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"    &amp;quot;One thing I will be known for is turning the UN into a nightclub,&amp;quot; mused fashion designer and philanthropist Diane von Furstenberg as she thanked Daily Beast boss Tina Brown for her introduction at the first annual DvF Awards this past Saturday night. And though meant in jest, von Furstenberg&amp;#039;s statement was in fact true\u2014the room felt, looked, and pulsed far more like a hip downtown dance space than a ballroom at the meeting place of the world&amp;#039;s highest-ranked diplomats. At least that was the case until we took our seats and recipients Sadiqa Basiri Saleem of Afghanistan, Danielle Saint-Lot of Haiti, Katherine Chon of the United States, and Ingrid Betancourt of Columbia took the stage, sharing with us the inspiring backstories that earned them the prestigious nod, along with how they each planned on using the award&amp;#039;s generous $50,000 grant to further their work.  For Saleem, who was introduced by CNN correspondent Christiane Amanpour, the money will go towards creating the first women&amp;#039;s college in Afghanistan. &amp;quot;Educated women do not see themselves as victims anymore,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;We need more educated women, and an investment like this is the most significant way to move our women forward.&amp;quot; For Saint-Lot, introduced by U.S. Ambassador at Large for Global Women&amp;#039;s Issues Melanne Verveer, the award will serve as seed money to help women artisans &amp;quot;get back on their feet&amp;quot; after the devastation of her country&amp;#039;s recent earthquake. In one of the most moving moments of the evening, Saint-Lot brought her young daughter (proudly wearing a cobalt DvF dress) on-stage and told the crowd, &amp;quot;35 seconds can change a whole country. When the earthquake hit, all I could think about was finding my daughter. When I saw she was safe, nothing else mattered. I know now what it means to be blessed.&amp;quot;   For 30-year-old Katherine Chon (introduced by GMA co-anchor Robin Roberts), co-founder of the anti-human trafficking NGO, The Polaris Project, her $50,000 will go toward improving her organization&amp;#039;s national hotline, which in its infancy has already led to the arrest of human traffickers and rescue of those caught in its scarily pervasive wake. &amp;quot;Traffickers count on our ignorance, inaction, apathy, and desire to keep the problem at arm&amp;#039;s length,&amp;quot; Chon said. &amp;quot;This award will help those of us who fight for freedom to continue to do our work.&amp;quot;  And finally, actress Meryl Streep introduced former politician and FARC captive, Ingrid Betancourt, whose imprisonment in the Columbian jungle only came to an end in July 2008, close to seven years after she was taken by gunpoint. Betancourt plans to use her award to help the families of those young guerrillas who, as she put it, &amp;quot;don&amp;#039;t really want to be doing what they&amp;#039;re doing.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I want to use this second opportunity at life,&amp;quot; she says, &amp;quot;to push people forward to fight for that freedom inside of us that makes us better human beings.&amp;quot; Significant as the DvF Awards were, it was only one of a dozen-plus celebrations of female empowerment that took place over the weekend as part of The Daily Beast&amp;#039;s first `Women in the World&amp;#039; summit. From Friday night&amp;#039;s celeb-studded reading of the play, Seven (the introduction to which was given by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton), to Saturday morning&amp;#039;s one-on-one with Barbara Walters and Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, to any one of the panel discussions on pressing world issues involving women moderated by Katie Couric, Diane Sawyer, Tom Friedman, or Brown herself, the summit couldn&amp;#039;t have been a bigger success, nor a more powerful tribute to brilliant, glass-ceiling-breaking women from all points on the professional and international spectrum.  \u2014Johanna Cox   On the left: Diane von Furstenberg, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and summit organizer Tina Brown walking the red carpet before Friday night&amp;#039;s reading of Seven; On the right (top): Brown giving her opening remarks; (bottom): presenters\u2014and von Furstenberg\u2014standing behind the recipients of the first ever DvF Awards Photos: Courtesy of Amanda Potters Communications, HL Group, and Getty "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/news/a3821/diane-von-furstenberg-tina-browns-beast-of-a-weekend-921/>