Succeeding Together: Three Days to Help Congo's "Girl Mothers" Lead with Music

Yesterday evening, I posted a squib about a really cool project being funded via Kickstarter called "Succeeding Together: Uniting Music and Hope."

It's cool, yes, but it's also important. It's a chance to do a lot of good for some strong young women in Democratic Republic of Congo for a very little amount of money.

My friend is the professor mentioned at the Kickstarter page, and she's the one who turned me onto this. [You can read her posts about it here and here.] One of her former students launched the projects, and is collaborating with musicians in Congo to help what are known there as "girl mothers": very young unwed mothers who have been abandoned by their families and society. These young women have decided that they will not be tossed aside, and instead have banded together to mount a fierce fight for their own futures, the futures of their children, and the futures of all of Congo's other girl mothers and their families.



This is leadership. Leadership, in fact, at a level that most of us can't even begin to imagine. It's difficult, it's frightening, it's dangerous. All the more so in a place like Congo right now, where bloody internal strife is being leveraged and exploited by outside colonizing forces that want to steal the region's wealth of valuable natural resources.

Now, this Kickstarter project is trying to help amplify these young women's voices. Two popular Congolese musicians, Innoss'B and Maisha Soul, have committed to working with them to create a powerful music video and help send it viral throughout Congo (and, everyone hopes, the world beyond). It's a message of hope, expressed through the cultural commonality of music.

It's a message that these young women and their children matter.

There are three days left in the Kickstarter campaign; it ends at 5:05 PM MDT on Thursday, March 13th. It's a very, very modest goal: a mere $2,000. But donations have stalled at $915. All we need to do is help raise $1,085, and it's done. But remember: With Kickstarter, the project must raise pledges for the entire amount of the project goal in the allotted time, or the project gets nothing.

So please: Share this with everyone in your networks, both on- and offline. And if you can kick in a little, that helps, too. The minimum pledge is one dollar. But add enough of those dollars together, and the girl mothers of Congo will get to lift their voices and sing.