As most fashion designers find themselves all wrapped up in New York Fashion Week, Diane von Furstenberg is calling attention to life off the catwalk, debuting the DVF Awards. The veteran designer, philanthropist, and president of the Council of Fashion Designers of America will honor four women who’ve worked for social justice across the globe, on issues ranging from sex trafficking to girls’ education to female entrepreneurship.
The inaugural awards ceremony March 13 will highlight the impact of two international winners—Sadiqa Basiri Saleem of Afghanistan and Danielle Saint-Lot of Haiti—as well as a domestic winner to be selected by online voters at Facebook. Each winner will receive $50,000 to continue her work. “It’s about people who have survived, learned from their survival, and are leading from their survival,” von Furstenberg told The Daily Beast. The designer was heavily involved in the selection process, along with a board of directors that included Diane Sawyer and Maria Shriver. “I’m very sorry that I can only give one award,” von Furstenburg said of the five American nominees. “But…at least I can give exposure to five.”
Sadiqa Basiri Saleem’s hopes of becoming a gynecologist were crushed after the Taliban closed her Afghan-run university in Pakistan, but she swore she would not let the same thing happen to the aspirations of other young Afghan women, including her sisters. In 2002, with help from a few generous supporters, Saleem used her personal savings to found the only girls' school in Godah, her small, isolated Afghan village, where most women are illiterate. Since then, Saleem has worked to change that sad fact, leading the Oruj Learning Center and launching five more schools and four learning centers. The Taliban continues to try to prevent girls from attending school and often retaliates against activists, but Saleem is willing to take the risk. “Bringing education to girls was based on the needs I witnessed, not a drive to bring about social change,” the recent Mount Holyoke graduate
told Newsweek early last year. “I’m not concerned for me but I am concerned for my girls, the students. Really, for everyone.”
Over 2,800 young women are enrolled in Saleem’s program, which began with a mere 36 students. “Women’s schools are so important in Afghanistan because that’s the future of the country,” Von Furstenberg said.
Long before Haiti’s misfortune registered on Americans’ radar due to the Jan. 12 earthquake, Danielle Saint-Lot, a Haitian native, campaigned for change. After attending a Vital Voices Global Leadership conference in Uruguay in 1998, Saint-Lot returned home and helped organize a conference for Haitian women. That conference resulted in the formation of the NGO Femmes en Democratie, now a network of female artists, designers, and 50 female-owned businesses. Saint-Lot provides women with training, opportunities, and access to financing. She also promotes women’s political participation and education.
“If you educate them, they will educate their children differently,” Saint-Lot told
Ms. magazine. “When you offer someone the possibility to work and make money, people will be able to feel hope.” As an active member of Vital Voices, Saint-Lot continues to work to replace despair with hope for each and every Haitian woman. That is a sentiment she needed to hold on to in the wake of the devastating earthquake that left Saint-Lot and her daughter homeless in Jacmel, Haiti. As a DVF honoree, she will receive $50,000. “You can imagine how much she can use it right now,” Von Furstenberg said.
“Some people come to help because they suffer,” Von Furstenburg says. “Some people come to help because they didn’t suffer.” Malika Saada Saar is in the later group. “She doesn’t have any tragedy in her life,” the fashion icon adds. “But she has a great mother and a great grandmother who taught her about dignity.”
The venerable Saada Saar is the founder and executive director of the Rebecca Project for Human Rights, a national legal and policy organization that advocates for public-policy reform, justice, and dignity for marginalized women—the poor, the addicted, abuse victims, and the imprisoned. She has effectively reformed laws on both a national and local level, including her recent feat of persuading the federal government to ban the practice of shackling female inmates during childbirth. “The ACLU, Conference of Catholic Bishops, reproductive health organizations all agreed that childbirth should be sacred and women should not be shackled. These disparate groups found common ground... in Texas!” Saada Saar told
Politics Daily of the achievement. Von Furstenberg added, “It’s all about sacredness of mothers and daughters.”
