A.Organizational Background Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood (CCFC) is an established organization committed to fighting the exploitation of children by companies who treat them as adult consumers. In this day and age, businesses often take advantage of the malleable minds of children, pushing products and ideas at them and hoping for them to latch on or buy. These practices have many long-term effects, as children are groomed to be materialistic at an early age, creating a psychological environment in which materialism determines self-esteem, allowing children to use "material goods [as instruments] ... to cope with or compensate for doubts about their safety, competence, and self-worth’ (Chaplin & John). Children are being exploited now in a way that will cause them to rely on materialistic goods as a measure of happiness, self-esteem and identity, all without their direct, educated consent. We, as an organization, have worked tirelessly to "support parents’ efforts to raise healthy families by limiting commercial access to children and ending the exploitative practice of child-targeted marketing” (commercialfreechildhood.org). We have puta lot of time, effort, and research into exploring and understanding the nature of these child rights violations. The growth of the commercialization of the modern world has increased the appearance of drug use among youth, “obsessive consumerism, exposure to sex and violence, using “material possessions [as] a way to cope with decreased life satisfaction,” and much more (Bakan) (Opree, Buijzen, and Valkenberg). We have started a movement to address these detrimental practices of marketing to children, and strive to increase the reach of our advocacy efforts. So far, we have raised public awareness of this issue through media coverage, as well as with the help of known researchers and professionals in this field of interest. We have also tried to reduce the amount of time children spend in front of a screen; we are the creators of “Screen-Free Week,” which is celebrated annually, urging children and their families to detach themselves from all things digital and enjoy other aspects of life. Our efforts have led to some significant changes, including “an unprecedented refund from Disney on Baby Einstein videos and a landmark ruling by the FTC against Your Baby Can Read’ (commercialfreechildhood.org). We have submit petitions and filed comments to address the effectiveness of current regulations. We believe that creating widespread awareness and highlighting the indecent behavior of businesses and advertisers will help to reduce, or even end, these harmful actions. CCFC is aiming to target the legal system so that corporations and governments are held accountable for any infractions against children’s rights through exploitation via marketing practices. The staff is responsible for creating strategies and campaigns to bring this issue to the public eye so as to affect change on a governmental scale.Creating campaigns means targeting corporate interests and employing tactics, such as petitioning and reaching out to senators and corporations directly, to increase public interest in the topic and push for legal reform. Our regular volunteers who have been with us through many projects will continue to provide the means by which campaigns are marketed and how the word is spread about this issue at hand; volunteers are the group of people who tum strategy to action. The members of the board essentially ensure that the organization adheres to an ethical standard and that all actions work to advance the mission, which is ending the exploitative practices applied by corporations onto children We are focused on ending the act of preying on children's technological data and using it to not only learn more about the child and direct the child’s desires, but also to do so without the child’s conscious consent. The constituents of our organization will be the eventual beneficiaries of our concerted efforts, but the end product of our proposed project will be used by other advocacy organizations, legal experts, and legislators to collaboratively attempt to close legal loopholes that stil allow for the exploitation of children, B. Application of the Human Rights Framework Our goal is to minimize human rights violations revolving around the exploitation of child consumers and child consumer data perpetrated by governments and corporations, We have gone to a great extent to previously research and analyze how international and domestic laws currently stand in relation to what actions constitute human rights abuses. The upholding of fundamental human rights is paramount to our efforts as an organization In 2013, the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 68/167 ("The Right to Privacy in the Digital Age") which specifies the rights to privacy in this new digital age in which we live. The resolution asserts that human rights that have been reinforced in such documents as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) are also applicable to our digital personas; human rights extend to the virtual world. This resolution specifically mentions Article 12 of the UDHR and denounces the interception of data by governments or corporations, stating that such practices could be human rights violations. The resolution further suggests that data should only be collected and interpreted in relation to security issues. In no way are the corporate practices relating to child consumer exploitation in compliance with this human rights document. Ideas of fundamental, universal, and equal human rights that were established in the UDHR were further expanded upon in the 1966 UN Resolution "InternationalCovenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights." It is important to notice that this, resolution directly specifies that human rights extend to children. For our purposes, Article 10 of this document provides the most influential declarations for further lawmaking: “Special measures of protection and assistance should be taken on behalf of all children and young persons without any discrimination for reasons of parentage or other conditions. Children and young persons should be protected from economic and social exploitation” (ICESC). When awarded this grant, we will live out the mission