Tennessee’s state capitol building will be sporting a new color scheme — purple — Monday evening as organizers hope to draw attention to the tens of millions of orphans around the world.
Cheryl Robeson Piggott, CEO of a charity called The Stars Foundation, originated the World Orphans Day observance. The group has scheduled a fundraising event for Nashville that will bathe the building in purple light and will air public service announcements on NRB TV, an evangelical Christian network reaching 41 million homes, to promote the effort.
She said she hopes purple, as a color, will be associated with orphans in much the same way as pink is the color symbolizing breast cancer awareness. “It’s our biggest tool right now for getting the marketing of the brand,” she said in a telephone interview.
There are an estimated 140 million orphans globally, Ms. Piggott said, citing UNICEF’s definition of an orphan as a who has lost one or both parents. She said that the surviving child may not be living with a remaining parent, adding that 20 million orphans are in India now.
Beginning in 2009, Ms. Piggott began a lobbying effort to raise awareness of the plight of the world’s orphans, designating the second Monday in November as a day to remember these children.
She admits that meeting the needs of tens of millions of orphans is “huge,” which is why Ms. Piggott’s work focuses as much on awareness as on delivering relief. She said that the group has shipped tons of donated supplies overseas, including 60,000 pairs of shoes to Liberia.
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“I’m not trying to fix the whole problem,” she said. “I think that when we become more aligned, our platform will rise, and we will be able to attract the kind of a movement where people are thinking more about the orphans worldwide on a global scale,” she added.
Ms. Piggott said an experience in India sparked her concern for orphans. About 90 miles outside of New Delhi, she recalled, she saw women bringing infants to work at a carpet factory because child care was unavailable. It led her to found and support an orphanage “for a couple of years that we had [a] business over there.”
The experience, she said, opened “my eyes up to what’s going on in the rest of the world.”
Troy Miller, president and CEO of the National Religious Broadcasters and NRB TV, said the network welcomed the chance to promote the message of caring for orphans.
“It just made a lot of sense for us to bring awareness to this topic, within our viewing audience, and a lot of our folks really do get involved with what goes on internationally to support a lot of organizations that deal with orphans and deal with hunger problems and education around the world,” Mr. Miller, whose family has adopted four international children, said.
• Mark A. Kellner can be reached at mkellner@washingtontimes.com.
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