Texting Peace

Initially, we wanted to launch an extremely comprehensive text-messaging hotline with on-site advocacy throughout the entire country, but we had to reconsider our approach due to being understaffed. We decided to adjust our intervention and create the watch dog groups to make the on-site interventions instead. In reality, this has produced a much better possibility for sustainability, because we are mobilizing communities to take ownership of their neighborhood's safety by creating strategic alliances with local police enforcement.
Another hinderance we foresee is gaining rapport with communities that fear and distrust local authorities. We are addressing this concern by training students to lead the campaign and gaining communities trust with comprehensive on-the-ground outreach.

A bigger and more defiant counter-narrative to corporate media is emerging and making even more use of alternative media. Viewer-content-based and collaborative media-making sites such as our partners Stroome.com will give viewers tools to share their own stories. Technology is being used by communities who have been historically marginalized to document atrocities and demand justice. TEXTING PEACE pushes this trend even farther, by reaching out on a grassroots level to mobilize our constituents to take justice-oriented actions over their own lives.

If TEXTING PEACE fails to gain traction in the next two years, we will make a concentrated push on Facebook to promote the use of our advice-line to youth. We will ask Guatemalan musicians like Alejandro Arriaza to become spokespeople for our Facebook campaign with specified marketing to Guatemalan youth.
We are also considering the possibility of tracking street harassment with a citizen mapping tool. This is an function we might decide to implement even in the case of success. The idea is to allow users to send SMS reports and photos to a central mapping platform to visualize problem areas. We want to produce a counter-narrative to the one of misogyny and marginalization of women. If women become comfortable with contacting us and reporting street harassment, it is more likely that they would use our other functions as well.
We are currently developing instructional animated videos that viewers can text to each other or share with their contacts on Facebook to promote the use of TEXTNG PEACE.

To date, SOFT's funding has generated from merchandise sales of tee-shirts to our student and activist networks based in the United States. JUSTICE FOR MY SISTER has been supported by arts grants and funding from foundations, Embassies, and a Kickstarter crowdsourcing fund-drive. Others have contributed to our fiscal agent in exchange for tax-writeoffs.
We will offer all of our services and programs in Guatemala to the public free-of-charge. We are approaching the main Telecom companies in Guatemala to see if they can give us a corporate sponsorship or free credit, or free shortcodes.
We will hold a Latin American tour with our composers where audiences will collectively compose music in response to the film. We will release a compilation CD and the sales will go 100% to TEXTING PEACE.

Grupo de Mujeres Ixchel and 15 student volunteers will be touring the country with the film to talk about critical issues that the film raises with multigenerational audiences in churches, schools, and other local non-profit organizations. Partners of our film's outreach and tour include Sector de Mujeres (an alliance of 33 political organizations that services over 10,000 women in Guatemala) and the Myrna Mack Foundation. They will host some of the screenings and promote TEXTING PEACE to their constituents.

SOFT has 6 volunteers based in the Los Angeles area. Our partner Aashika Damodar will help guide us through our process of getting our project of the ground. Five part-time staff members from Grupo de Mujeres Ixchel and the 15 student volunteers who will participate in our film's tour and campaign will ensure that we achieve the growth milestones identified in the Social Impact section. As we conduct our film tour, we will be able to identify local organizations and collectives that can serve as local partners and in some cases, watch dog groups.

Speak Out For Tod@s is comprised of domestic violence intervention specialists, innovators, designers, and researchers. We see social networking as a great resource to promote our initiatives and we would be happy to assist other organizations in pushing their efforts, as well. We are interested in expanding the tools that we are using to other sites. Currently, we are compiling an activist toolkit to facilitate the expansion of our grassroots organizing methods and new media tools to implement our model in other sites as well. We are excited to learn from other projects and gain guidance from others' experience with marketing and investment. We are always eager to network with other innovative projects that promote social justice throughout the globe.