by Jennifer Burden | Feb 24, 2013 | Shot@Life, Social Good, Uganda, Uncategorized, World Voice
It takes a lot for me to leave my family behind for a week like I did to go to Uganda. Actually, it was the only time I’ve ever done it, sparked by an URGENT matter. Did you know that every 20 seconds a child dies from a vaccine-preventable disease?
Doesn’t sound pressing enough?
Well how about some math…:
In the time it takes for the Shot@Life 28 Days of Impact campaign to run through the blogosphere, statistically,120,960 children will succumb to vaccine-preventable deaths in the developing world.
And February is the shortest month.
That is 1.5 MILLION children in a year will die a death that we could have helped prevent for a few bucks. Yes, a few bucks, even just one buck, in some cases. It’s so simple.
Last October I left my family for a week and flew to Uganda with a delegation from the UN Foundation’s
Shot@Life campaign.
(more…)
Jennifer Burden is the Founder and CEO of World Moms Network, an award winning website on global motherhood, culture, human rights and social good. World Moms Network writes from over 30 countries, has over 70 contributors and was listed by Forbes as one of the “Best 100 Websites for Women”, named a “must read” by The New York Times, and was recommended by The Times of India.
She was also invited to Uganda to view UNICEF’s family health programs with Shot@Life and was previously named a “Global Influencer Fellow” and “Social Media Fellow” by the UN Foundation. Jennifer was invited to the White House twice, including as a nominated "Changemaker" for the State of the World Women Summit. She also participated in the One Campaign’s first AYA Summit on the topic of women and girl empowerment and organized and spoke on an international panel at the World Bank in Washington, DC on the importance of a universal education for all girls. Her writing has been featured by Baby Center, Huffington Post, ONE.org, the UN Foundation’s Shot@Life, and The Gates Foundation’s “Impatient Optimists.” She is currently a candidate in Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs in the Executive Masters of Public Affairs program, where she hopes to further her study of global policies affecting women and girls.
Jennifer can be found on Twitter @JenniferBurden.
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by Jennifer Burden | Feb 21, 2013 | ONE, Social Good, World Voice
When World Moms Blog first became a #ONEMoms community partner, we published a collaborative post by our global contributors on sweet potato recipes. Our moms mixed the root with everything from black beans to walnuts!
Today, we’re back participating in the ONE Blog Hop and helping to spread the word about Sweet Potato Day today! (#sweetpotatolove)
Could you imagine if your community could make a big healthy difference by adding sweet potatoes to the local diet? In many communities this switch can be the difference from a child growing up malnourished or nourished. Or a child needing eye glasses, or not. (more…)
Jennifer Burden is the Founder and CEO of World Moms Network, an award winning website on global motherhood, culture, human rights and social good. World Moms Network writes from over 30 countries, has over 70 contributors and was listed by Forbes as one of the “Best 100 Websites for Women”, named a “must read” by The New York Times, and was recommended by The Times of India.
She was also invited to Uganda to view UNICEF’s family health programs with Shot@Life and was previously named a “Global Influencer Fellow” and “Social Media Fellow” by the UN Foundation. Jennifer was invited to the White House twice, including as a nominated "Changemaker" for the State of the World Women Summit. She also participated in the One Campaign’s first AYA Summit on the topic of women and girl empowerment and organized and spoke on an international panel at the World Bank in Washington, DC on the importance of a universal education for all girls. Her writing has been featured by Baby Center, Huffington Post, ONE.org, the UN Foundation’s Shot@Life, and The Gates Foundation’s “Impatient Optimists.” She is currently a candidate in Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs in the Executive Masters of Public Affairs program, where she hopes to further her study of global policies affecting women and girls.
Jennifer can be found on Twitter @JenniferBurden.
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by World Moms Blog | Feb 12, 2013 | Kenya, Social Good, World Voice
We meet interesting people on all platforms! Twitter led us to Evans Wadango, the founder of Sustainable Development For All, an organization in Kenya. At only 19 years old he came up with a revolutionary idea, the “Use Solar, Save Lives” program to enable families to receive a regular source of income after getting solar lamps. Interested in the type of self-starter that he is from his home country of Kenya, we invited him to write us a guest post:
On my recent visit to Western Kenya, I met so many people living in dynamic villages, with different economic conditions. Some of the villages have electricity cables passing along the main road, but the families living just fifty meters from the electricity cable cannot afford the cost of tapping to it. Although I saw the worrying trend of a rapid decrease in the size of land owned by each family, some families grew sugarcane while others grew maize.
My friend and I visited one of the villages Sustainable Development For All-Kenya has been working in for several years where we met women of Mumashi group holding their usual meeting. I saw children going to school, healthy women and children, and more importantly, happy faces. The women were learning how to bake cakes. My friend asked the women how the baking of cakes was going to change their lives. The women were so eager to answer- but the group leader, mama Ruth explained: (more…)
World Moms Blog is an award winning website which writes from over 30 countries on the topics of motherhood, culture, human rights and social good. Over 70 international contributors share their stories from around the globe, bonded by the common thread of motherhood and wanting a better world for their children.
World Moms Blog was listed by Forbes Woman as one of the "Best 100 Websites for Women 2012 & 2013" and also called a "must read" by the NY Times Motherlode in 2013. Our Senior Editor in India, Purnima Ramakrishnan, was awarded the BlogHer International Activist Award in 2013.
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by Kristyn Zalota | Feb 5, 2013 | Babies, Being Thankful, Birthing, Child Care, Clean Birth Kits, Death and Dying, Humanity, Inspirational, International, Maternal Health, Poverty, Social Good, Women's Rights, World Moms Blog, World Voice, Younger Children
This post is the third installment by Kristyn Zalota, Founder of CleanBirth.org, about her work in Laos. To read the first post in the series,click here: “One Mom’s Mission to Save Lives in Laos”. To read the second post, click here: “Small Project Big Impact: Making Birth Safe in Laos”.
