Dear friends,
This is getting scary -- repressive regimes are locking up Avaazers! Turkish police threw our colleague Özlem into prison. Indonesian soldiers jailed a man
just for signing an Avaaz petition! And our staff have been detained from Egypt to Palestine.
They want to frighten us into silence. So we're going to do the opposite. Every time an Avaazer is arrested, we'll hire the best lawyers, plaster the media with their stories, and 'jujitsu' their intimidation into massive campaigns to expose the regime's persecution of anyone that speaks out against them.
Avaaz has a unique power to reach millions with these stories in just hours. Let's show the tyrants we won't be gagged, and make them realise they messed with the wrong people!
The only way to defend our movement is if enough of us chip in today. Avaaz doesn't take funds from anyone else.
Özlem's appeal is in 6 days -- if 3,000 of us chip in the cost of a cup of coffee or more, we can ramp up the fight to free her right now, then defend Avaaz to fearlessly speak out against crackdowns everywhere:
Locking up activists on spurious charges is going viral from Turkey, to Egypt, to Russia. But we know how to fight back. When our colleague Wissam was detained in Egypt, we created a massive media storm, got him out, and raised the alarm about the regime's slide to autocracy!
The more successful our movement, the more enemies we will make. That means more arrests, and more resources needed to:
- run rapid response campaigns
- hire world-class lawyers
- pay for hard-hitting ads
- organise embassy protests
- get teams into countries to get our people out of jail
Right now, we're working tirelessly to get Özlem out. She's a human rights defender, not a criminal! And every day she is in a dark cell is a dark day for our movement. Let's all chip in now to ensure we can protect our people everywhere:
Whether it's campaigning for our oceans, our climate, or our basic human rights, Avaazers have become a fearless force to reckon with worldwide. Let's come together today to keep it that way.
With hope and determination,
Alice, Emma, Oli, Spyro, Martyna, Ricken and the whole Avaaz team
P.S. If you're still mulling this over, here are our top 5 reasons to support Avaaz:
1)
Your money actually goes to social change - Many large charities use incredibly expensive techniques like street approaches, phone calls, or TV ads and fancy dinner fundraisers. While the best charities keep fundraising costs low at around 15%, for some, a very high percentage of the funds raised (sometimes 50-100%!) never get to the charity's programs at all, taken by the huge fundraising costs, which are often paid to a privately contracted company. The only way Avaaz raises funds is this email, which costs very little to send!
2)
Accountability is built into our model - Every Avaaz campaign decision is ultimately made by our movement, through statistical polling that tells us exactly what the movement as a whole wants to do. This means that what we do each week with the money donated to us is both transparent to our movement and determined by it. On top of that, each Avaaz campaign is only as strong as the number of people who choose to join it. We're one of the most purely people-powered organizations in the world.
3)
We're unique, and desperately needed - There just isn't another Avaaz. We are the only totally global, multilingual, campaigning movement of our size and scale in the world today, and our rapid-reaction, multi-issue, high technology approach is also unmatched globally. And wow, do we see needs for our movement everywhere we look. We get lobbied by hundreds of groups every week because people see how our blast of global attention, smart strategy, and the efforts of our amazing team can really move issues in a way few other things can.
4)
We win - if you've read this far you've probably been with Avaaz for a while and you know what we're capable of. Go to our
highlights page and see over 100 significant victories our movement has achieved together, and that's just a small fraction. And we don't just take on the easy wins, or claim that we won something when we had almost nothing to do with it. Alongside our massive grassroots movement we also have what might be the world's finest advocacy team, ensuring that people's voices are actually in the room where decisions are made, and matter.
5)
There's a magic in Avaaz - this one might seem fluffy, but our polls show that over 60% of our movement feels it. There's something truly special about the spirit of this movement, of bringing people together across every border and barrier in hope and love and smart, effective action for the world we all dream of. I don't have a word for this magic (the team calls it "Avaaziness" :) but I feel it every single day I work here. It's what has fuelled my belief that we are the change we wish to see in the world, and that together we have the capacity to shape history.
Make a donation
here.
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