Every Wednesday evening, Bluebird Barbecue hosts their Community Night. A different partnership is formed every week in order to raise awareness and funds for a local non-profit, with ten percent of the evening’s sales donated straight to the organization. This Wednesday, October 22, Breakaway will be inviting everyone to dine with Bluebird Barbecue and support their revolutionary program.
Breakaway is a free, interactive online soccer game developed at the Champlain College’s Emergent Media Center that was purposefully created to educate youth worldwide about the issue of violence against women. Since the original creation of the online game, youth soccer camp programs have been developed to extend the curriculum and reach more children in both Hebron, Palestine and Sonsonate, El Salvador. Both the game and the camp models encourage honest discussion between kids about gender-based violence, gender equity, and bullying. Violence against women and girls is a serious and prevalent issue around the world, and Breakaway aims to make large strides towards ending this brutality.
Breakaway has been proven to be an effective and transformative tool to address these issues, and is presently raising funds in order to continue their work. Their goal is to travel back to El Salvador to train more local facilitators and run more youth camps. El Salvador has one of the highest global rates of femicide – the murder of females because of their gender – with an average of 12 murders for every 100,000 women. According to Rodrigo Bustos, director of Plan El Salvador, “Our only hope [to end this violence] is working with young people, boys and girls, to change these beliefs.” Empowered by a preventative approach to end violence against women and girls, Breakaway combines the educational capabilities of game-play with the intense passion for football shared by boys and girls throughout the world.
Join us Wednesday, October 22 between 4:30 and 9:30 PM at Bluebird Barbecue, 317 Riverside Avenue in Burlington. Eat pulled pork and baby back ribs to support a good cause? Yeah, we think that sounds like a winning combination.
To learn more about Breakaway, you can visit the organization’s website http://breakawaygame.champlain.edu/, watch the video http://vimeo.com/98940885, or play the game yourself http://www.breakawaygame.com/play.php?lang=EN