Ms. Margarida Matsinhe (left) has worked in vaccine delivery in Mozambique for more than 30 years.
Sixty-four-year-old Margarida Matsinhe has won the 2013 Gates Vaccine Innovation Award for her “instrumental” work in overhauling the vaccine system in her native Mozambique.
Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, made the announcement on Wednesday in his annual letter. The award recognizes “revolutionary ways” for immunizing the world’s poorest children. Nominees are assessed on innovation and creativity, impact and scale.
Matsinhe, a field officer with the non-profit Village Reach, has worked in vaccine delivery in Mozambique for more than 30 years, including during the country’s civil war and post-war reconstruction period. She currently serves on the government’s Committee of Experts on Immunisation and advises leaders on vaccine quality and distribution strategies.
Partly as a result of her work, Mozambique has achieved vaccine coverage of 95 percent, but Matsinhe says her goal is no less than 100 percent.
Good Black News
(Misty Copeland/Photo: Hello Beautiful)
Ballet dancer Misty Copeland has a two-book deal. Copeland, 30, is working on a memoir for Simon & Schuster‘s Touchstone imprint and picture book for G.P. Putnam’s Sons Books for Young Readers, part of Penguin Group (USA). Copeland helped break ground as an African-American female soloist for the American Ballet Theatre. According to a release Wednesday by the two publishers, both of her books are scheduled for 2014.
In her memoir, Copeland is expected to describe the battles between her mother and her dance instructors while she was a teen over whether she should be allowed to pursue her career and who was her legal guardian.
article via blackamericaweb.com
Harvard Law School professor Kenneth W. Mack writes at the Huffington Post that it’s an African-American woman, attorney Pauli Murray, who deserves credit for expanding the language of civil rights in 1963 to include women’s rights — and even LGBT rights.
“President Obama’s unprecedented endorsement of gay rights in his inauguration address last week — delivered on the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday — marks the beginning of a year when Americans will celebrate the 50th anniversary of so many groundbreaking events of 1963: children defying dogs and firehoses in Birmingham, President Kennedy’s endorsement of civil rights as a moral cause, the church bombing that claimed the lives of four little girls in Alabama, and the March on Washington. As the nation remembers these important milestones, it is important not to forget the work of a long-forgotten activist who emerged publicly that year to link civil rights to women’s rights, and ultimately to her own closeted sexual identity. In doing so, an African American woman lawyer named Pauli Murray strongly criticized the leadership of the civil rights movement for excluding women as it was planning for the march that would bring 250,000 protesters to Washington that fall. More than any other individual, it is Murray who deserves credit for expanding the language of civil rights beyond the African American struggle for equality to women’s rights, and ultimately to what she later called “human rights” — and for paving the way for a President of the United States to claim that it included gays and lesbians as well.
In 1963, Pauli Murray was working hard to make Americans aware of an idea she had come up with two decades earlier — one that influenced people as different from one another as Eleanor Roosevelt and Marian Wright Edelman — and which would help change the meaning of equality. She called it Jane Crow. Alongside the system of Jim Crow race segregation, Murray argued, there was an equally wrong system of sex segregation. Sex discrimination should be against the law for the same reasons as race discrimination. This was a radical idea at the time …”
Read Kenneth W. Mack’s entire piece at the Huffington Post.
article via theroot.com
Kid President, who says on his website that he is “sponsored by Mom,” began his positive offerings last July, according to NewsOne. Making sure he has ample time to dance in between his cathartic messages, one can only fall in love with the adorable young boy who is wise beyond his years.
In the midst of school shootings, high unemployment, divisive politics, and seemingly neverending violence in many of our communities, it is refreshing to see a young boy armed with a camera, a good heart, and loving words attempt to inspire the world…one video at a time.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-gQLqv9f4o&w=560&h=315]
William ‘Mo’ Cowan, speaks to the media after begin named interim U.S. Senator January 30, 2013 at the Statehouse in Boston, Massachusetts. Cowan, a senior advisor to Governor Deval Patrick, will fill the position until a successor can be named for the departing John Kerry, who was recently named Secretary of State. (Photo by Darren McCollester/Getty Images)
Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick has appointed one of his senior advisers, Mo Cowan, as John Kerry’s interim replacement in the United States Senate, meaning that two African-Americans will serve in that chamber simultaneously for the first time ever.
Cowan is expected to serve in the Senate until June 25, when a special election will be held to replace Kerry, who was confirmed this week as secretary of state. The longtime Patrick adviser says he will not run for the seat himself, as Patrick had been looking to appoint a Democrat who would serve as a caretaker while others campaign to permanently replace Kerry.
