does this by using entertainment todeliver safe sex information so that young people are empowered to make safer sexual and lifestyle decisions.
In 2005, Staying Alive launched the Staying Alive Foundation to provide small grants to young people who are responding to the multiple threats of HIV, through prevention and create enabling environments for HIV positive people in their communities.
Staying Alive is now the world’s largest youth focused HIV and AIDS prevention campaign. The multi-media campaign consists of documentaries, public service announcements, youth forums and web content produced for young audiences worldwide. In order to reach as many households as possible globally, all Staying Alive content is available to third party broadcasters rights-free.
The success of Staying Alive is due to its retained set of core beliefs and values “ that change lies in the hands of young people. If the dynamics of the HIV epidemic are really to alter, then it is imperative that this generation be informed and empowered.
The Staying Alive campaign is a partnership between MTV Networks International, UNAIDS, UNICEF and PEPFAR. Staying Alive has also partnered with, Sida, CIDA, the World Bank, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation among others.
CAASBA Cares
http://www.casbaa.com/casbaa-cares/
CASBAA is the industry association for digital multichannel television, content, platforms, advertising and video delivery across Asia. The mission of CASBAA is to promote the growth of pay TV and video content through industry information, networking exchanges and events while promoting global best practices.
CASBAA Cares is the association’s CSR initiative which has been designed to provide an industry-unifying CSR solution for member organizations who lack a robust CSR program in the region, or who wish to supplement their company’s existing CSR activities.
CASBAA Cares provides an opportunity to leverage the collective reach and influence of the CASBAA membership to return new value to the community at large and to add a human dimension to members’ businesses. It has three main elements: public service announcements (PSAs), industry support for an annual sustainable cause, plus on-the-ground volunteerism.
CASBAA helps coordinate the distribution of PSAs to interested member broadcasters and platforms. It has established communication channels with members and key relief agencies, so it can quickly get messaging on air in support of critical and timely relief efforts.
In addition, from time to time, CASBAA will help to coordinate messaging of topical social campaigns, such the ‘Hopenhagen’ campaign for which members provided air-time in the lead-up to the UN Copenhagen climate change conference in December 2009.
In 2010-11, CASBAA Cares is supporting Plan International, one of the oldest and largest children’s development organisations working in 48 developing countries across Asia, Africa and the Americas to promote child rights and lift millions of children out of poverty.
Sony Pictures – ‘Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs’
Sony Pictures Entertainment’s global operations encompass motion picture and television production and distribution; a global channel network; digital content creation; development of new entertainment products, services and technologies; and distribution of entertainment in more than 140 countries.
In 2009 and 2010, Sony Pictures teamed up with the United Nations’ World Food Program (WFP) to promote awareness on hunger and raise funds to provide nutritious school meals for children through the release of its animated movie ‘Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs’.
In the film, a young inventor makes food fall from the sky to feed a town where they’ve only been eating sardines. In the real world, the number of hungry people is now a staggering one billion. The ‘Cloudy’ characters, starring in print and TV ads, are lending a hand in the fight against hunger by asking the public to help œfill the cup of hungry school children.
For only 25 cents a day, a child can concentrate on lessons without being distracted by a rumbling stomach. The promise of a daily cup of porridge is an investment in education, as more children will attend class regularly. In the words of the film’s lead character, Flint: œIt really works!
In addition to the ‘Cloudy’ public awareness and fund-raising campaign, Sony Pictures has expanded its CSR projects to include ‘A Greener World’, an initiative to demonstrate its commitment to playing its part to protect the environment for future generations. Sony Pictures believes it is everyone’s responsibility to leave our world better than we found it, and that is as true for businesses as it is for governments and people.