We successfully completed our flash mob

THURSDAY, APRIL 5, 2012 at 11:00 AM in the

STUDENT CENTER PIEDMONT ROOM

Ripple Effect is challenging YOU to make one of the biggest commitments you might ever have to make. Are you up for it?

We challenge you to join the “I AM” Challenge, for which you would be asked to wear the same T-shirt design for an entire year. The T-shirt design will have “I AM ____” on the front, with your name filling in the blank, and “and I speak for Keinye” on the back. Why?

Because we want to stand up for all those who live in fear of saying “I AM… infected with HIV” by saying I AM for them.

AND

Because we want to support Keinye, a three-year-old orphan living in an HIV-affected community of the Dominican Republic, whom Ripple Effect is sponsoring.

Bad things can happen to good people, and these people infected with HIV live in fear of being ostracized by their community because of lack of education about the disease. This is a HUGE commitment, but keep in mind that nothing will happen if you do not do it the entire year. You’re not required to wear the t-shirt for any occasion that requires a dress code (wedding, funeral, interview, etc.). In fact, you could even set a personal goal! However, we do highly recommend wearing the t-shirt for one year, so we can promote this challenge with consistency.

You can buy between 1 and 10 shirts (we recommend 7 for each day of the week) and provide a range of 53 colors that you can choose from (so that people know that you are not wearing the exact same T-shirt every day).

Hopefully throughout the year, people will come up to you and ask, “Why do you wear the same T-shirt design every day?”

You can tell them that the shirt literally represents the two sides of the HIV pandemic issue: lack of awareness and lack of funds.

The front side of the shirt is to raise awareness while the back side of the shirt will hopefully raise money for Keinye’s food, medicial treatment, and education.

That said, we are also looking for company sponsorships to hopefully help cover the cost of the shirts in the future, as well as raise money for our orphans. Companies are eligible to have different forms of recognition by Ripple Effect, everything of which is detailed at http://www.rippleffect.org/donate, a site where both companies and individuals are encouraged to donate to help support our cause and commitment! If you know about any companies or individuals that might be interested, please encourage them to donate or let us know!

 Please visit our FAQ page and feel free to email Megha Mandal at smandal9@gatech.edu if you have any other questions. We understand that this is, as said before, a HUGE commitment, and we want to make sure you have been completely debriefed and that all your questions are answered in a timely fashion! Any support, monetary or intangible, that you can give us would be highly appreciated.

Crazy but creative is how we do. This idea was adopted from Christchurch’s I Am Challenge in New Zealand, and Ripple Effect is now spearheading it in the United States. We ask again: are you up for the challenge?

Step 1.

Fill in this Form to select your T-shirts.

Step 2.

Pay for the shirts (if paying by credit or debit card). Please note that each shirt is $7 and you are subject to a 2.9% PayPal fee and $0.30 per shirt if paying by credit or debit card.

Number of Shirts

1: $13.68 USD 2: $25.00 USD 3: $34.26 USD 5: $51.75 USD 7: $50.72 USD 10: $72.33 USD

Step 3.

Pick up the shirts on April 17, 2012 at 6:30 p.m in room 320 of the Student Center.

Teams warming up before the tournament

Ripple Effect’s first annual Hoops for AIDS basketball tournament was held on Saturday March 10, 2012.
Although the tournament formally started at 1pm with the first game tipping off at 1:45pm, in actuality
it had begun months before for members of Ripple Effects Executive Board. What started as a rough
idea, through much hard work and dedication from all board members, grew into an extremely exciting
day and event which we could all proudly look back on.

Anticipation and nerves of how our first basketball tournament ever would go were high leading up
to the 1pm start time, but once Joshua Kinnemore (Ripple Effect board member) began his opening
statement and handed the microphone to our guest speaker from AID Atlanta, the feeling in the air

The tournament bracket board.Spreading the word on AIDS during the tournament.

went from restless to relaxed. Twelve teams of 3-5 players battled it out while many others, including
friends and family, came to cheer them on and to support the cause. The atmosphere was something
to behold, with tremendous competition on the court and smiles off of the court. People sang and
danced along to music played by WREK Radio, while kids and adults alike enjoyed pizza and snow cones
on a sunny Saturday afternoon. To our excitement, Columbia Pictures asked to be involved with the
event and came to advertise their recent hit movie “21 Jump Street.” This made things more interesting
for those in attendance as raffles and giveaways were done, allowing many to win “21 Jump Street”
memorabilia and pre-screening tickets to see the movie prior to its theater release.

