Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for others? -Martin Luther King Jr., Montgomery, Alabama, 1957.
It only seems fitting that the 5th anniversary of Not Your Mama’s Gamer fell on the weekend of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s birthday celebration. While many folks around the United States reflect on the work of Dr. King and his fight for racial equality in the United States, I have also been working to finalize my plans for the next phase of work for NYMG. This next phase of work is going to have a bent that is definitely more based in real world activism. For years we have participated in the Extra Life marathon to raise funds for Children’s Miracle Network hospitals, used our presence to make the voices of women in the community heard, taken to our own soapboxes on issues and causes on the podcast and blog, and worked within our local communities to educated children and adults. We have seen this work as being a step in the right direction of making the world a better place not only for ourselves, but for our children and the children that come after them.
In this next phase of activist work at NYMG I will be asking myself (and asking other to do the same), “What are you doing for others?”. What are we doing while unarmed people of color are being murdered in the streets (and in detention), while conspiracy theory driven conservatives are fighting to defund Planned Parenthood and women’s reproductive rights swing in the balance, while environmental racism gets taken to a whole new level and thousands of children in Flint, MI are poisoned for the sake of a fiscal bottom line?
Often as citizens and academics we pay lip service to social change and engage in social media activism and talk about it from a research standpoint but do nothing to affect change in the real world. Now don’t get me wrong, I understand that there are often extenuating circumstances. We often have physical, economic, or time barriers to doing real world activist work and sometimes clicking Share or Retweet to help make other people aware of injustices in the world is the best that we can do at a moment. As a single parent who has irons in many other fires I know first hand how difficult it can be to find the time to do the work. As an academic I know how difficult it is to connect the work to the research that we do because oftentimes our academic homes don’t value the work that we feel that we should be doing. Activist work takes time as well as effort and that is time and effort that many academics (especially untenured faculty members) have to spend writing, teaching, and presenting at conferences if they have any hope of ever earning tenure. There is (usually) no space on our c.v.’s to record activist work, it falls outside of the realms of both traditional scholarship and service. NYMG and the Gaming for Good initiative gives us the opportunity to move beyond lip service. It gives us the chance to put our money where our mouths are so to speak. And this is what we are committed to doing with our charitable and outreach work.
Our current campaign, the Gaming Mammothon (get it, marathon for mammograms) seeks to raise money for the National Breast Cancer Foundation (NBCF), which provides education and detection services for women across the country. Founded in 1991, the NBCF provides free and low-cost mammograms to women with limited resources and increases awareness about breast health through continuing education programs and online community support. As we researched organizations to support in this drive, we ultimately chose NBCF because it allocates less than 10% (each) of its budget to program administration and fundraising costs, leaving more than 80% going directly to the education and detection services.
As owners of breasts, and some of us having loved ones who have battled breast cancer, we have decided to come together to raise money to help provide early detection services to support women who might otherwise lack access to these services. Please join us in our fight to vanquish cancer.
During the course of the event we will be using the hashtags #NYMG_G4G to share our stories and offer information about breast cancer. The marathon will take place on Saturday, February 13, 2016 and the fundraising page will be active to continue to receive donations through February 29th.
With our 2016 Gaming Mammothon we honor the women in our lives who have had the courage to “Fight Like a Girl!”.
Things of note:
Much love and respect to Christa Charter (Cancer ass-kicker, mama-goddess,fabulous author, and games industry veteran) for sharing her breast cancer story from diagnosis to present.
Financial data for NBCF from Charity Navigator
All donations collected directly through NBCF fundraising portal (http://fundraise.nbcf.org/nymgamer)