Oprah Winfrey (born Orpah Gail Winfrey on January 29, 1954) is an American media proprietor, talk show host, actress, producer, and philanthropist. Winfrey is best known for her self-titled, multi-award-winning “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” which was the highest-rated program of its kind in history and was nationally syndicated from 1986 to 2011. She has been ranked the richest African-American of the 20th century, the greatest black philanthropist in American history, and was for a time the world’s only black billionaire. She is also, according to some assessments, the most influential woman in the world.
Winfrey was born into poverty in rural Mississippi to a teenage single mother and later raised in an inner-city Milwaukee neighborhood. She experienced considerable hardship during her childhood, claiming to be raped at age nine and becoming pregnant at 14; her son died in infancy. Sent to live with her father, a barber in Tennessee, Winfrey landed a job in radio while still in high school and began co-anchoring the local evening news at the age of 19. Her emotional ad-lib delivery eventually got her transferred to the daytime-talk-show arena, and after boosting a third-rated local Chicago talk show to first place, she launched her own production company, Harpo, and became internationally syndicated.
Credited with creating a more intimate confessional form of media communication, she is thought to have popularized and revolutionized the tabloid talk show genre pioneered by Phil Donahue, which a Yale study claims broke 20th century taboos and allowed LGBT people to enter the mainstream. By the mid 1990s, she had reinvented her show with a focus on literature, self-improvement, and spirituality. Winfrey later joined with the Discovery Channel to start her own network, the aptly-titled OWN (Oprah Winfrey Network).
To learn more about Winfrey’s life, career and philanthropy, click here.
LAS VEGAS (AP) — Declaring “now is the time” to fix broken immigration laws, President Barack Obama today heralded a rare show of bipartisanship between the White House and Senate lawmakers on basic plans for putting millions of illegal immigrants on a pathway to citizenship, cracking down on businesses that employ people illegally and tightening security at the borders.
But both the White House and Senate proposals for tackling the complex and emotionally charged issue still lack key details. And potential roadblocks are already emerging over how to structure the road to citizenship and whether a bill would will same-sex couples — and that’s all before a Senate measure can be debated, approved and sent to the Republican-controlled House where opposition is likely to be stronger.
Ideal School of Manhattan administrators (l-r) Angela Bergeson, Head of School; David Byrnes, director of institutional equity, and Michelle Smith, school co-founder watch second-graders at work on a Civil Rights Museum project
A Civil Rights museum like no other is going to pop up in Manhattan later this week. This one is meant to change the future. Students at the Ideal School of Manhattan were busy constructing exhibits for the museum, a yearly event at the seven-year-old, independent K-to-eighth grade school.
Head of School Angela Bergeson said the museum started out as a yearly school assembly on civil rights, but became so popular that “we decided to devote the whole morning to the museum so that families could go room to room and see all the curriculum pieces, the writing, readings and plays.”
Each grade in the school is assigned an iconic figure from the Civil Rights or non-violence movements, along with an associated word around which the students create exhibits.
Each grade in the school is assigned an iconic figure from the Civil Rights or non-violence movements, along with an associated word around which the students create exhibits.
Advertising and marketing trade publication Advertising Age announced its 2013 Agency A-List honors this week, highlighting a black advertising CEO as its Executive of the Year. Steve Stoute, CEO of Translation, is a partner with Jay-Z for the agency, which launched first as a multicultural firm but now serves as a general market agency.
Stoute came from the entertainment world, if you couldn’t tell based on his ad agency partner, working with Sony Music Entertainment and Interscope Geffen A&M Records. His connections in the entertainment industry are appealing to his clients, which include State Farm, A-B InBev, McDonald’s, and Coca-Cola. Transitions was also behind the marketing campaign to introduce the Brooklyn Nets basketball team.
Entertainment is a hot industry, but Stoute told Ad Age that there’s more to it than that. “…I think our strategy department is the best in the industry,” he said. “The thinking in our agency never gets the credit it deserves because we have a celebrity. We are first and foremost a strategic and creative shop. And second, we have a Rolodex in entertainment and sports that’s unique in the industry.”
Elsewhere on AdAge’s list, LatinWorks, a Hispanic-focused shop, was honored as multicultural agency of the year, and the number three advertising agency, Grey, has Michael Houston serving as managing director and CMO.
Read more at http://madamenoire.com/259579/ad-age-honors-black-ceo-as-exec-of-the-year/#a2gHhHY3ohZxcBVd.99
NEW YORK (AP) — The Boys Scouts of America is considering a dramatic change in its controversial policy of excluding gays as leaders and youth members.
Under the change being considered, the different religious and civic groups that sponsor Scout units would be able to decide for themselves how to address the issue — either maintaining an exclusion of gays or opening up their membership.
The announcement of the possible change came Monday after years of protests over the policy — including petition campaigns that have prompted some corporations to suspend donations to the Boy Scouts.
Under the proposed change, said BSA spokesman Deron Smith, “the Boy Scouts would not, under any circumstances, dictate a position to units, members, or parents.”
Copyright 2013 The Associated Press via thegrio.com