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The Pixel Project is 17 years old today:

  • 17 years of being the only anti-VAW nonprofit to specialise in working to raise awareness, funds, and volunteer power to end VAW at the very 21st century intersection of social media, online communities, new technologies, and pop culture/the arts.
  • 17 years of our all-volunteer team across 6 continents collaborating to raise awareness, funds and volunteer power for the movement to end Violence Against Women (VAW).
  • 17 years of conceptualizing and developing our ongoing anti-VAW campaigns, projects, and programmes.
  • 17 years of creating social media-based platforms that make it simple and accessible for everyone from the person on the virtual street to various online communities to get on board the cause to end VAW.
  • 17 years of experimenting with (and implementing) positive, innovative, and effective new ways of using online tools, social media, and pop culture/the arts to get the conversation about VAW going amongst individuals and communities.
  • 17 years of helping boost the signal for positive stories of people around the world working to stop VAW as well as the women and girls who survive VAW tell their stories.
  • 17 years of building partnerships with allies that range from anti-VAW organisations and campaigns of all shapes and sizes, to award-winning bestselling authors, to livestreams with dads to sound the clarion call for the end to VAW.
  • 17 years of bridging the communication gaps to provide victims, survivors, and their families and friends with information for getting help for escaping any form of violence against women and girls.
  • 17 years of constant creativity in our outreach work to educate individuals and communities who would otherwise ignore or deny the existence of VAW.
  • 17 years of sharing expertise in VAW and social media campaigning with fellow activists/advocates, experts from fields as different as law and healthcare and doctoral/research students.
  • 17 years of inspiring everyone from kids to celebrities to get on board the cause to end violence against women and girls.
  • 17 years of working to accelerate the shift in the conversation towards including men and boys in helping stop VAW.
  • 17 years of walking the talk to show that online activism can and does make a difference in the battle to end violence against women and girls, especially in this age of online VAW.
  • 17 years of going to bat for and having the backs of women and girls facing online VAW.
  • 17 years of standing up to sexism, misogyny, and the patriarchy in its myriad of forms across countries and cultures.
  • 17 years of battling every spike in VAW worldwide caused by everything from Donald Trump’s presidency to the COVID-19 pandemic.
  • 17 years anti-VAW activism despite ongoing worldwide cuts in funding and aid for nonprofits working for women’s rights and safety.

It’s been 17 interesting and action-packed years, to say the least!

And now, onwards to our annual review of the year that came before:

An Overview of the Year 2025

2025 was the year we began transitioning back into our full roster of campaigns and initiatives after a quiet 2024 spent working behind-the-scenes on new initiatives for our next phase while taking a breather after 15 years in service to the cause to end violence against women.

On the fundraising side

In Spring 2025, UN Women raised the alarm that at least half of organisations aiding women in crises worldwide may shut down within a year due to global aid cuts. However, because The Pixel Project’s work has never been funded by any government or grantmaking foundation or wealthy benefactor and because we are 100% volunteer-staffed, we were able to continue our work in 2025 thanks to the generosity of our donors and supporters as follows:

  • We held our first Read For Pixels fundraiser in September and October 2025 after taking a break from fundraising in 2024. Our Read For Pixels 2025 (Fall Edition) fundraiser raised $6,150 with the help of our Read For Pixels community including authors, publishers, book lovers, and donors.
  • Additionally, we received the final residual proceeds from our 1st charity anthology GIVING THE DEVIL HIS DUE (donated by Running Wild Press) and the first round of proceeds from our 1st charity poetry collection, UNDER HER EYE (donated by Black Spot Books).
  • Last but not least, there are also donors who continued to make one-off or recurring donations to help keep our work running. Thank you so much also to all the donors who have donated to our general fund to help keep us alive as an organisation – to friends, family, and VAW survivors who have donated what they can during these tough economic times – THANK YOU ALL SO MUCH! Even $10 helps so much in keeping our work alive!

