Integrity Idol – Celebrates “Honest” Civil Servants in Liberia
We have successfully launched our Integrity Idol Liberia national campaign!
Integrity Idol is a national movement- on the ground, online and on television- to celebrate and encourage honest Civil Servant across the country. A lack of integrity- which leads to corruption, inequality and insecurity- remains the very heart of the challenges that Liberia faces today and our inability to create positive social change. Ordinary citizens feel helpless to change these dynamics, with little to do except complain about the graft and mismanagement of those in power. Integrity Idol is a four months campaign with the explicit goal of engaging Liberian across the country in a conversation about integrity and accountability. It will generate support for those civil servants within the system who are sacrificing their lives to serve the public good.
The Integrity Idol campaign allows citizens to nominate individuals who exemplify the qualities of integrity, honesty in the work they deliver. The program will celebrate that teacher who goes the extra mile in a public school to support quality education; to that district office bureaucrat who always makes sure problems are fixed on time. Our team will then verify submissions and select a respected, expert panel that will narrow the field of submissions to the top five.
These five finalists will then be filmed- doing their jobs, talking about why it is important to have integrity and interacting with others who can vouch for their great work. These 20 minute episodes will then be shown on national TV (and syndicated on national and community radio stations) in prime time across Liberia, while being posted on You Tube and social media. Citizens will be made aware through the campaign that they can vote for who they think should be Liberia’s “Integrity Idol” through social media, post, e-mail and phone. After a public voting period of a week- through which we expect tens of thousands of votes- the expert panel will again convene to add their voices to the conversation and to crown the Integrity Idol in a public ceremony in Monrovia.
It is a privilege to be part of this movement of changemakers in Liberia. Too often we have been told the stories of corruption, war, economic strife and so forth. It is high time we shed light on those stories of hope, stories of triumph in the face of insurmountable circumstances. These stories won’t only inspire positive behavior, they will create a new wave of thinking in society that will promote proactivity over resilience.