Yesterday I had the opportunity to listen in a conference call along with other social good bloggers to hear World Food Program USA Board Chair Hunter Biden and WFP USA President & CEO Rick Leach discuss the “Live Below the Line” Challenge to help solve global hunger. The fact that 1 in 8 people in the world live in constant hunger – which means 925 million peoplewill not get enough to eat this year (more than the populations of the United States, Canada and the European Union) is not only a tragedy but the world’s number one health risk.
This week is Global Immunization Week a time set aside to celebrate and advocate the importance of providing global vaccines to save lives of children around the world. I have been an active member and advocate for the United Nations Foundation’s Shot@Life campaign for the last year and a half and have been continually inspired by how easy and simple it is to save lives.
Every 20 seconds a child dies from a vaccine-preventable death. Yet we can change this tragic reality. We know that 1 in 5 children in the developing world do not have access to life-saving vaccines. Yet we have the tools and resources to prevent 1.5 million deaths each year – the equivalent to the number of children entering kindergarten in the US each year – by providing vaccines. For the mere cost of a week’s worth of coffee – $20 – you can give a child a lifetime of immunity from a deadly disease and save a life. It is easy. Simple. And it saves lives.
Your voice, your time and your support can change a child’s life forever.
Photo credit: Stuart Ramson/UN Foundation
As a Shot@Life Champion I’ve had the opportunity to use my voice by learning all about the importance of global vaccines and sharing this information as an advocate through social media, my blog and directly with my members of Congress. I’ve visited Washington DC three times to learn more about global vaccines and advocacy. I’ve also lobbied with my members of Congress both here in Minnesota as well as on Capital Hill. Finally, I’ve held two local fundraising events at my home in which together with my friends we have raised over $2,800 which has helped vaccinate 140 children for life. It has been a year to remember and I feel proud that I’ve been able to make a difference in the world.
First Shot@Life party during Global Immunization Week. April 2012.
My children and me wearing our Shot@Life t-shirts during Global Immunization Week.
Some people ask why do I care? Why do I spend so much of my time devoted to other children half way around the world, children I will never meet?
Simple. I am a mother too and I want to help give every mother the same opportunity to having a healthy child and an opportunity to reach those precious milestones in a child’s life that stay forever in your heart.
Like my daughter’s last day at preschool.
I want to give every child the Shot@Life they deserve.
Women getting her child immunized in Mozambique. Photo credit: Stuart Ramson/UN Foundation.
Please help spread the word about Shot@Life and the importance of global immunizations. Here are some ways you can help out:
Earlier this month, I posted on the upcoming Newborn Health Summit in South Africa and shared some tragic facts about how many children are not getting a chance at life. The post is called “Crisis and Hope in Newborn Health“.
As part of the Global Team of 200, I have been working with the Gates Foundation this month to spread word and awareness about global newborn health in honor of The Global Newborn Health Conference being held on April 15th in South Africa. The conference is supported by Save the Children. MCHIP, Gates Foundation, USAID andUNICEF.
Today, my YouTube video was released on why I am advocating for newborn health. It made me cry. It is so beautiful that I had to share. It is a part of who I am, what I believe, what I stand for, and why I must advocate for all those voiceless moms around the world who won’t have the joy of watching their children grow up.
I am so honored to be part of the Global Team of 200 and truly looking forward to my upcoming trip to India this May where I will go to advocate and learn more about maternal health.
Having a baby is supposed to be the most joyous time of a women’s life. However, not always do things go as planned and far too often what is supposed to be the happiest time of a mother’s life ends in tragedy.
Despite advances in medical care, newborn mortality rates in some of the most impoverished countries in the world remain alarmingly high.
Ashawa, Dohuk Governorate, Northern Iraq — UNICEF Officials visit Ahmedi Hospital to review the implementation of the Baby Friendly Hospital Initiative. Photo credit: UN Photo/Bikem Ekberzade
How much do you really know when it comes to the unacceptable toll of newborn deaths, around the world?
Last Friday, March 22 was World Water Day 2013, a powerful day of advocacy and awareness worldwide about the importance of safe water and sanitation. As part of the Global Team of 200, a group of social good mom bloggers from across the country who concentrate on women and girls, child hunger, and maternal health, I wrote my piece titled “Coming together for World Water Day“.
Photo credit: WaterAid
Jennifer James, founder of Mom Bloggers for Social Goodand The Global Team of 200 wrote this piece today on the popular blog site Babble called “Mom Bloggers in the Importance of Water” which documents the work our volunteer team of social good mom bloggers did for World Water Day 2013. I was honored to read it and wanted to share it with you all.
Today is World Tuberculosis (TB) Day. I was asked to write a post for the UN Foundation’s Shot@Life blog on how I have become inspired to be a global health advocate. Here is the post. To check it out on the Shot@Life blog, click here.
Photo credit: World Health Organization (WHO)
Never in a million years would I have pictured myself as a global health warrior. If you had asked me two years earlier if I’d be writing, volunteering and advocating on global heath issues, I would have certainly been surprised by the question. Yet in January 2012, I was selected to attend a three-day seminar hosted by the UN Foundation to be trained on global vaccines as a Shot@Life Champion. Little did I know, this summit would change my path and start my life-long journey as a global health advocate.
