The animated film UN1325 ENGAGE UNDERSTAND ACT produced by gender specialist and social researcher Ingrid Quinn and French/Americanartist Pippo Lionni and distributed by Videoseeding.com will go viral/global across social media sites on 20 October 2010 (YouTube, Facebook etc). It will be screened throughout the upcoming UN Peace Fair in New York, 26-29 October 2001. The film UN1325 ENGAGE UNDERSTAND ACT is a call to action.

Help us raise $75,000 by December 1!

At first it seems like a radical idea: we can stop violence against women. But think about this:

The women with whom MADRE works have survived wars, natural and man-made disasters and crushing poverty. And always intertwined with those devastating events is violence against women. It's one of the common threads that, sadly, connects all our work.

Fills a gap in the growing field of gender and security.

Provides empirical data for the academic community and a tool for evidence based policy work globally and regionally.

Of use to policy-makers, NGOs, development agencies, activists focusing on women's rights, peace and security, as well as to scholars in Africa, Europe and North America.

In a recent article for BBC News MiddleEast, Jon Donnison reports on the Palestinian women who hand-sew Jewish kippot to be sold in the markets of Jerusalem.

"My mother continues to cry for my brother, as do all mothers. Arab or Jewish, Palestinian or Israeli, armed or unarmed". Aesha Aqtam.

"While I sit here mourning my husband, there is a woman on the other side who is mourning her husband. Where's the sense in that? In war, both sides lose, nothing is achieved". Piera Edelman.

Improving the economic situation of women is key to peace-building efforts in Liberia following a civil war that tore the country apart and left 75 percent of its people in extreme poverty. UNDP, with funds from Denmark, has set up revolving microloans that provide funds to women entrepreneurs, many of whom are heads of households. Women make up 80 percent of the informal sector in Liberians economy.

Speaking Truth to Power: Women Peacebuilders Tell of Struggle and Triumph on 10th Anniversary of Groundbreaking Resolution 1325

Portland's Lisa Shannon, author of “A Thousand Sisters” and founder of the “Run for Congo Women,” will be the keynote speaker for the sixth annual Peace Fair & Walk scheduled for 2:30 p.m. Sunday at St. Barnabas Episcopal Church. Her topic will be “War: The Forgotten Women of the Congo.”

In April 2009 NATO celebrated its 60th birthday with a meeting of Heads of State in Strasbourg. Several thousand women and men from antimilitarist movements of France, Germany, the UK and other NATO countries flooded into the city to picket the Summit and protest against NATO's continued existence and its ever-more threatening policies.

As the number of interfaith and faith-based peace initiatives grows, women peace activists from twenty one countries met in Nicosia to discuss how to use faith to build peace.