Wray Ardan's Blog, page 3
April 22, 2021
HAPPY EARTH DAY!
My Favorite Day of the Year!
INSPIRING BOOKS TO READ
March 8, 2021
International Women’s Day...
Why 1 Day? 1 Month? Let it be EVERY DAY of EACH AND EVERY YEAR! Women, girls, of every age and race matter.
Women empowered makes the world a better place.
February 15, 2021
Disha Ravi - Fridays for the Future
In September, Ravi told The Guardian: “Countries like India are already experiencing a climate crisis. We are just not fighting for our future, we are fighting for our present.
The sprightly 22-year-old helped clean up lakes, plant trees and campaigned against plastic. She attended workshops, walked the streets demanding climate action, loved animals and spoke out against sexism and capital punishment. A vegan and the sole-earning member in her family, she worked with a local company that makes plant-based food.
READ MORE - Disha Ravi: The jailed Indian activist linked to Greta Thunberg
December 11, 2020
Meet TIME's First-Ever Kid of the Year
Just 15 years old, Rao has been selected from a field of more than 5,000 nominees as TIME’s first ever Kid of the Year. She spoke about her astonishing work using technology to tackle issues ranging from contaminated drinking water to opioid addiction and cyberbullying, and about her mission to create a global community of young innovators to solve problems the world over.
October 21, 2020
14-Year-Old Girl Wins $25,000 for Work on Possible COVID Cure
Scientists at top universities searching for a coronavirus cure have just gotten help from an unexpected source: a 14-year-old from Texas.
Anika Chebrolu of Frisco, Texas has been named “America’s Top Young Scientist” for identifying a molecule that can selectively bind to the spike protein of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, in hopes of developing a cure for the disease that has so far infected more than 40 million people and claimed more than one million lives.
“I have always been amazed by science experiments since my childhood and I was drawn towards finding effective cures for Influenza disease after a severe bout of the infection last year,” she told 3M. READ MORE…
October 8, 2020
Good News Story: Nigerian Irish Teen Girls Win Prize For Dementia App
An award-winning app that can help patients with dementia will launch later this month in app stores. But unlike most apps — made by professional software developers in a male-dominated tech industry — this one was created by three teenage girls.
The Nigerian-Irish teens are the champions of Technovation Girls, an international competition that challenges young women to develop an app that can solve a problem in their community READ MORE…
September 11, 2020
Zebedee Management, a talent agency that represents models and actors with physical and learning disabilities.
Zoe Proctor, a model-turned-performing arts teacher for disabled adults, was saying that while her students “were so talented and keen”, they faced limited opportunity. Zoe Proctor and her sister-in-law, Laura Johnson wondered how, without a talent agency, Zoe’s students and other disabled people, would ever get acting or modelling work. So they decided to set one up themselves.
With casting directors listing job adverts on industry websites every day, describing the look, age or gender required, Zoe and Laura also decided to put their clients forward for work whether or not disability was listed in the advertisement.
“If we waited for a call saying ‘disability’, we’d have no jobs,” says Laura.
In June, Ellie Goldstein, an 18-year-old from Essex, who has Down’s syndrome, featured as the face of a Gucci Beauty advertising partnership with Vogue Italia. The picture Gucci put on Instagram, in which Ellie wore its Mascara L'Obscur product, has been one of the brand’s most popular posts to date, liked by more than 863,000 people. READ MORE…
August 27, 2020
Buying masks, delivering food: Teens step up in pandemic
In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, communities across the country have discovered a powerful resource that has stepped forward to make a difference: America’s teenagers.
August 26, 2020
August 18, 2020
A DAY TO CELEBRATE~Women's suffrage at 100
Today marks 100 years since women won the constitutional right to vote in the United States, and we’re in Nashville, Tennessee, to celebrate five monumental figures in the women’s suffrage movement. Why Nashville? Because it was Tennessee’s capital that became the final battlefront in the long fight for the Nineteenth Amendment. On August 18, 1920, the state legislature faced a choice: Should Tennessee become the 36th and deciding state to ratify the amendment, securing its place in the Constitution? The stakes were high as eight states had already rejected the measure—but thanks to some unexpected ‘aye’ votes from known opposers (one representative switched his vote at the urging of his mother), ratification won out.
As for the five suffrage leaders honored by the monument in today’s photo, each was present in Nashville for the ratification vote: National organizer Carrie Chapman Catt traveled to Nashville and mobilized demonstrators for the cause. Sue Shelton White, Anne Dallas Dudley, and Abby Crawford Milton each headed women’s rights organizations in various parts of Tennessee and helped bring their groups’ voices together for the final victory.
But the landmark achievement of August 18, while indisputably a women’s history milestone, wasn’t a complete success. That brings us to the fifth figure: local educator Juno Frankie Pierce, a key activist in the Black women’s suffrage movement—a national force that wouldn’t see its goals achieved for decades to come. In Tennessee and the rest of the South, African Americans’ voting rights were long denied under Jim Crow laws—as were those of Native American and other minority voters in many parts of the country. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 put protections in place for previously suppressed voters, finally guaranteeing votes for marginalized groups, but voter suppression remains a concern even today in the US and around the world.
