Jimmie Briggs

Jimmie Briggs is an award-winning human rights activist, journalist and author.

Briggs is the founder of the Man Up Campaign, a global initiative to mobilize young people to stop violence against women and girls in their communities through music, sports and technology. The Man Up Campaign formally launched during a Young Leaders Summit at the University of Johannesburg during 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa, bringing together youth from 25 countries throughout the world, including Sub-Saharan Africa, as well as the Middle East and Latin America.

Over the past two decades, Briggs has earned a reputation as one of the most respected human rights advocates in the field of journalism. Through extensive travels in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, he has produced seminal reporting on the lives of war-affected youth and children soldiers, as well as survivors of sexual violence. Briggs' work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, LIFE, El Pais, The Village Voice, Fortune, and scores of other publications.

Briggs is a National Magazine Award finalist and recipient of honors from the Open Society Institute, National Association of Black Journalists (for work in Uganda and Rwanda), and The Carter Center (for research on mental health trauma among rape survivors). His book Innocents Lost: When Child Soldiers Go To War won accolades in 2005, and took readers into the personal journeys of child soldiers and war-affected children in Rwanda, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), among other countries.

Briggs was selected as the winner of the 2010 GQ Magazine "Better Men Better World" Search, as well as one of Women's eNews' 21 Leaders for the 21st Century for his work with the Man Up Campaign and the issue of violence against women. He is currently working as a consultant on youth for the United Nations and advising Wyclef Jean and Yele Haiti on engaging men as advocates for gender violence prevention.

Briggs has worked for the UN Special Session on Children, Seeds of Peace, Oxfam USA, Amnesty International and the Enough Project in the DRC. He has served as an adjunct professor of investigative journalism at the New School for Social Research, and was a George A. Miller Visiting Professor in the Department of African and African-American Studies at the University of Illinois: Champaign-Urbana.

His next book The Wars Women Fight: Dispatches from a Father to His Daughter, examines violence against women and girls in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Afghanistan and Haiti.

He lives in New York City with his daughter, Mariela.