Daniella L. Boston is co-founder and executive director of uNight: for the Children of Uganda, a New York-based not-for-profit organization dedicated to building an effective grassroots constituency in the United States to help end the 20-year civil war and the humanitarian catastrophe in northern Uganda.

uNight sponsors and supports innovative projects to help reclaim and rehabilitate the lives of thousands of children and youth affected by the war. The civil war in Uganda has claimed thousands of lives, affected millions of children and youth, and forced over 1.8 million people into squalid makeshift camps where over 1,000 people die each week. It is one of the worse humanitarian catastrophes in the world. The rate of violent death in northern Uganda is three times Iraq’s, and the level of suffering and dislocation surpasses that of Darfur in the Sudan.
In partnership with the Ugandan community in the US, uNight has mobilized grassroots support through film screenings, panel discussions, community events, and public demonstrations and marches. In October 2005, uNight organized a highly successful public march in New York as part of GuluWalk, a global campaign that was carried out simultaneously to raise awareness about the humanitarian crisis in northern Uganda. uNight has also launched chapters at schools and universities nationwide to galvanize support for the children and youth of northern Uganda.
Prior to co-founding uNight, Ms. Boston visited Uganda for the first time in 2001, where she spent six months living in rural Masaka, working for Student’s Partnership Worldwide (SPW), a not-for-profit organization that recruits and trains young adults as volunteer Peer Educators to lead programmes addressing urgent health and environmental issues of local communities in Africa and Asia. In spring 2004, Daniella returned to Uganda to study with the School for International Training (SIT) as part of their Development Program. In summer 2004, the Harvard University Committee on Human Rights Studies sponsored Daniella’s research on political development in Uganda. Daniella Boston’s thesis, a culmination of her practical experience and research in Uganda is entitled “One-party, No-party or Extra-party Democracy? Political Culture, Participation and the Movement System in Uganda.”
For two decades, the international community has ignored the genocide in northern Uganda. uNight is determined to mobilize an constituency of people, especially in the US and UK, who will fight for the human rights of the victims of Uganda’s civil war, especially the children of northern Uganda, the most “invisible” victims of this senseless war.

For more information about uNight, please visit: www.unight.org.

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