of Article 10; we will protect the children who, after nearly 51 years since its passing, are still exploited by those in power, even in some of the most democratic and “free” societies in our world. International law, while important, runs into many issues surrounding sovereignty: powerful states often ignore international law and do as they please within their own borders with little or no repercussions. For this reason, individual sovereign states must enforce these laws as well. In 2013, for instance, the United States passed the Children's Online Privacy and Protection Act, which was a huge step in the right direction as a powerful state deliberately enforced international law to prevent the human rights abuses mentioned above. This document provides a framework for what corporations can and cannot do when pitching to child consumers. The document also provides standardized definitions for words such as “child” (any individual under the age of thirteen), “collecting information” (means the gathering of any personal information from a child by any means, including but not limited to...), and “the internet” (means collectively the myriad of computer and telecommunications facilities, including equipment and operating software, which comprise the interconnected world-wide network of networks...) among others. With all of these regulations directly laid out, it identifying circumstances where child consumers are being exploited will be more straightforward. In the spirit of being explicit, this project will not focus strictly on the United States’ policies. This was just an example of how international frameworks can be applied on the state level. C. Request Receiving this grant will allow us the monetary resources to create a legal framework that holds corporations and governments accountable for the consistent and inappropriate exploitation of children by ensuring children their basic rights to information, thought, and voice. We would like to come up with legal standards to support the cause of limiting the commercialization of children's lives and lobby governments and corporations to understand the harmful, long-term effects of this deliberate exploitation of children. The monetary support is necessary for ourorganization to make a sustainable change at a larger scale in the legal process, where our cause can actually progress with the help of “law and order.” As an organization, we are aware of the collaborative nature of Libra as an organization and view collaboration with them and other Libra grantees as a way to not only further our cause but to create a multidisciplinary approach to achieving our goals and those of other Libra grantees. In fact, a joint effort is something we view as synergistic given the overlapping goals of human rights work. The legal framework that we will create holds both corporations and the governments in which these corporations operate accountable for the consistent and inappropriate exploitation of children in order to ensure the basic rights to information, thought, and say in matters affecting their lives are upheld. We will achieve this by implementing legal standards to support the limitation of the commercialization of children’s lives and create a campaign to rally government and corporations not only to adhere to these standards, but to also understand the harmful, long-term effects of this, issue. There is already existing research that has been conducted on the amount of child-targeted advertisements there are, particularly via television commercials and from the food industry; however, in an age where the media environment is ubiquitous, we would like to conduct our own in-house research that is not specific to TV ads and food Thus, to kick off the creation of such a framework, we will need funding to do an extensive amount of research aimed at uncovering the unethical practices of corporations everywhere. We are interested in how the data that is unknowingly collected from devices such as mobile phones and tablets is used to personally target each child individually. Companies such as Google and YouTube that conduct large data collection from its consumers with every use will be a large focus in our study. By doing this, we will have a better understanding of exactly which human rights are being violated, how they are being violated, and possible preventions, which will all become part of the legal framework we build. The process of creating a legal framework that will be recognized at a government level will be intensive. We estimate that we will need six months to conduct the research and another six months to work with lawyers to create the framework that will incorporate existing policies (international and domestic) based on the results of our research. The product of our research will be a practitioner manual that directly outlines the legal framework that currently exists in different countries and internationally in order to identify loopholes that governments and corporations employ in order to continue exploiting children. This manual will be used by advocates and legal experts alike in order to further lobby for the rights of children and potentially introduce future legislation that will minimize human rights violations around the world. These goals are manifestations of our “Theory of Change,” particularly of change in attitudes, change in children’s environments, and change in rules. We hope that inchanging the rules, we will be able to alter children’s media environments to be more protective and also change the callous attitude society is building towards these rights in this technological era. We realize that these goals towards change will not happen overnight and will require continued maintenance once achieved. Therefore, we have several fundraising plans already in place. In order to campaign for the ratification of our legal framework and its lifespan beyond the scope of this grant, we have raised money and will continue to raise money via our ongoing donation acceptances and our individual events, such as our Thanksgiving Turkey Trot, holiday raffles, and monthly kids’ game nights. We will also rely on our volunteers to help with this cause, particularly our remote volunteers, as much of our campaigning and communication with government officials will be done on the web.