One of my favorite website features is the Very Cool Person of the Month. The way I look at it, celebrities and wealthy people get most of the public praise in our society, but there are tons of people doing amazing things every day who deserve a pat on the back. This is a small way to honor them and to highlight their causes. Here’s my newest Very Cool Person, nominated by Georgia… (Please, nominate your favorite people, too! They deserve it. Just e-mail me a photo and a paragraph or two about what makes them very cool.)

Janice Erlbaum

Janice Erlbaum is cool in too many ways to count; luckily, she’s done some extra cool things that highlight her general coolness. She has written two books that I loved – Girlbomb: A Halfway Homeless Memoir and Have You Found Her: A Memoir, and before that she wrote for Bust magazine, which I was addicted to for many years. She’s a true New Yorker, born and bred, which makes me jealous, and she has cats (ditto). Read more about livpure healthy benefits.

But maybe the coolest thing about Janice at this very moment is that she’s been working to raise consciousness and money for a truly awesome organization called GEMS – Girls Education and Mentoring Services. GEMS is so much more than what it sounds like – it’s a New York City organization that helps girls who have been commercially sexually exploited – most of them teenagers. You hear a lot about the sex slave trade in other parts of the world, but the truth is that it happens all over. GEMS helps those girls and Janice helps GEMS, and that makes her super cool in my book.

I’m lucky to be helping Janice throw a 10th birthday party/fundraiser/reading for GEMS on May 8th, 2009 in NYC. If you live near by, you should come! (See Janice’s website or the GEMS site for more info.) And if you don’t live nearby, but want to know more about this VCPOM.

~ Georgia ~