The Ripple Effect team posing in front of our profit thermometer. We far exceeded our goal of $300.

Although the day was full of fun for all those involved, the initial goal of the tournament was not
forgotten. Thanks to our 2012 Hoops for AIDS tournament champion, “The Bruhs” (Dante Montgomery,
Kyle Johnson, and Cameron Williams), and the other eleven teams that participated, we were able
to exceed our goal of raising $300 through tournament proceeds alone. Combined with generous
donations from parents and friends from the local community, we raised a total of $569.92: enough to
support Keinye, the young girl from the Dominican Republic which we sponsored, for over a year! Other
than that, we had several people choose to take the Ripple Effect Pledge against HIV and were able to
spread awareness of the virus to over 75+ people in attendance. Ripple Effect: Georgia Tech hopes to hold this event again next year on an even bigger scale, so thank you to all who participated and helped in putting the event on and we hope to see you again next year!

]]> http://www.rippleffect.org/hoops-aids/feed 0 http://www.rippleffect.org/the-pledge-tree http://www.rippleffect.org/the-pledge-tree#comments Wed, 23 Nov 2011 21:05:48 +0000 michelle.partogi http://www.rippleffect.org/?p=667

The Pledge tree idea has been repeatedly discussed within the confines of the Ripple Effect headquarters. Well, the prototype of it finally come to fruition! In theory when someone makes a pledge, her name falls under the name of her referrer, and the pattern continues when the person recruits someone else.

This prototype is manually updated, so don’t expect change right away. In addition, people without referrers aren’t able to be added, and if a referrer hasn’t taken a pledge himself, then the referee can’t be added either. Hopefully, these logistical issues will be fixed in the near future. In the meantime, if your name isn’t up when you think it should be, please resubmit your pledge with the referrer information filled.

Let’s make this tree grow! Go make a pledge today.

Ripple Effect is currently working in partnership with BOAT (Believe, Organize, and Act Together), a youth group founded to promote wellness and unity among students living in the Alpharetta area; this is one of Ripple Effect’s  first initiatives in reaching out to young children in our community.

It is important to understand that our future lies with children and educating them about the spread of HIV/AIDS; this is of utmost importance in order to help prevent the spread of HIV and encourage them to think of creative activism at an early stage.

One of BOAT’s members, Ali Nayebi, helped open the festivities by sharing his talent with the piano.

This was followed by a young girl’s performance with her violin.

Then, one of the executive officers of BOAT, Ali Khosravi, gave a presentation on how BOAT and Ripple Effect are coming together with the shared goal of fighting HIV.

Ripple Effect then took the stage, with Hasan, Sadib, and Stan, giving a visual and verbal Ripple Effect presentation. Sadib made sure to show off our awesome shirts!

Throughout the week, we agreed that the key to HIV/AIDS prevention was peer education, but that peer education alone was not quite enough. We wanted to push peer education one step further. Through our outreach, we don’t just want to peer educate, rather, we want to make peer educators. We want every person that we reach to spread the word about HIV/AIDS. We want to create a Ripple Effect.

This is where you come in. By taking the Ripple Effect Pledge, you can help stop the spread of HIV/AIDS. It doesn’t matter who you are, and it doesn’t matter how you do it, but we want you to publicly declare how you will educate those around you about the risks posed by HIV/AIDS. Whether you’re a parent pledging to educate their children, a teenager pledging to send a Facebook message to ten friends, a political leader pledging to educate their constituents as part of their campaign, or a celebrity musician pledging to educate their fans about the risks of HIV/AIDS at every concert, we want you to pledge to fight HIV/AIDS in your own way.

To help you do this, we have started this website to equip you with key tools necessary to start your own HIV-prevention campaign. Learn, think, pledge, and read about the HIV/AIDS advocacy that we have been doing in our own communities. We hope that this provides you with the inspiration, the innovation, and the motivation to create change in your community.

HIV started as a ripple. Let’s end it with one.

-Jacob and the Ripple Effect Team