By Trilby Goouch
Blogs Editor

Today marks the beginning of Women’s Worth Week (WWW) at Queen’s. With this in mind, QJBlogs caught up with Queen’s Half The Sky, an AMS club created in 2011 that focuses on addressing and bringing awareness to global issues of poverty and disparity with a focus on empowering women. Although the club isn’t involved with WWW at Queen’s, their initiatives are relevant to the spirit of the week. The club was created by a group of friends after reading the book Half the Sky by Nick Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. Inspired, the girls decided to take the book’s message and spread it throughout the Queen’s community. The group has grown significantly over the past year, and has made significant contributions to charities based off their three pillars: maternal healthcare, microfinance and access to education.

In order to acknowledge the global reality of poverty and disparity, activists and scholars have begun to focus on the role of women and young girls in their community. For years, females have been cast aside and experienced the highest degree of global poverty and suffering. According to a 2012 Save the Children report, the worldwide leading cause of death among teenage girls is pregnancy, which arises from a lack of contraceptive options and a sometimes-dominant male culture. And, according to UNICEF, women aged 15 through 45 are more likely to die from gender-based violence than from malaria, cancer, traffic accidents and war combined.

2012 is an especially exciting year for Queen’s Half The Sky. The book was recently revamped into a documentary, featuring celebrities like Olivia Wilde and Eva Mendes travelling to countries and meeting women affected by the issues addressed in the book.. The documentary will be screened in two parts tonight and tomorrow night from 6:15 to 8:15 p.m. in Dunning Hall, room 11. Queen’s Oxfam will also be bringing fair trade goodies. Come to learn more about how we can come together to catalyze global change.