Six years ago, Sparknews launched the Impact Journalism Day, the first international alliance of twenty newspapers around the world. Today, this alliance has grown: more than 50 newspapers take their pen every year to write the stories of unknown women and men who innovate to find local solutions to global issues. Together, on June 16th, these newspapers will simultaneously publish articles and videos to help those innovative solutions travel and be replicated. While still underlying current major issues in these reports and through a questionnaire on Sustainable Development Goals, the media have decided to show what works so as to restore confidence and inspire people to act.
They do not write this new story alone: anyone can take part in it and tell the world as they want to see it evolve.
More than a one-day publication, Sparknews is launching a global call to each and every one of us. We, too, can share the admirable initiatives that contribute to making our neighborhoods more resilient and greener, and that reinvente our ways of moving, managing, working, consuming, investing our money, etc. Through our networks, we all have the power to talk about these projects to our communities and help them grow.
For the first time this year, an artists’ collective worked alongside Sparknews to announce the publication of June 16th. The Team Spi Rhythm collective took up a unique challenge: in 15 days, this multidisciplinary and multicultural crew experienced collective intelligence to achieve – from writing a song to filming a clip – the Impact Journalism Day teaser video. The latter invites readers to discover 60 projects with a high social or environmental impact from every corner of the world. Haytham, a Syrian poet, Thibaut, a French beat-boxer and slammer, Mandaakh, a Mongolian singer, Maïa, a Franco-Japanese singer, Silvio, a Franco-Italian editor, Julianna, a Polish singer and many others, have worked all together to convey in their way the following message: “Let’s share solutions, let’s make them travel […] Optimistic or pessimistic, what is important is what we’re doing, so we wield our pen, put it in the ink to be authors of our history”.
The Team Spi Rhythm collective uses art as an universal language to spread this optimistic word, and in the same way as Impact Journalism Day newspapers do, these artists “mix their voices”, their cultures, their languages, and their will to change the world.
A growing movement of change-makers.
Everywhere, locally and globally, this positive and committed movement continues to develop. More and more organizations are working to help social entrepreneurs gain a greater voice by investing in them and accelerating their approaches (such as the Skoll Foundation, Ashoka, Impact Hub, One Young World Summit, etc.). These growing initiatives are also finding a way to scale up their businesses by developing links with traditional businesses. As a result, large companies are incorporating new ways of creating value into their business model and developing more virtuous products.
In the last two years, local IJD volunteer April V. Ong Vaño has organized community meetups in Manila for Impact Journalism Day. This year, there will be a local meetup for Cebu on June 23, 5:00
– 8:00 PM at Sprocketeer, Baseline Residences. Cebuano journalists, writers, storytellers and changemakers are welcome to join in this global movement for #ImpactJournalism and
#StoryOfChange.
