A message from the Foundation's CEO
Thomson Reuters Foundation is all about treating information as a form of aid and giving legal support to people in need.
2010 was a signature year in which we launched two game-changing programmes. One, TrustLaw, provide lawyers for free to social entrepreneurs and NGOs around the world. The other, our Emergency Information Service, informs local populations after natural disasters of vital information such as which hospitals still have the capacity to receive patients or where people can go to find food and water.
We also redesigned AlertNet to make the world's premier humanitarian news site easier to navigate and much more visual. Our multimedia projects from disaster hotspots won three major awards and an Emmy nomination while our climate change section set the agenda on the human impacts of global warming.
The Foundation's TrustMedia programme provided journalism training to more than 1,000 journalists from 88 countries including Jordan, Bangladesh, China, Brazil, Kenya, India and the Balkans. Meanwhile, the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University set the standard for the comparative study of journalism worldwide, offering 22 fellowships and holding dozens of major events.
The next big step is the launch of TrustLaw Women in the spring. Coming on the heels of TrustLaw Governance , where we focus on anti-corruption, TrustLaw Women will put online an immense wealth of information and resources to help women around the globe know their rights.
A database of women's rights laws in each country is being built by the American Bar Association and will graciously be put on TrustLaw, while our team of journalists covering humanitarian issues and anti-corruption around the world will also cover women's rights.
The reason we chose women's rights is because in the developing world when a woman works children are better fed and better educated, so you tackle the very roots of poverty. We want to facilitate that as best we can by helping women know their rights, as well as providing the associations that represent men and women a lawyer for free when they need it most.
Monique Villa
