With International Women’s Day just around the corner, we’ve asked our ONE Moms and partners to write about ordinary women and girls who have inspired them to be better activists. In this post, our friends from the World Food Programme write about Molly, an adolescent girl from a slum in Nairobi, Kenya, who dreams of helping other children when she grows up.
What do you see when you look into the eyes of the girls in your life you are proud of? We’re talking your daughters and students and nieces and neighbors. Charisma? Smarts? Courage?
At the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP), we are blown away by the enormous potential we see. We see the next generation of women embarking on changing the world. We see the future of a hunger-free world.
This International Women’s Day, we want you to meet one 13-year-old girl we are proud of. Her name is Molly and she is a big-hearted student who loves dancing and dreams of helping children when she grows up. She also lives in the Mathare slum of Nairobi, Kenya where she receives a daily meal at school through WFP’s School Meal’s Programme. It is often the only daily meal she can count on. Her teacher says she is one of the brightest students in her class.
With International Women’s Day just around the corner, we’ve asked our ONE Moms and partners to write about ordinary women who have inspired them to be better activists. In this post, Jennifer James, ONE Mom and head of the Mom Bloggers Club, writes about the passion for justice she sees in her friend, Mary.
Mary Martin Niepold
I have always been impressed by women who are go-getters. They don’t stand idly by and let others make decisions for them. They are thought leaders who create goals and go after them tenaciously. They think outside of the box and aren’t afraid to use and amplify their own voice. These are the women I look up to and after whom I want to pattern my life’s work. I meet women like this every so often. They are rare to be sure. It takes a very special woman to catch my eye and make me ponder life’s possibilities.
With International Women’s Day just around the corner, we’ve asked our ONE Moms and partners to write about ordinary women who have inspired them to be better activists. In this post, ONE Mom Elizabeth Atalay takes pride in her job as a mom and an activist.
My deep secret confession is that what I wanted to be when I grew up, more than anything in the world, was a stay-at-home mom.
I can hear all of you liberated women out there gasping in horror at this very moment, but please don’t judge me. Try to understand: This came from a little girl who grew up with a working mother with a Ph.D., the ultimate liberated woman at a time when few were. She was an amazing mother, but of course when we are children, we can only see our mothers in relation to our tiny selves, not as the whole women they are. In turn, I idealized my neighbor, the stay-at home mom who baked cookies and sewed clothes for her children, while I lived out the feral childhood of a latchkey kid. That neighbor, by the way, is now a grandmother in the process of completing her own Ph.D., so she is still my ideal!
Action: 32. Time: 15 minutes. Level of difficulty: Moderate. For the results of last week’s action, click here.
In honor of International Women’s Day coming up next Thursday, March 8, we’re asking our ONE members to answer this question: Which “ordinary woman” inspires you to be a better activist?
Which woman in your life makes you want to do more of this? Activists at a vaccine tour of Edinburgh.
We’ve already asked our ONE Moms and NGO partners to answer this question. Earlier this week, ONE Mom Elisa Morgan wrote about her friend Jane, who passed away from cancer on International Women’s Day nearly two years ago. And Shayne Moore reflected on a fellow mom blogger who started an anti-modern day slavery website after hearing a shocking statistic.
With International Women’s Day just around the corner, we’ve asked our ONE Moms and partners to write about ordinary women who have inspired them to be better activists. In this post, ONE Mom Elisa Morgan reminds us to make use of the time we have through the story of her friend, Jane.
After what seemed to be a “routine” hysterectomy, Jane discovered she had cancer, an aggressive, deadly cancer of the uterus. Vibrant Jane, in her early 60s, was still teaching kindergarten at the public magnet school she’d helped found 15 years prior. Her daughter was about to be married, her oldest son was about to make her a grandmother, and suddenly — Jane was dying.
ONE Mom Elisa Morgan in Africa
Dying? No way!
After exhaustive and exhausting tests, Jane and her family came to terms with the poor prognosis, and Jane began treatment to prolong her life. Their goal was for Jane to attend her daughter’s wedding and hold her grandbaby.
With International Women’s Day just around the corner, we’ve asked our ONE Moms and partners to write about an ordinary woman who has inspired them to be better activists. In this blog post, ONE Mom Shayne Moore shares the story of Kimberly, founder of the Abolitionist Mama blog.
I have a friend who heard a story. It broke her heart and it filled the quiet spaces in her mind. It was sad story, even disturbing. In her busy life of mothering two children, running a home, having a part-time job and being a wife, sister and daughter, Kimberly stayed with the story. She did not push it away or ignore it.
In her sunny life in southern California, a dark cloud began following her around. Kimberly had just woken up to the reality of modern-day slavery — the reality that there are more than 27 million people in slavery today and the majority of them are women and children. There are more slaves today than ever before in the history of the world. Untold numbers are young girls being used in the sex trafficking business — a business in which criminals make billions of dollars per year.
My friend did not hear this traumatic reality and dismiss it as “too overwhelming.” One day, while driving in the car listening to her young daughter sincerely explain that slavery had ended with Abraham Lincoln, Kimberly’s heart burned for women and girls everywhere. Her daughter’s innocence and her own newly shattered ignorance awoke a sleeping lioness hungry for justice.
Mary Beth Powers of Save the Children shares a special story for International Women’s Day.
Whenever I travel to Bangladesh, I can’t help but imagine how it would be for my 12-year-old daughter to grow up there instead of in suburban New York.
My daughter is still a child, barely an adolescent. But in Bangladesh, plans for her marriage might be well underway by now, her education nearing its end.
The shy and fleeting faces of Bangladeshi girls have made such an impression on me during the 20 years I’ve been traveling to Bangladesh for public health work. That’s been the case even though girls in rural areas were barely seen and never heard –- especially in those early years.
But increasingly, things are changing for girls. It’s extremely exciting. Imagine the full potential of half population being unleashed!
Check out this video of Shathi. She got married at 14 and became a mother at 15. She’s expected to stay home, like most girls and women in her community. But, today she’s raising her voice to influence those around her to think differently about girls and their futures.
What did it take to make the quiet and unassuming Shathi a powerful agent for change? A safe space to talk, play and learn with other adolescent girls and young women, and support for her to express herself in her own family.
Shathi is just one of 42,000 girls who’ve benefited from Save the Children’s Girls’ Voices project, thanks to support from the Nike Foundation. Today many of these young women are talking about early marriage and the increased risks of maternal and newborn death that come with young pregnancies.
And armed with new life and business skills, many of the girls are contributing to their family’s wellbeing in ways never before imagined. (Check out Shilpi’s story to see how).
These girls are no longer shy and fleeting but are instead outgoing and active members of their families and communities.
I can hardly wait to see what these girls do next.
Mary Beth Powers leads Save the Children’s newborn and child survival campaign, which you can join at www.goodgoes.org.
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