Founder and Executive Director
Man Up
www.campaign.org
His upcoming book The Wars Women Fight: Dispatches from A Father to His Daughter, narratively examining violence against women and girls in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Afghanistan and Guatemala, will be published in 2011. Most recently, Jimmie Briggs conceived of and founded the Man Up Campaign, a global initiative to activate young people to stop violence against women and girls in their communities through music, sports and technology. The Man Up Campaign formally launches during a Young Leaders Summit at the University of Johannesburg during 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa, bringing youth together from 50 countries throughout the world, many from Sub-Saharan Africa, as well as the Middle East and North Africa.
Over the last decade and a half, Jimmie Briggs has earned a reputation as one of the most respected human rights advocates in the field of journalism. His work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, LIFE, El Pais, The Village Voice, Fortune, and scores of other publications. Through extensive travels to countries in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, he has produced seminal reporting on the lives of war-affected youth and children soldiers, as well as survivors of sexual violence.
A National Magazine Award finalist and recipient of honors from the Open Society Institute, National Association of Black Journalists (for work in Uganda and Rwanda), and The Carter Center (for research on mental health trauma among rape survivors), his book on child soldiers and war-affected children Innocents Lost: When Child Soldiers Go To War won him accolades in 2005, and took readers into the personal journeys of youth in Rwanda, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), among other countries. He has also worked for the UN Special Session on Children, Seeds of Peace, Oxfam USA, Amnesty International and the Enough Project in the DRC. Further, Briggs has served as an adjunct professor of investigative journalism at the New School for Social Research, and was a George A. Miller Visiting Professor in the Department of African and African-American Studies at the University of Illinois: Champaign-Urbana.