On the awareness-raising side

Ongoing Campaigns, Programmes, and Initiatives

The Read For Pixels Campaign

In 2025, we resumed hosting livestream interviews, readings, and panel sessions with authors after taking a year off the campaign in 2024 for a break after a decade of hosting livestreams, panel sessions, and fundraisers.

1. The 11th Anniversary of the Fall Edition Read For Pixels Campaign

As always, we continued to get ever closer to the next campaign milestone of 300 award-winning bestselling authors, with 10 of these worthy wordsmiths joining the campaign for the first time in 2025. They spoke out against VAW via YouTube livestream sessions and helped raise funds for the Pixel Reveal campaign via RallyUp fundraisers choc-a-bloc with exclusive geeky goodies. They hailed from a wide range of genres and included well-known names and fan favourites such as Catriona Ward, Richard Kadrey, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, John Langan, Premee Mohamed, and more. Check out the full list of authors here.

A total of 11 livestream events and 6 Read For Pixels Reddit AMAs were held for the Fall 2025 Edition (August – September). The livestream events included:

  • 8 1-to-1 Livestream readings+Q&A sessions with new Read For Pixels authors (check them out here)
  • 3 Livestream author panels featuring Read For Pixels alumni including UNDER HER EYE poets. Topics of discussion ranged from fatherhood and father figures in Horror, the rise of female detectives in the Crime genre, and feminism and poetry. (check them out here).

2. Under Her Eye – The Pixel Project’s 1st Charity Poetry Collection

Under Her Eye (UHE), The Pixel Project’s 1st charity poetry collection in partnership with Black Spot Books, was released on 7 November 2024. 113 poets wrote original poetry about violence against women for the book which is currently available in both paperback and e-book formats. All proceeds from the sales of the book goes towards supporting The Pixel Project’s anti-violence against women work.

The awareness-raising activities that we had done in collaboration with the book’s award-winning editors Lindy Ryan and Lee Murray and some of the contributing poets included:

  • A special Domestic Violence Awareness Month 2025 blog interview series featuring 14 UHE poets talking about why they participated in the UHE and why VAW must end.
  • A “Feminism and Poetry” panel featuring three (3) UHE poets including Ai Jiang, Carol Gyzander, and Stephanie M. Wytovich.

Additionally, awareness-raising activities such as our 16 For 16 articles had accessible calls-to-action to buy or download the book complete with the relevant integrated in them.

3. Read For Pixels Blog Interviews

From time to time, we publish interviews featuring authors, publishers, and literary agents speaking up about stopping violence against women.

In 2025, aside from our Domestic Violence Awareness Month interviews with UHE poets, we also published an interview with Michelle Dotter, the publisher and editor-in-chief of Dzanc Books.

The People and Pets Say NO! Campaign

 Our 14th annual People and Pets Say NO photo statement campaign on Facebook and Instagram continues to run steadily with people from all walks of life submitting pictures of them and their pets saying NO to VAW during Domestic Violence Awareness Month. Starting from 2025, all submitted pictures are shared on Facebook, Instagram, and Bluesky

In 2025, a total of 12 pictures were submitted:

  • 4 pictures were submitted by Pixel Project team members
  • 1 picture was taken by UHE poet L.E. Daniels
  • 7 pictures taken by Pixel Project supporters who are also either VAW survivors, anti-VAW activists, friends/family of Pixel Project team members, or Pixel Project supporters.

The Fathers For Pixels Campaign

No Fathers For Pixels livestream events or interviews were held/published in 2025. Instead, Fathers For Pixels 2025 activities included:

1.  A Father’s Day 2025 Op-Ed on 15 June 2025 titled: “Where Have All The Role Models Gone: Jimmy Carter, Kim Nam-joon, and Making The Case for the Imperfect Positive Male Role Model”.

