PeaceFest ‘09 Promotional Video

Human Rights Festival

The PeaceFest is well behind us, and many more good things are happening.  Please check out the Human Rights Festival, coming up Dec. 10-15 in SL.  This will be an amazing collection of performers, speakers, art shows, and more.  The full calendar of events will be distributed in a nifty HUD that will let you teleport to the locations directly.  The HUD (heads-up display) is to be handed out on Dec. 6, I believe.

Peace Train and Twilight’s Peace are collaborating on putting together an agenda for Sunday Dec. 14.   See the latest on the Human Rights Festival here.

Studying the PeaceFest effort…

For those of you with in-world presence, there is a survey PeaceFest participants and attendees.  It is a study of virtual organizations and how Peace Train was formed, how PeaceFest came about, and what can be learned from this collaborative effort.  If you have an avatar are a member of Peace Train or the Peace Collaborative (groups in SL) you should have received a notice with a link to the survey.  The professor conducting the survey is contributing 300 lindens to Peace Train for every survey submitted!  Please IM Cotton Thorne in-world if you need more info…

Cotton

Check to Uthango Delivered!

It is with great pleasure that Peace Train representatives presented a check to Uthango Social Investments for nearly 87,000 Lindens!  Peace Train Engineers Tonks Akina and Siri Vita met with Alanagh Recreant and company from Uthango to deliver the Lindens.  Official PeaceFest avatar PeaceFest Pevensey dropped by to transfer the Lindens.  It is such a delight to be able to represent the generosity, good will, and hopes of all of you who participated in PeaceFest 08.  More to come – we are now sorting out the details to establish a public charity, and through that organization we will be able to convert the rest of the Lindens and write checks to the remaining 9 organizations. 

Tonks and Siri present the check to Alanagh and Wilberforce

Dreams to reality

And then some. We began with this somewhat simple idea of creating a celebration for peace, featuring talent, artwork, performances and real life peace workers in an effort to build awareness and generate some donations for real-world organizations.

Thank you all for helping us get there! There are so many people to thank – please see the Your Stories tab and comment there. While we expected to close the PeaceFest down at 11:00pm SLT on Sunday, you continued. You continued singing, performing, dancing, laughing and contributing to the cause. THANK YOU.

Our total contribution reached way beyond our expectations - $869,718 Lindens.  This is something around $3200 US dollars.  And while this may not seem like much money to some audiences, for some of our recipients, this will be something useful indeed.

Thank you all – from all of us at Peace Train – for making this such a fantastic experience.  You will be hearing more from Peace Train…

Cotton

Amazing! Keep going….

It is amazing – the response has been great.  Sometime in the wee hours (eastern US) we passed 400K lindens.  This morning the traffic picked up even more thanks to a HotSpot listing on the Second Life website.  The performers have been fantastic, the panelists were amazing with their stories from their locations, and the fun continues today.  Here are just a couple snaps from yesterday:

Uthango, CWWPP, and ICCHRA (S. Africa, Croatia, Uganda) all connected via skype and in-world

 

Ongoing performances at Woodstock! Thanks, Lynsey Fleury...

Amazing vocals by ScarlettaLa Roux at the Broadway Jazzarts Center - thanks, Gwennette Writer!

Past 100K and counting

At some point this afternoon, we passed our first 100K lindens raised.  That is something around $500.00 US.  This is a great start!  Remember, that real currency is what will be distributed – here are some ideas of what it takes:

·         $50 ($L 13,500) will feed an orphaned infant in sub-Saharan Africa for three months (11.4 million have been orphaned!)

·         $10 ($L 2,750) buys one lifesaving insecticide-treated mosquito net for a hospital bed (25% of children in Luwero Uganda die of malaria)

·         $35 ($L 9,500) will purchase five prescriptions of malaria treatment, saving five lives (25% of children in Luwero Uganda die of malaria)

·         $480 ($L 130,000) will purchase antiretrovirals for one HIV-infected mother for a year ( 22.5 million people in sub-Saharan Africa are infected with HIV)

Let’s make a difference together!  Come join in the fun!  Here are a couple of pictures taken during this kickoff day for PeaceFest:

Dream Team with T-shirts!Crazy dancing at The Wall!

Crazy dancing at The Wall!

PeaceFest 08 Starts TODAY!

After months of hard work, we are finally here! PeaceFest 08 starts today, and everyone is encouraged to blog, twitter, call, skype about it, and of course come in world to the Welcome Area and join the festivities!  You will find there a sign that gives you (when you click it) an updated (and VERY convenient) Pocket Schedule of the events, with all of the landmarks and additional details on the events.

The Peace Train Welcome Area for PeaceFest 08

The schedule will be updated during the next 3 days, so you have the option of checking the Google Calendar version, and getting a Pocket Schedule in-world.  We will do our best to keep them both updated every couple of hours…. We look forward to seeing you there!

Schedule is out!

Hi all!  The long-awaited schedule of events is now posted (under the Schedule tab).  Please note that things will shift a bit as we get closer to the date.  The *amazing* thing is that we have something around 75 events on the schedule (yes, seventy five) on a couple dozen sims. 

The schedule items will be updated over the course of the coming days, and we will be using our Google Calendar and in-world displays and notecards at the Welcome Area.   

Questions about the schedule?  Send an email, or IM Cotton Thorne or Tonks Akina in-world.

A Mid-Olympic Peace Fest!

What a joyful realization that we celebrate and raise awareness of world peace at SL Peacefest at the same time athletes from around the world will be right in the middle of the 2008 Beijing Olympics! 

One World, One Dream

 I checked the schedule, and the games will be in full swing with many popular events taking place simultaneous to our 3 day festival of Peace in Second Life! 

A perfect companion and inspiration to bring the world closer, this small and beautiful place, with generous giving of appreciation and hope.  It can be done through Second Life. It has been done! In fact I just learned that Relay for Life earned 200 thousand U.S. Dollars through Second Life in one 24 hour event!

The Theme of this year’s olympics is “One World, One Dream”.  I second that! May that same oneness surround our SL Peacefest events, contributors, performers, panelists, artists, and all who care about our common goal of Peace.