At the beginning of this year, the mother unit and I told ourselves that we wanted to be more involved with charity. Initially we were wanting to support a great charity called Youth Insearch which does some great work with abused kids, but could never think of a decent idea that might have some cut through and made sense with our network and what we have available.
Then when a few months ago I met a woman called Stephanie Lorenzo and she told me about her work with
Project Futures. Ideas instantly started jumping into my brain.
We came up with the campaign for #mercymask. We decided we would start donating $1 from every sample pack and $5 from every White Clay Mask to the great work being done by this charity.
We then encourage others to help spread the word about human trafficking by uploading a picture of themselves with a White Clay Mask and a fact about human trafficking.
Here are some facts about Human Trafficking that made me want to get involved:
- According to UNICEF, 2 million children will be sold into the sextrade in the next year.
- In South East Asia, many of these children are sold for as little as $50 and some as young as 6 years old.
- Profits from sex slavery exceed US9.5 billion per year.
- Human trafficking is the second largest organised crime in the world. It has become a bigger business than drug trafficking.
- The U.N estimates that 2.5 million people from 127 countries have been trafficked to 137 countries for purposes such as forced labour, sexual exploitation, removal of organs, forced marriages, child adoption and begging.
- In 2009 there were only 4,166 successful human trafficking prosecutions worldwide, 335 of which were for forced labor.
