Know More Media has been covering the on-going and innovative "Empowering Women" campaign by the Poverty-Fighting organization of Unitus.  Now you can watch this short, powerful 1 minute video about this viral campaign:

For those who are still looking for a meaningful (and last minute) Mother's Day gift, may we suggest that you write a loving and heartfelt tribute to your Mother or to the other mothers in your life.  You can do so here in 4 easy steps.

This is my mom, Helen Stay, as she is running with the Olympic Torch in Los Angeles in the 2004 Athens Olympic Torch Run.  Here is the tribute I wrote about my mom. She has really been struggling the last few months with severe dehabilitating pain and was finally given some medication to relieve the pain.  However the pain medication made her so nauseous that she wasn't getting enough nourishment. I have been working on this tribute for the past few days and this morning, right when I was going to publish it, I found out that she had been taken to the emergency room last night and has been hospitalized.  I hope this tribute brings some joy into her hard life.

Besides paying tribute to my mother, by participating in this campaign, this tribute is also helping to empower the lives of other mothers and women in the developing world who face incredible hardships every day.  For them, their life is a struggle of daily survival.  Just getting a clean source of water is often a monumental daily effort.  There are constant concerns about having enough nutrition for their children and the mothers are often the ones who go without if there is not enough for the whole family.  There is no emergency room to take their sick children, nor is there often adequate medical care.  Even the simplest medical issues can become life-threatening for these moms and their children. 

Having been out to the rural villages and to the urban slums of Africa, Asia, South America, and the Pacific, I know the courage, the determination, the will of these mothers to provide a better life for their children.  I have seen a loan of $200 help some lady escape the chains of poverty and break this cruel cycle.  This lady becomes empowered to generate adequate income so she can feed her family, so she can get education for her children (both for boys and girls), and so she can better access medical care when needed. 

This is why I support Unitus - it is helping organizations that provide these microcredit loans to the poorest of the poor.  Unitus helps these organizations, called MicroFinance Institutions, or MFIs, grow faster so they can reach more poor faster.  Every MFI that Unitus has partnered with has over 100% growth rates and grow 8 times faster than the MFI Industry average. That means more poor are being helped. All of the money, 100% of it, donated through the Empowering Women campaign goes directly to the poor.  And currently, through the generous gift of a donor, your contribution that is tied to a tribute is matched up to $25,000.  So you can double your impact, helping empower twice as many women, if you make your tribute soon.

I invite you to pay tribute to those Empowering Women in your life.  You can do so here. Give the honor and respect to your mother while helping empower the lives of women who have life much harder than we can imagine.

From the Unitus blog, here are some others that have supported this great campaign:

• Seth Godin of Squidoo and author of a slew of best-selling books was one of the first to blog about Unitus and his post on our viral campaign drove more than 15% of total traffic to the site the first few days   
• Robert Scoble of the Scobeleizer blog and the ScobleShow (and who once did a video of Mike Murray on MS’s channel 9.)
• Jeff Barr’s post was another early blogger for the campaign and he built a great tribute to his wife on the Empowering Women site
• Chris Pirillo twittered about us, blogged about us on on Chris.pirillo.com and LockerGnome and did our first video tribute to his wife and fellow blogger Ponzi. Pirillo-related traffic has been HUGE!
• Dave Schappell of JibJab and a great friend and advisor to Unitus blogged about us and made tributes to his wife and mom and was instrumental in our blog outreach
• Brier Dudley, a blogger at the Seattle Times for Business and Technology, thought our campaign was a great Mother’s Day gift
• Hal Halliday did a great post about the inspriring female bloggers that Know More Media works with
• Melonie Murray at Workerette posted about the similarities between workerettes and the micro-entrepreneurs that Unitus serves.
• Devin Thorpe at Mid-Market Maven was another early blogger for the Empowering Women campaign and built a lovely tribute to his wife Gail who’s an out-of-this-world 3rd grade teacher.
• Ponn Sabra of Empower Women Now did a great post and also made a tribute to her mom.
• Even our wonderful friends at Sage Computer Services who built our Empowering Women site (in record time, no less!) posted about us.
• Jeff Cornwall at Belmont Universit’s Center for Entrepreneurship also posted recently about our entreprenurial model. 

Others that have given tribute include:

Real Women - Real Careers

Dee's Blog - A tribute to her mom

Tales from the Crib - A list of last minute Mother's Day gifts

Daring Young Mom on her Flying Trapeze - Give a great overview of how $5 can really empower a woman in the developing world.

Swinging from the Vine - Gives a nice plug for the campaign

Rose Madrid-Swetman - About making a difference on Mother's Day

MetaMurph's Metasphere - Comments on the Idol Gives Back campaign, Bono's One campaign, and the Unitus Empowering Women Campaign

Katie's Blog - Currently TV Reporter for BBC Click. TV journalist and Presenter for Five News, ITN and BBC, Katie kindly covers the great work of Unitus and this new Empowering Women campaign