Ipas > Ipas selected as Working Assets® donation recipient

Ipas selected as Working Assets® donation recipient

January 13, 2005

Working Assets® donations could help Ipas in its goal of furthering women's reproductive rights and health.

Photo courtesy of the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.

Ipas is thrilled to announce that it will be one of the 50 organizations featured on the Working Assets 2005 donations ballot! Working Assets, a telecommunications company, donates a percentage of each customer’s charges to nonprofit groups each year. Donations are generated by the actions of Working Assets customers when they make long distance or wireless phone calls, or charge purchases on credit cards. During 2005, Working Assets expects to build a pool of more than $3 million to be allocated among the 50 groups selected.

The allocation will be determined solely by the votes of customers. Using the ballot, customers can direct their donations among the groups. If you are not a member of Working Assets, please consider them for your long distance or cell phone needs.

We urge Working Assets customers to direct their donations to Ipas, which works globally to protect women’s health and advance women’s reproductive rights. For three decades, Ipas has worked with local partners throughout Africa, Asia and Latin America to provide training and medical equipment designed to prevent deaths and injuries from unsafe abortion, which claims the lives of nearly 70,000 women every year. Ipas believes that no woman should have to risk her life or health because she lacks safe reproductive choices.

Ipas is the only global organization working solely on the issue of unsafe abortion and, because we refused to sign the Global Gag Rule, we receive no U.S. government funding. The Gag Rule prohibits U.S. family planning assistance to foreign nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that use funding from any source to perform, provide counseling or referral, or lobby for abortion. Ipas vehemently opposes this harmful policy and will not be a party to these unethical and life threatening restrictions.

Ipas needs the support of private citizens to maintain its freedom and flexibility to go where women are most in need of life saving services. Each minute of every day, nearly 40 women undergo dangerous, unsafe abortions. Working Assets customers can help Ipas reach out to millions of women around the world—most of them poor and young—who are at risk of disability or death from unsafe abortion. Please spread the word!

For more information, contact:
Kirsten Sherk
Senior Associate, Media Relations
e-mail: sherkk@ipas.org
phone: 919.960.5612
fax: 919.929.0258