South-Korean born Katherine Chon was incredibly disturbed by a newspaper article she read seven years ago, detailing the plight of a group of girls who had been forced into prostitution at a brothel disguised as a massage parlor just a few miles from her hometown. “I was shocked that slavery could still exist and that it was occurring less than two miles from my protected college walls,” the then-Brown University student
said. “The women were around my age and I felt that had my own life circumstances been different, it could have happened to me.” Chon was determined to do something about the widespread problem of human trafficking, which is the world's third-largest criminal industry, just behind arms and drugs. During her senior year of college, she formed Polaris Project, which provides emergency shelter and comprehensive case management to those who’ve been sold into modern-day slavery. The nonprofit also operates the 24-hour National Human Trafficking Resource Center Hotline in English, Spanish, Korean, and Thai, and has processed thousands of calls.
“I believe that individuals can make a difference,” Chon, who is currently a fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, told
WomenForHire.com. “Follow whatever you are passionate about, embrace it, and don’t be afraid to accept the challenge. You can be scared of it, but do it anyway.”
From the age of 5 to 16, Cathy Harper Lee was regularly raped by her step-father, at gunpoint. He went on to leave the then-teen and her mother, marry someone else, and have a child, whom he named after Lee. “She knew it would continue,” Von Furstenberg says of the disturbing cycle of abuse Lee experienced firsthand. That thought is what motivated her to go to the police, with whom she struggled to have her case heard. But eventually, other victims of Lee’s stepfather came forward and authorities finally paid attention to her story, which was featured on
America’s Most Wanted. Just one day before the program aired, her step-father turned himself in and is now imprisoned for the abuse of 27 children. “She got so many letters from so many people,” Von Furstenberg says of Lee’s moving appearance on
America’s Most Wanted. “She realized this was not just about herself.”
Since then, the now-43-year-old mother went on to establish the Justice League of Ohio, which works to help victims of violent crimes and their families navigate the legal system. “I want to make sure no one has to experience that. They don’t need to battle the justice system also,” Lee told
The Survivors Club.
During her sophomore year at Yale University, Kirsten Lodal was doing far more with her time in New Haven than going to frat parties and rooting for the Bulldogs. The then-19-year-old co-founded LIFT (formerly the National Students Partnership) to benefit the parents of children she came into contact with while volunteering at various youth-services programs. She noticed just how much they struggled, working multiple minimum-wage jobs, yet still unable to afford sufficient food, clothing, and shelter for their families. LIFT connects college students with low-income families to provide counseling and information about community resources. The success of the initial site in New Haven led the organization to expand to Boston, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., and it now counts over 5,000 volunteers and over 30,000 served.
Von Furstenberg was impressed by how much LIFT CEO Lodal achieved at a young age. “She’s only 30 and she’s been doing this for 11 years,” said the designer. “Obviously, LIFT’s goal is to fight poverty, but it’s also to change poverty in politics. It’s not just the work that they do, but they create influence.” Lodal told a local
ABC News affiliate, “I realize how rare it is to have the chance to live every hour of my day with purpose, so I really couldn’t imagine doing anything else.”
As the executive director of the New York City Mission Society since 1996, Stephanie Palmer works to ensure educational opportunities for the poor. During her 14 years with the city’s oldest human-services organization, Palmer put together countless educational and employment training programs, advocated for legislation in support of the nonprofit sector, and tripled the Mission Society’s budget. But her approach centers on quality of programming, not quantity, whether in after-school athletics or teen pregnancy prevention. “It starts with education,” Palmer told
The New York Nonprofit Press. “We knew that if you were going to move kids and families out of poverty, education is where it has to happen. In order to survive in this economy, at a minimum you need to get out of high school or really have two years of college.”
Palmer is particularly focused on New York’s African-American young women, through her work with the Black Women for Black Girls Giving Circle. “She’s a divine woman,” Von Furstenberg raved.
