New Year's 2006: Helping Girls Run for their Lives

I read an article in the W. Post the other day about Ethiopian girls training for running competitions to avoid being married, basically sold into marriage, often as young as 12, and their need for shoes in order to continue to do so.
(http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/28/AR2005122801369.html)

I decided I wanted to help the Ethiopian girls get shoes, so sent a message to our listserv and some other people about a plan I have started to develop that I am calling “Helping
Girls Run for their Lives.”

Here is the outline of my incipient plan:

We would send out a call for local artists to create works of art featuring shoes.

We would find a local gallery to sponsor an exhibit in which a significant certain portion of the sales of the artwork would be donated for the purchase of running shoes for the girls.

We would send out a call for other artists and galleries around the city and country to do a similar thing.

We would contact the running shoe companies to try to get them to donate a certain number of pairs of shoes as well as sell us other pairs at cost.

We would contact the private shipping companies to ask them to ship the shoes at cost.

I asked Ms. Wax, the author of the article, to ask Ms Meseret Defar, the Ethiopian Olympic gold medallist and activist featured in her article, and Ms Zainab Salbi, the founder and director of Women for Women International, a nonprofit that knows how to get aid to individual women
who need it, to consider taking on the role of setting up the distribution of the shoes in Ethiopia.

I asked Ms Oprah Winfrey, whom I know supports many causes already and has a special interest in the girls of Africa, for her assistance in this project in whatever manner she sees fit.

I have several other people to contact yet. So....we'll see what happens.