Here's what Abdul Shakoor is taking home to Afghanistan:

"I've learned how to 'use culture to change culture' for women's rights." 

Abdul (above) and his colleagues "graduated" from the most recent -- and largest-yet -- Breakthrough Institute, held this spring in the beautiful mountains of Nepal.

Through this week-long intensive training, 31 participants from 12 organizations representing Nepal, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Vietnam learned the nuts and bolts of pop culture with a purpose: how to create highly-visible, game-changing multimedia campaigns for women's rights (as in the videos featured below).

Here's just a glimpse of the exciting plans some of our participants came away with:

• Afghanistan: mobile and radio campaign to promote girls' education
• Vietnam: campaign highlighting impact of domestic violence on children, possibly using music videos
• Pakistan: multimedia campaign challenging early marriage

Also through the Breakthrough Institute, three highly skilled organizations in Bangladesh are already well on their way to launching groundbreaking new campaigns using our methodology to tackle sexual harassment and more.

The Breakthrough Institute: the basics

Our methodology works -- and we like to share it! We use mass and multimedia, popular and local culture, arts and technology, and on-the-ground initiatives to inspire people to act for local and global human rights. Our best-known campaign, Bell Bajao, brought not only significant change in attitude and action in India, but also -- from countries worldwide -- overwhelming demand for adaptation and interest in learning "how we did it." We now help other organizations learn to design social change campaigns, especially around women's rights, that are appropriate for their cultural landscapes as well as their capacity and budgets. Through intensive interactive trainings, they develop campaign-building skills -- including preliminary research and impact evaluation, messaging and message testing, multimedia innovation, new approaches to norm and attitude change, and more -- and prepare to roll out their own groundbreaking initiatives.

Together, we can build the skills to bring human rights into homes, communities, and everyday lives around the world.

If you or your organization is interested in hearing more, please contact us.