Established to fight indifference to manifestations of discrimination
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How are EIC winners doing?
Find out what the progress of the Erase Indifference Challenge winners of the 22' & 23' edition looks like.
On Thursday 9 November we had the pleasure of meeting at the Online Meeting for the Erase Indifference Challenge Winners 2022 & 2023. All the EI Challenge winners, our partners from Zeno Group, Mitch Markson IdeaCraft and the Auschwitz Pledge Foundation team were at the meeting. We met to summarise the progress of the winners from last year and this year so far.
Project Updates - EIC 2022 Winners:
Right to Be & T’ruah: Emily May, President, Co-Founder of Right to Be, provided insights into their efforts to combat antisemitic harassment. Through collaboration with T’ruah, the initiative broadened its impact with 14 successful Bystander Intervention trainings, reaching over 3,175 participants. Notable achievements include a remarkable 98.5% recommendation rate and over 94% expressing increased confidence in stopping harassment. Additionally, Right to Be has extended its reach by partnering with CAIR-Chicago to address Islamophobia, recognizing its heightened significance during these challenging times marked by the war in Israel and Gaza.
GD Events: Stanisław Niemojewski, Head of Production in GDevents, detailed the progress of their project, highlighting the success of linguistically universal games fostering integration in multicultural schools. The initiative, tested in many schools with a high number of Ukrainian students due to the war in Ukraine, nears completion. Future plans include sustained reintegration efforts and an emphasis on promotion.
Project Updates - EIC 2023 Winners:
Canadian Women’s Foundation: Andrea Gunraj, VP of Public Engagement, presented the success of the Signal for Help Responder Learning Campaign. With 50,000 individuals initially trained, the initiative not only optimized the Digital Learning Journey but also experienced a significant increase, reaching a total of 60,000 people who signed up to be Signal for Help Responders, expanded workplace and community trainings (the goal is 40 workplaces and communities by the end of 2025), and initiated knowledge-sharing initiatives through partnerships and events (e.g. partnership with TikTok Canada). The campaign aims to change narratives around gender based violence through collaborations with influencers, documentary film festivals, and media art festivals.
Cyberwell: Tal-Or Cohen-Montyemayor, Founder and Executive Director, shared Cyberwell's milestones, which included conducting market research on existing ad-tech tools, selecting one and marking the selection of YouTube as their platform of focus. Despite ongoing conflict in Israel and Gaza, and dealing with the extreme rise of antisemitic content online, the project gained global recognition, with presentations at the Eradicate Hate Global Conference in Pittsburgh, in the end of September 2023, and discussions with key industry players. Cyberwell is also in the process of securing partnerships with large technology companies.
Smilemundo: Aleksandra Zemke, the Founder of Smilemundo, introduced Smilemundo's progress, detailing the design phase of their project. The Insignia tool, tested successfully, is now evolving into a larger prototype for testing in secondary schools, universities, and the business sector. The design emphasizes the importance of implementing the tool within the institutions to assess its effectiveness. The evolving prototype aims to explore the mechanisms of social exclusion and the impact of rule-following pressure. Additionally, the team has introduced an Insignia creator, constituting the first virtual prototype. The three-month observation phase will precede the development of educational content, marking a strategic progression in the project's evolution.
GrowSPACE: Martyna Kozdra, Content Coordinator, and Dominik Kuc, Founder and CEO, shared GrowSPACE's preparations, including a refreshed graphic identity and successful volunteer recruitment. Looking ahead, the team's next steps involve updating the website and preparing to enhance the survey. With LGBTQ+ Friendly Schools Ranking at the core, new partnerships and outreach strategies aim to expand the initiative's impact. The project's adaptability is showcased by ongoing discussions in other European countries, with the website ready for scaling to other countries.
Thank you for the meeting and we are happy to see the progress and commitment that inspires further action.
APF Team
Recap of the Erase Indifference Challenge 2023
The 2023 Erase Indifference Challenge proved that creative teams from all over the world are exploring and applying new approaches to tackle the problem of indifference.
Global reach
The 2023 Erase Indifference Challenge proved that creative teams from all over the world are exploring and applying new approaches to tackle the problem of indifference. The latest edition of the Erase Indifference Challenge attracted 113 teams from 44 countries. The competition committee had no easy task evaluating projects from Africa, North and South America, Australia, Asia and Europe.
| Country | Amount of projects |
|---|---|
| Albania | 1 |
| Argentina | 4 |
| Australia | 1 |
| Brazil | 2 |
| Cambodia | 1 |
| Canada | 4 |
| Columbia | 1 |
| Congo | 3 |
| Croatia | 1 |
| Cyprus | 1 |
| Eswatini | 1 |
| Country | Amount of projects |
|---|---|
| Ethiopia | 1 |
| France | 3 |
| Germany | 9 |
| India | 2 |
| Indonesia | 1 |
| Israel | 3 |
| Italy | 2 |
| Kenya | 5 |
| Kyrgyzstan | 3 |
| Latvia | 1 |
| Lesotho | 1 |
| Country | Amount of projects |
|---|---|
| Lisokganya | 1 |
| Malawi | 3 |
| Mexico | 2 |
| Moldova | 1 |
| Myanmar | 2 |
| Nepal | 1 |
| Netherlands | 1 |
| Nicaragua | 1 |
| Nigeria | 3 |
| Norway | 1 |
| Peru | 2 |
| Country | Amount of projects |
|---|---|
| Philippines | 1 |
| Poland | 2 |
| Rwanda | 1 |
| Singapore | 1 |
| South Africa | 6 |
| Spain | 2 |
| Switzerland | 1 |
| Tanzania | 4 |
| Uganda | 2 |
| United Kingdom | 9 |
| United States | 15 |
The majority of them proposed solutions to combat indifference towards our 5 main categories of discrimination: misogyny, racism, anti-semitism, discrimination against refugees and migrants, and discrimination against members of the LGBTQIA+ community. There were many applications that addressed each of these manifestations of discrimination.