As you may know from my previous posts, I am a mom on a mission to make birth safer in Laos. This month my organization, , has the goal of raising enough funds to save 1,000 mothers and 1,000 babies.
I am a doula, Lamaze educator, and advocate for safe birth for impoverished women. I was drawn to work in Laos, because women there die at a higher rate than Afghani women and Lao babies die at a higher rate than babies in Sudan.
In November 2012, I traveled to southern Laos and, with my Lao partner organization, trained nurses in the use and distribution of Clean Birth Kits. When the nurses told me that women give birth alone, I agreed to fund community education about safe birthing practices
Having completed the nurses’ training, we went deep into the mountains to visit the clinics there. I immediately sensed the grinding poverty of the area. People live on $1 per day. The life expectancy of women is short, either due to childbirth (8-12 births) or disease. Most will lose several babies.
What do you see when you walk into the villages? Naked kids with runny noses. Mothers with babies in slings. Bamboo and wood one-room dwellings on stilts. No electricity, not a single store. While a new road connecting Thailand and Vietnam is bringing change, it is mostly in the form of human trafficking, HIV, and environmental degradation. (more…)
Kristyn brings her years of experience as an entrepreneur and serial volunteer to CleanBirth.org. She holds a MA, has run small businesses in Russia and the US, and has volunteered in Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos and Uganda on projects related to women’s empowerment.
After having children, Kristyn became an advocate for mothers in the US, as a doula and Lamaze educator, and abroad, as the Founder of CleanBirth.org. She is honored to provide nurses in Laos with the supplies, funding and training they need to lower maternal and infant mortality rates in their villages.
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by Nicole Melancon (USA) | Jan 29, 2013 | Health, Maternal Health, Sleep and Children, Social Good, World Voice
It must have been a sign of fate that I happened to be paging through the resort brochure the last night of my stay at the lovely Barefoot Cay and saw the two-page spread on Clinica Esperanza. Instantly, I was taken by the story and by a stroke of luck the next morning, thirty minutes before my departure to the United States I found myself interviewing the very doctor who has dedicated the last several years of his life to helping build the clinic.
Photo of the clinic. Photo credit: Doctor Patrick Connell.
The clinic itself started in a rather unexpected way. Peggy Stranges, an American nurse had come to the gorgeous, tropical island of Roatan off the shores of Honduras to retire. However, once word caught on among the local community that a nurse was living right down the street, more and more people came to Nurse Peggy looking for help. In a place lacking modern health care, Peggy began to see a need for providing low-cost or no-cost health care services to the people of Roatan.
Clinica Esperanza started at Nurse Peggy’s kitchen table and over the years expanded from her home to an apartment beneath her house, then occupied four rooms at a nearby church, and finally ended up in its home today as a first-class freestanding hospital in the Sandy Bay area of Roatan. (more…)
Third Eye Mom is a stay-at-home mom living in Minneapolis, Minnesota with her two children Max (6) and Sophia (4). Her children keep her continually busy and she is constantly amazed by the imagination, energy and joy of life that they possess! A world wanderer at heart, she has also been fortunate to have visited over 30 countries by either traveling, working, studying or volunteering and she continues to keep on the traveling path.
A graduate of French and International Relations from the University of Wisconsin Madison, where she met her husband Paul, she has always been a Midwest gal living in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Chicago. This adventurous mom loves to be outside doing anything athletic (hiking, running, biking, skiing, snowshoeing or simply enjoying nature), to travel and volunteer abroad, to write, and to spend time with her beloved family and friends.
Her latest venture involves her dream to raise enough money on her own to build and open a brand-new school in rural Nepal, and to teach her children to live compassionately, open-minded lives that understand different cultures and the importance of giving back to those in need. Third Eye Mom believes strongly in the value of making a difference in the world, no matter how small it may be. If there is a will, there is a way, and that anything is possible (as long as you set your heart and mind to it!).
Visit her on her blog, Thirdeyemom, where she writes about her travels and experiences in other lands!
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by Ms. V. (South Korea) | Jan 21, 2013 | Human Rights, Safety, South Korea, World Voice
Knotted Gun sculpture outside UN Headquarters in NYC.
Here, in South Korea, as in every other part of the world, there has been grief and shock over the shootings in Connecticut. The loss of so many young lives in such a vicious act of violence is incomprehensible across languages, religions, and cultures.
After tragedies like this one, which are all too commonplace in the US, people want as much information as possible about the shooter, their family, their upbringing. Any clue at all as to how this could have happened, even though we all know that no answer will ever satisfy us. There is nothing we could discover that would make this ok or comprehensible.
As people across the world ask why – why on earth would someone do this? – in many places people are asking why this young man had access to weapons that could fire 6 bullets per second. (more…)
Ms. V returned from a 3-year stint in Seoul, South Korea and is now living in the US in the beautiful Pacific Northwest with her partner, their two kids, three ferocious felines, and a dog named Avon Barksdale. She grew up all over the US, mostly along the east coast, but lived in New York City longer than anywhere else, so considers NYC “home.” Her love of travel has taken her all over the world and to all but four of the 50 states.
Ms. V is contemplative and sacred activist, exploring the intersection of yoga, new monasticism, feminism and social change. She is the co-director and co-founder of Samdhana-Karana Yoga: A Healing Arts Center, a non-profit yoga studio and the spiritual director for Hab Community. While not marveling at her beautiful children, she enjoys reading, cooking, and has dreams of one day sleeping again.
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