 

2. A tie-in with our new Quotes For Pixels campaign – posting eight (8) Quotes For Pixels meme posters featuring fathers and male allies speaking up about VAW and/or sharing ideas for stopping VAW across our social media channels.

Our Social Media Programmes

Our Facebook page remains our most popular social media account and continues to grow slowly but steady as we reached over 55,000 followers (up from 54,000 followers in 2024) by 31 December 2025 with a very lively community respectfully discussing the various posts and news.

Ever since we began uploading memes and posters that provide food for thought instead of just sharing it from other pages, we have gained much better traction with our Facebook community members and the general public.

We reached a milestone on 27 May 2025 when a meme about consent that we posted generated over 49,000 likes, over 14,000 shares, and over 4,300 comments. This is a major increase in virality from our previous milestone on 8 July 2024 when a meme we posted about consent generated over 30,000 reactions, over 11,000 shares, and over 5,600 comments.

 

Our Instagram account follower numbers have seen a small increase from 860 followers to 1,137 followers to date and we anticipate the number to continue slowly rising in the year to come as more people leave the app that was known as Twitter and need to follow our work.

In addition to posting promotional and awareness-raising posters as well as People and Pets campaign picture we now also:

  • cross-post Inspirational Interviews on Instagram in the form of the interviewee’s headshot with shortened links in the caption.
  • cross-post any poster memes and videos we produce for campaigns and initiatives.

Our Bluesky account is growing slowly but steadily. As of 31 December 2025, we reached 892 followers. It is now home to our automated twice-daily VAW helpline session which brings helplines from over 200 countries to the public. As always, we monitor our direct messages to help anyone reaching out for help regarding VAW.

Note: Even though our Twitter/X account is now officially inactive, we continue to retain it to prevent anyone from impersonating us on that platform to cause harm such as spreading misinformation about VAW and harassing victims and survivors. As with Bluesky, we continue to monitor our direct messages on X to help anyone reaching out for help regarding VAW.

Our TikTok account was added to our portfolio of social media accounts in late March 2025 as an additional channel for us to share our Quotes For Pixels videos. As of now, it has 35 likes, 0 followers, and is intended to function in 2 ways:

  • As an additional video archive for Pixel Project videos
  • As additional access to The Pixel Project’s work for people who prefer using TikTok.

 

On the blogging/journalism/website content side

Our Annual/Ongoing Blog-based Campaigns and Initiatives

The “16 For 16” blogging campaign in honour of the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-based Violence continues to grow as we accumulate an archive of positive articles packed with shareable ideas, information, and solutions for inspiring individuals and communities to take action to stop VAW. We welcome 2 guest contributors in 2025 including Emerge Lanka (Sri Lanka) and Survivor Space Oxfordshire (United Kingdom).

Inspirational Interview series: We had an almost full roster of interviewees as we interviewed 10 anti-VAW activists/organisations from 10 countries including India, Kenya, Nepal, Sri Lanka, the United Kingdom, and the USA.

 

New Awareness-raising and Educational Initiatives Launched in 2025

The Quotes For Pixels Initiative

The Pixel Project team has spent 2023 and 2024 working behind-the-scenes on a deep dive into our huge and formidable campaign archives to transform the best and most powerful of our livestreams, AMAs, and Inspirational Interviews of the past 16 years into awareness-raising materials and tools in shareable short-form formats such as reels and memes that will:

  • Help us get the message about violence against women out faster and stick better in people’s minds in the fast-changing social media landscape
  • Appeal to young people
  • Boost the signal for activists, advocates, allies, and organisations who are doing the work to end VAW

On 1st March 2025, we formally announced the initiative as the Quotes For Pixels initiative and launched it in 2 phrases:

Phase 1: March 2025 (Women’s History Month and International Women’s Day) – We posted 1 Quotes For Pixels poster featuring a female activist, advocate, or author per day throughout the month.

