Paul McCartney backs new Everyone Matters campaign

From paulmccartney.com, April 2, 2014:

People around the world have been uploading “I Am!” selfies to express pride in identity for today’s 2014 Everyone Matters day, a campaign Paul has supported since it launched in 2012.

Everyone Matters is a global initiative bringing together international celebrities and leading organisations representing people of all ages, sex, race and religion.

Paul joins a number of people who have penned slogans of inclusiveness and tolerance. Other supporters of the humanitarian message include Hugh Jackman, Ellen DeGeneres, George Clooney, Kevin Spacey, the Dalai Lama, Nicole Kidman, Daniel Craig, London Mayor Boris Johnson, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Natalie Portman, Christina Aguilera, Deepak Chopra, Dame Judi Dench, and many more.

This year the campaign invites you to upload “I Am!” photos to Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, to encourage people to make the world a place where everyone feels it’s OK to be who they are without fear of judgment or shame. The photo is accompanied by a handwritten statement; perhaps a personality trait, something they like, where they live, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion – anything that says who they are. If you’d like to join in, please remember to use the hashtag #IAM

For those of you unfamiliar with the term, a ‘scouser’ is slang for someone from Liverpool. Paul is proud of his Northern heritage and has become a much-loved figurehead for the city, to this day keeping his accent!

From Everyone Matters:

Being a loving, respectful human being is the most important thing we can be – but unfortunately it’s not prioritized in today’s social interactions, media discourses or school curriculum. In our accelerating, desensitized, digitally-driven, winning-is-all world, there’s an epidemic of casual disrespect, bullying, incivility, and rudeness.

We are trying to change that with year-round school programs, community engagements, a global online community – and our annual flagship “Everyone Matters Day” which celebrates EVERYONE’S uniqueness as contributing to what makes their city or community vibrant.

Paul McCartney was one of the inaugural global figures who supported the first Everyone Matters campaign launched in 2012.