Giving Compass' Take:

• Girl Rising is a film created by Christina Lowery, who believes that storytelling will help advance the plight for gender equality on an international level. 

• TriplePundit asks Lowery about how gender equality has changed in the last five years, and she responds that the public is more aware and more engaged with the issues. How can Lowery leverage this interest in order to garner more support and financing for her storytelling projects?

• Read about why the fight for gender equality is different in 2018. 

Girl Rising is a film that became a powerful movement and gave filmmaker Christina Lowery the role of a lifetime. Now the CEO of a globally recognized non-profit with connections to Michelle Obama and support from Meryl Streep, Alicia Keys, Priyanka Chopra and Freida Pinto, Lowery’s work is to show communities the power of education, get girls in school and keep them there. The reason: educating girls is the single most powerful way to end global poverty.

Using storytelling to create change and make a difference is what Lowery has known she wanted to do since she was young. Here, she talks about how she’s helping make the world a better place, one story at a time.

Why is storytelling such a powerful way to help people and change minds?

I have ping-ponged back and forth in my life between two main interests: storytelling and international development. I thought I would go into international development and work for a big NGO, but at the end of graduate school, I went to Mexico to research another documentary on women’s economic development, and I thought, “Oh! Why would I want to do anything but this? Telling stories from real people is so interesting.”

How have the past few years of new awareness around gender imbalance changed or affected the urgency of your work?

Our work seems to have new relevance and resonance with people in a way that it didn’t five years ago. People are aware of the spectrum of what happens when there are imbalances in power between genders, and what gender inequality can look like, and what the effects of that can be.

Read the full article about Girl Rising from HP Inc.'s The Garage Blog at TriplePundit