Phase 2: April 2025 (Sexual Assault Awareness Month) – Starting on 1 April 2025, we began posting Quotes For Pixels public service announcement (PSA) videos. A new Quotes For Pixels video was released on our social media channels (YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok) approximately every two weeks on a Wednesday

 

The Women’s History Month Panel Sessions

We launched and hosted our first Women’s History Month livestream session on 8 March 2025 (International Women’s Day 2025) for 2 reasons:

  • Honouring both Women’s History Month and International Women’s Day by opening conversations about women’s “herstory” from various perspectives and honouring its impact on today’s anti-VAW activism and advocacy.
  • Expanding the scope of our awareness-raising work on livestream events to include the amplifying the voices and showcasing the expertise and knowledge of female academic historians and other female history experts.

Our inaugural Women’s History Month panel topic was “When History Does Not Repeat Itself: Lessons from the Past about Ending Violence Against Women”. Panellists included Dr Megha Kumar (India and the UK) and Dr Rebecca Turkington (USA).

As always, we’ve achieved all that we have achieved as a team and in 2025 we welcomed the following volunteers:

  • Research and Writing team – Jenna Miles (Canada)
  • Research and Writing team – Marion Esm’eralda Musengy’a (Kenya)

The Year Ahead

We will continue developing and running our annual and ongoing campaigns with established campaigns changing formats or expanding to different platforms in order to better serve the cause.

2025 will see us return to our full roster of livestream events and fundraisers.

Here is what to expect in 2026

1. Our Ongoing Campaigns and Initiatives:

We will be running our current roster of campaigns and initiatives including:

  • The return of the International Women’s Day Edition of Read For Pixels in March 2026 including a full livestream series and two (2) panel sessions
  • Sharing recorded poetry readings by UHE poets from time to time to boost the signal for the poetry collection.
  • Publishing more in-depth interviews with various anti-VAW and women’s human rights activists for our monthly Inspirational Interview campaign.
  • Releasing more Quotes For Pixels PSA videos and poster memes featuring the ideas from activists, advocates, and authors for tackling and ending VAW.
  • Encouraging more people and pets putting their best foot/paw forward for Domestic Violence Awareness Month via the 15th year of our “People and Pets say NO!” photo statement campaign (October 2026).
  • Writing and publishing our 14th annual 16 For 16 Blogging campaign (December 2026).
  • Hosting our next Women’s History Month panel session on 7 March 2026.
  • Re-starting our Fathers For Pixels livestream panels and interviews in June 2026.

2. Website Resource Development

From adding more primer sections about different types of VAW to developing a better safety button, we will continue to build our website resources for the general public.

In 2026, we will be publishing more VAW primers to keep developing our “VAW Facts” section as a comprehensive beginner’s guide to learning facts and figures about VAW.

3. New Project Development

We will be working on a new groundbreaking project with a research expert and criminologist from the University of Cambridge.

Further details of this project, which is still in its early stages, will be released later this year.

Interested in donating to support our work? Here are 3 ways you can do so:

  1. You can donate directly to us to help us keep our work alive. To donate to us and for more details about how your donation will be used, visit our donation page.
  2. Buy our 1st poetry collection,Under Her Eye. All donations and net proceeds from audiobook sales go towards supporting our campaigns, programmes, and initiatives.
  3. You can hold a fundraiser for us which could be anything from holding bake sales if you’re a baker to donating a portion of your profits if you run a business to running a marathon and getting folks to sponsor you by donating to us. Get in touch directly with us at info@thepixelproject.net if you wish to raise funds for us or with us.

Here’s to The Pixel Project surviving and thriving to continue fighting for the cause for as many years as it takes to eradicate violence against women. May we live to see the day when our work is no longer needed – the day when violence against women is no longer the norm in communities and cultures worldwide. Just as it takes a village to raise a child, it takes an entire community to work together to effectively eradicate the violence against women and girls for good.

It’s time to stop violence against women. Together.

– Regina Yau, Founder and President, The Pixel Project