Okay, Amnesty International isn’t often thought of as a “fun” organization. There are few topics more serious and disturbing than human rights abuses. However, a movement can’t sustain itself for long without recognizing and celebrating its achievements, and without generating positive energy to keep its members going.
Amnesty International has been the recipient of a very generous gift from Yoko Ono - permission to record and publish a CD of songs from John Lennon’s solo songbook to raise awareness and money for Amnesty’s human rights work around the world. This summer a special Double-CD album was released: Instant Karma: The Amnesty International Campaign to Save Darfur, featuring a wide selection of “global artists” like U2, Green Day, Avril Lavigne, the Black Eyed Peas, and R.E.M. recording their own version of John Lennon classics.
At Amnesty International’s office in Ottawa (Canada) we put together a team to develop ideas for promoting the music CD, and using it to reach out to the public. Our team (including youth/student and public awareness organizers) came up with a brilliant idea, picking up on the John Lennon/Yoko Ono theme and building an outreach effort around the famous Bed-in for Peace that John and Yoko carried out in the summer of 1969 (in Montreal and Amsterdam).
“Get in Bed for Darfur” was created as an outreach project to the general public, inviting them to join Amnesty in speaking out for peace in Darfur. Our bed-ins team travelled to a variety of music concerts, venues, and public festivals where the music & activism theme would fit it, and set up a big tie-dyed bed and colourful signage. We viewed this project as an exercise in “anti-tabling” - a break away from the usual Amnesty presentation at public event of a table full of brochures and take-action postcards. It’s different: fun, colourful, and engaging!
Here are a few example photos taken at Bed-in events. (more can be seen at http://www.amnesty.ca/instantkarma/bedins)
Our unique setup with its colourful signs and innovative messaging attracted more than the usual attention at public events - especially when we were located in the “causes” corner. (other NGOs were seen on occassion pushing their tables closer to our bed to catch some of the crowds we were attracting). People generally had no trouble “getting” the idea - even those in the under-25 age set - and were genuinely appreciative of the opportunity to engage in a fun, easy action to join the global effort to stop the violence in Darfur.
Time for some e-campaigning tactics-talk. We asked everyone to sign a release allowing us to us their bed-in photo in our public campaigning, and we also collected their email addresses so we could invite them to view their photo on the Bed-ins for Darfur website (http://www.amnesty.ca/instantkarma/bedins). Subsequent emails have invited them to join our mailing list, sign up for our Youth and Student program, and to extend a special offer to them: donate $50 to Amnesty and we’ll send you the InstantKarma CD for free. To date we have raised close to $15,000 from this promotion.
So what is next? Our grassroots organizing team is already making plans for next summer, and envision a larger, cross-country outreach campaign visiting many different music venues and festivals, carrying on the experiment with alternative tabling, and continuing to put the fun back in human rights.
