Wouldn’t it be rad if you could help make someone else’s life better by doing something you love? While you’re out shreddin, making turns and having a good time with your friends, someone’s life is making a turn for the better. We have come up with something pretty epic and it’s called the ZION POP Program (People of the Planet). The POP Program is people driven and is all about Social Justice. We have made it our mission to help out our fellow humans who have been dealt a bad hand. This is the part of ZION Snowboards that we call “serious fun.” There are some hardcore issues happening in our world and we thought it would be rad to involve core snowboarders in making a difference. With the POP program we will be donating 10% of the sale of our participating products to charities that help make people’s lives better. Cool thing is - you can do this while you’re doing your switch backside 10’s or Tindy’s!

ZION is stoked to announce that our first partnership for the POP Program will be the Ratanak Foundation! ZION will be donating 10% of the sale of POP Products sold in our Flagship Online Shop to the Ratanak Foundation’s New Song Project. The New Song Project is dedicated to fighting child sex trafficking in Cambodia. We had a chance to meet up with Brian - the Founder of the Ratanak Foundation and we literally had our jaws on the floor after hearing about what was going on in the brothels in Cambodia with children as young as 5 years old. These children are being violated 10-20 times a day for a cost of 2 dollars per customer. Young virgins can go for up to five hundred dollars because customers that have AIDS believe they will be cured if they have sex with a virgin. You can imagine the devastation that this brings. The New Song Project is all about rescuing these children and rehabilitating them so that they can learn what if means to be a normal human being. The children that are rescued are brought to a top secret, high security location where they are in rehab for about 2 years. They are taught to be children again - most of them do not know what being a child is - they never got the chance. This stuff is not a cake walk - this is secret mission Chuck Norris kind of stuff because they need to be extracted from the brothels and pimps and then secretly brought to a safe location. As you can imagine the pimps do not want to lose their “product” so this is a very dangerous job for the rescuers whose lives are at risk every time they do a rescue operation.

The goal of the ZION Snowboards POP Program is to put a big a dent as possible into this beast of child sex slavery. Partnering up with the Ratanak Foundation is going to change kids lives one at a time and give them a chance to be normal humans after everything has been brutally stripped from them.

ZION is a company founded and run by snowboarders. Our office is the mountain and the only suits we wear to work are snowsuits. We hope that building boards with maximum fun factor, offering products that set you apart at your local scene, and involving you in making other peoples lives better will get you stoked on ZION.

Check out zionsnowboards.com and click on the shop online link to check out the products that are part of the POP Program.

Tags: charity, non profit, people of the planet, zion snowboards

This entry was posted on Friday, August 8th, 2008 at 3:46 am and is filed under NEWS. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.