Samasource Hosts the First Annual GiveWork Gala on November 12th at the University Club of San Francisco

November 5, 2009

Silicon Valley's female entrepreneurs join forces with Nobel Prize laureates and writers to fight poverty with technology.

PALO ALTO, Calif., Nov. 5 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- On November 12th, Samasource will host the first annual GiveWork Charity Gala at the University Club of San Francisco, bringing together writers, luminaries, and some of the most influential female entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. The event will feature a live auction, with items for bid including a conversation with Nobel Prize laureates George Akerlof and Myron Scholes, a secret challenge with "The 4-Hour Workweek" author Tim Ferriss, and a date with Miss Afghanistan Vida Samadzai.

The gala aims to raise funds for Samasource, a non-profit social enterprise that enables marginalized individuals to build livelihoods through computer-based work. Samasource trains women, youth, and refugees in developing countries to complete paying, remote tasks, then connects workers with clients, like Stanford University Libraries and Bookshare.org, who need to outsource data jobs.

Samadzai, winner of Miss Afghanistan 2003, symbolized the potential for redefining the perception of women from Muslim countries when she competed in the 2003 Miss Earth pageant. The Taliban issued a fatwa against Samadzai after she publicly defended her participation, preventing her from returning to her native country. Samadzai now works to help Afghan refugees in Pakistan. As a Samasource ambassador Samadzai supports the Work for Women program, which provides jobs for women in Pakistan and East Africa. "The work Samasource provides for women are revolutionary in these parts of the world," Samadzai says. "Income means independence, and the skills women gain through these programs are breaking cycles of both poverty and oppression."

The gala will bring together many of the Bay Area's leading female entrepreneurs. Samasource has garnered support from women such as Adriana Gascoigne of Girls in Tech, Women 2.0 CEO Shaherose Charania, Katherine Barr of Mohr Davidow Ventures, and Randi Zuckerberg of Facebook, with whom Samasource has recently partnered. "It's great that the work Samasource is doing on Facebook Platform is also giving all these opportunities to people in some of the world's poorest places," Zuckerberg says. Other attendees will include Lorenzo Thione, founder of Bing, and author Tim Ferriss. Ferriss' blog readers now have the chance to decide how he should contribute himself to the live auction, drawing from his varied skills as author, productivity guru, education activist, and world-traveler.

The auction, which hopes to raise enough funds to create work programs in two new refugee camps, will be run by Auctionomics co-founder Silvia Console Battilana. Auctionomics is the auction-design firm created by Stanford Professor Paul Milgrom, the world's most recognized expert in auction theory.

Leila Chirayath Janah, Samasource founder and CEO, is scheduled to speak at the December 12(th) meeting of TEDx Silicon Valley, an independently organized offshoot of the international TED conference. The large overlap in attendees between the two events has given the GiveWork Gala the distinction of being the "unofficial pre-party" for TEDx.

Tickets for the GiveWork Gala are available at: http://samasourcegala.eventbrite.com/. Visit www.samasource.org/gala for more information.

About Samasource

Samasource gives marginalized people, from refugees in Kenya to women in rural Pakistan, life-changing work opportunities via the Internet. In parallel, it enables socially responsible companies, small businesses, nonprofits, and entrepreneurs in the US to contribute to economic development by buying services from the Samasource workforce at fair prices.

Samasource derives its name from the Sanskrit word sama, which means "equal". Samasource is a 501(c)(3) non-profit social business. Thus far, Samasource has found more than $220,000 in projects for 18 small businesses, nonprofit training centers, and rural data centers that provide jobs to more than 500 marginalized individuals in Kenya, Uganda, Cameroon, Ghana, and Pakistan.

For more information, please visit www.samasource.org, blog.samasource.org, or email info@samasource.org.

Individual tickets to the GiveWork Gala are $250. VIP tickets, tables, and sponsorships are also available. Some tickets have been reserved for readers of tech blogs. If you are interested in distributing these seats via your blog please contact Silvia Console Battilana at silviacb@auctionomics.com or at 650-704-1945.

SOURCE Samasource