Artists for Moms: New Year Kick-Off
It has been a wonderful year thanks to the kindness of our resident artists, and I would like to take a moment to recap 2009 for my readers. It was a very bumpy ride earlier this year! PledgeForMoms.org was getting a major face-lift, and migrating its “brains” to a completely different platform, WordPress, which would allow for smoother updating, better user interaction, and great widget capability (that would take months to figure out how to program using good ol’ DreamWeaver and my imagination). In December, all of the changes were finalized, and on February 6th the first article was released using the new WP interface. Needless to say, I was still in the beta phase, mourning the loss of posts from the initial site (pre-WordPress) and trying to get familiar with handling my new site. In March and April the very first posts for Artists for Moms project began to pop up. The project was in its infancy here (still quite small with no real direction), and I have decided to use DeviantArt and Flickr to recruit new participants as well as collaborate to find new ideas on how to improve this project and actually give it some depth and purpose.
Hundreds of artists were interested in supporting PledgeForMoms.org, but I think the main road-block was trying to figure out how exactly I wanted to leverage a network of over 200 artists into a positive and relevant force to help make a difference for women. Pledge for Moms is not driven by donations, or even by actual pledges of service to the site or to anyone. No! The site was never a supposed to be a preachy blog based on widely-known, ambiguous statistics… but it is a call for compassion. No matter who you are, you came from a mother. Each of us had very distinct experiences with our mothers (some not at all), but if you cannot bring yourself to feel compassion for women in need, then pledge to make a difference just because you love the woman who gave you life (even if you never met her). Ultimately, we are all children of women, and we are all connected through this most basic association. With this in mind, I decided to allow Artists for Moms to become an open source project: open to any individual wishing to participate, and open to interpretation and discussion. I have made various galleries to accommodate different issues and views suggested by the members of the project; I have also been approached about doing auctions to benefit charities for cancer research, reducing maternal mortality, and other worthy causes.
The motivation behind the site was to raise awareness, and I achieved this to a certain extent by syndicating this blog on Yahoo and making it widely available via RSS and email subscriptions (in addition to starting Twitter and Facebook accounts, which have had some success as well). However, Artists for Moms has helped me gain a clear perspective and vision for the site – let’s come together to support and celebrate women, mothers, femininity, innocence, and wisdom.
I am proud to feature some of our new artists for January in this post!
Glazzdoll, Canada
I think this is a great way to get support! Especially when so many people have different ideas of WHAT they want to support… that said, I think Artists for Moms is a good way to have people show luv for what they believe it AND still be part of a big movement overal.
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