| Type of discrimination | Amount of projects |
|---|---|
| Racism | 17 |
| Misogyny | 16 |
| Discrimination against members of LGBTQAI+ community | 16 |
| Discrimination against Refugees & Migrants | 10 |
| Antisemitism | 9 |
| All | 20 |
| Misogyny & Discrimination against members of LGBTQAI+ community | 6 |
| Racism & Misogyny | 5 |
| Racism & Discrimination against Refugees & Migrants | 2 |
| Ableism | 2 |
| Religious intolerance | 1 |
| Other | 7 |
Finalists
Let’s look at the projects that have reached this year’s final.
Creating a digital storytelling movement to learn to live together across differences in Bosnia & Herzegovina.
Afropedia.PE
The Signal for Help Ramp-Up Impact Project
Methods for Measuring and Mapping Indifference to Hate Online
Demonetizing Online Antisemitism - Combatting Advertiser Indifference to Jew-Hatred with Brand Safety
Strengthening the base
LGBTQ+ Friendly School Ranking
Tech-enable Young People to Stand Up for Their Rights and Erase Indifference Towards All Forms of Violence
Words Matter - Creating new narratives around migration to combat hate + racism
Scaling the Refugee Storytellers Collective to Erase Indifference Toward Displaced People
The Education Hub - antisemitism project
Insignia: A Gamified Social Experiment
We World Corporate Challenge
Winners
1) CyberWell
3) GrowSpace
2) Canadian Women’s Foundation
4) Smilemundo
We want to thank all participants for your passion and dedication. You can read more about the winners here.
Don’t do it alone. Let’s Erase Indifference together.
Don’t we have a right to indifference?
The world nowadays is facing significant problems, however, I believe that the issue underlying the majority of them is indifference to the suffering of others and a lack of compassion.
Piotr M.A. Cywiński
The director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum and president of The Auschwitz Pledge Foundation Board
The world nowadays is facing significant problems, however, I believe that the issue underlying the majority of them is indifference to the suffering of others and a lack of compassion. In order to counter and eliminate contemporary crises once and for all, we have to fight them at the source.
Yes, you do have a right to remain indifferent and not react to the evil that surrounds you. Take a moment to think, however, what this kind of indifference led to in the past? By ignoring evil, you accept its consequences. That’s why it’s crucial to act here and now. Auschwitz-Birkenau is a worldwide symbol of the Holocaust – the horrors caused by, discrimination, antisemitism, hatred, exclusion, and indifference. As people who for years have been active in preserving the memory of that place, we may not sit back and do nothing, seeing what’s currently happening around the world. Discrimination is on the rise and we have seen similar patterns throughout history. Singling one group out, isolating them, twisting their image, dehumanizing them, stirring hate, and identifying them as the enemy. History shows that crossing this line may take no more than a few years. By referencing the past, we want to shake society and ask the question–how many steps away are we today from the next atrocities materializing?
The problem of discrimination is a real and increasingly growing one. With the development of new technologies and increasing social inequalities, exclusion takes on new forms and individuals as well as whole groups are facing the consequences of discrimination. Today’s forms of exclusion adapt to new technologies and modern communication channels and are being reborn in front of our very eyes. Similarly we need to create new mechanisms which will be able to face up to modern forms of discrimination and the indifference of society that accompanies them.
Is there anything I can do to fight discrimination and indifference?
The issue of discrimination and exclusion concerns everybody, even if indirectly. Consider how many of your friends, acquaintances, collaborators are non-heteronormative, of a different skin colour than yours, different religion or race. How many women are there around you? Statistical research shows clearly that, most likely, every one of these people have experienced the upsetting or outright dangerous consequences of exclusion at least once in their lives. If you don’t feel the need to act for your own sake, act for the sake of those close to you. Everyone, regardless of their resources, can fight indifference. Everybody can effectively change their closest surroundings for the better. Only some have the possibility to act on a global scale. It is precisely with the aim of picking out such people and giving them a chance that we’re organizing our competition. The most important thing is to do away with the conviction that this problem doesn’t concern us or that there’s nothing we can do about it.
By organizing the Erase Indifference Challenge, the Auschwitz Pledge Foundation decided to create a framework and lend support to people who want to fight discrimination. We did this with the belief that a global competition will allow us to find a particular solution to the problem of exclusion. Our competition aims to find innovative ways of preventing discrimination. Whether the goal will be achieved or not will depend on the commitment of all of us. But most of all, on people’s participation in the Erase Indifference Challenge, to which everyone is heartily invited.
One person can do a lot, but nobody expects that we should face indifference on our own. You can make a stand against discrimination and educate those in your closest circle, but let’s also meet and look for answers together. We’re using today’s possibilities for communication and global media; together with young researchers, we’re looking for ways to use the latest technologies to make all of us live together in a world free from exclusion. Dialogue and readiness to act are essential here. Innovative ideas and the energy of young, talented minds can visibly change the world.