01 Aug Run the TCS New York City Marathon with Team WITNESS
News and Events |WITNESS is recruiting runners to join our 2014 marathon team! Run the most memorable race of your life – and support human rights along the way.
30 Jul Center for Civil and Human Rights Opens, Features WITNESS in Permanent Collection
News and Events | WITNESSA new museum focusing on the American Civil Rights movement and its connection to global human rights activity features WITNESS. We’re honored.
18 Jul Legal Protection for Elderly Americans
Success Stories |For too long, the United States had a silent crisis of elder abuse: the experience of neglect, exploitation, and physical or emotional abuse by older Americans. The Elder Justice Coalition advocated for over a decade for the passage of the Elder Justice Act (EJA). A partnership between the Coalition, WITNESS, the National Council on Aging (NCOA), and 17 elder rights advocates from across the nation produced a video as a critical way of exposing the crisis and advocating for change. On March 23, 2010, the Elder Justice Act passed. WITNESS and its partners visited courageous American seniors in their homes to document their poignant stories about abuse, neglect and exploitation. With the video footage we produced a short documentary, An Age for Justice: Confronting Elder Abuse in America and over 100 video testimonies. These films and short messages were then sent directly to Congress with a request to pass the EJA. While health care reform captured the national headlines, the EJA unquestionably deserves our attention. When asked about provisions of health reform that received little fanfare, former Health and Human Secretary Kathleen Sebelius pointed to the EJA — legislation that gives our nation a solid framework to protect seniors from being beaten, neglected and exploited. She stated, “[The Elder Justice
18 Jul Boing Boing Highlights WITNESS’ Archive Guide
Press | WITNESSVideo activists need to safeguard their material for future justice and accountability procedures that could take years if not decades to come to fruition.
16 Jul Exposing Gender-Based Violence in Zimbabwe
Success Stories | WITNESSSenior Program Manager Bukeni Waruzi first met Zimbabwean human rights defender Kuda Chitsike at a WITNESS video advocacy training in South Africa in 2008. As a lawyer with The Research and Advocacy Unit (RAU), an independent institute in Zimbabwe, Kuda was eager to learn how RAU could turn their lengthy written reports on politically motivated gender-based violence into videos to pressure citizens to action. This meeting was the beginning of a multi-year partnership between WITNESS and RAU. Since 2000, sexual violence has been used as a weapon by a number of Zimbabwean political parties to repress political dissent, intimidate political opponents and incur psychological damage. While working together RAU and WITNESS created a number of video advocacy pieces featuring the stories of survivors of physical and sexual violence. For each video, WITNESS worked with Kuda and her team to produce a Video Action Plan, a process designed to help activists think through messaging, how to reach their target audience and how to tell the story most effectively. RAU and WITNESS took great precaution and care to ensure the safety of the survivors filmed in the project. They went through a rigorous process of obtaining informed consent, ensuring that participants fully