Waving at the school children in rural Nepal. A trip that opened my eyes to the beauty and poverty of the world.
This Friday, March 22, is World Water Day – a day delegated by the United Nations to recognize the importance and need of safe water around the world. In honor of this important day, I am thrilled to be working with the Global Team of 200 and WaterAid to help raise awareness of the desperate need for safe drinking water and sanitation around the world. Safe water and sanitation transforms lives and is one of the keys to bringing people out of poverty.
Water is just the beginning because… it helps build a more prosperous future. For every $1 invested in water and sanitation, an average of $4 is returned in increased productivity, thanks to time saved and better health. Photo Credit: WaterAid.
Did you know that 783 million people do not have access to safe drinking water?
Step back and think about this statistic for a moment. What would you do if you were not able to simply turn on your faucet and fill up your glass or pot with clean, safe water?
Until recently, Ayelech, a 22-year-old mother of two living in Lehayte, Ethiopia spent over two hours a day searching for water and carrying it home in two large jerry cans on her back. She gave birth to her second child Oytiba while on the side of river filling her cans. Photo credit: WaterAid.
What would you do if you had to spend an hour or two each and every day fetching clean drinking water?
With a safe water source close to home, people in the world’s poorest countries have a lot more time and water to cultivate crops, saving money and improving their diets at the same time. Photo credit: WaterAid.
How would you manage? How would you live your life? And more importantly, how would you care for your family?
School-age children spent their days scrambling up narrow rocky trails, carrying home dirty water instead of going to school. Photo Credit: WaterAid.
To most of us in the Western world, the thought of not having instant access to clean, safe drinking water is literally unimaginable. However, for 11 % of the world’s population, this is a tragic reality. When you combine having unsafe drinking water with poor sanitation, it leads to diarrhea which kills 2,000 children every single day. Something completely unthinkable to many of us.
Every day, millions of women walk miles to fetch water, often carrying a child too. When the child gets too heavy to carry, they are left at home, often unsupervised. Photo credit: WaterAid.
Millions of people are trapped in a world in which clean, fresh and safe water is not even a remote option and has led to dire consequences. Preventable deaths and diseases, wasted time spent fetching water each day, lack of access for girls to education due to no adequate sanitation, and lower economic output for the nations without safe water and sanitation. Not having safe water or sanitation keeps people trapped in a vicious cycle of poverty with little chance of escape.
Water really is just the beginning…..these children are thrilled with their recently constructed toilet that provides them with good sanitation and privacy. Safe water really helps keep girls in school too. Photo credit: WaterAid.
But there is hope as the problem of unsafe drinking water is entirely solvable.
This Friday, join WaterAid and the Global Team of 200 to help spread the word about global water poverty. There are a variety of ways you can participate in this day and help spread awareness.
How you can help:
Follow WaterAid on Twitter and Facebook and share our posts on the #20ways that water is just the beginning of the road out of poverty. Also follow along with the Twitter has tag #WorldWaterDay 2013 for the latest news.
Join the World Water Day Google+ Hangout at 1.30pm EST/ 5:30PM GMT on Friday, March 22 at http://ow.ly/iZCdj – WaterAid and other leading water organizations (such as +charity: water, +Water.org, +Water For People, +People Water) will be discussing the world water crisis and solutions in a celebration moderated by YouTube star Justine Ezarik and WaterAid America’s Head of Policy and Advocacy, Lisa Schechtman (@LSchecht).
Make a donation: as experts in practical, hands-on water solutions WaterAid has brought clean water to 17.5 million people. But we need your help to achieve our aim of helping 1.4 million more people this year.
Please also watch WaterAid’s beautiful video “Water is Just the beginning” and share it.
Lives are transformed when hours spent carrying water are instead spent with family, tending crops, raising livestock or starting a business. Simple access to water, toilets, and hygiene education keeps families healthy, women and girls safe, and children in school. In communities around the world, WaterAid has helped 17.5 million people take the first steps out of poverty.
Today I am honored to be collaborating with a group of women bloggers on behalf of ONE, a non-partisan, grassroots advocacy organization that fights extreme poverty and preventable diseases, to increase awareness about world hunger.
ONE asks:
“How can it be that 40% of Africa’s children are so chronically malnourished by the age of five that they will never fully thrive, physically recover or mentally develop – and this has not improved in two decades, despite so much other development progress?
In 2010, 171 million children under the age of five had stunted growth (chronically malnourished)[1]
Every year, malnutrition causes 3.5 million child deaths – or more than one third of all deaths of children under the age of five[2]
More than 600,000 children die each year from vitamin A deficiency[3]
2 billion people are anemic, including every second pregnant woman and an estimated 40% of school-aged children — contributing to 20% of all maternal deaths[4]
The economic toll of malnutrition causes the loss of 2-3% of GDP in affected countries and more than 10% of productivity over a person’s lifetime[5]
As an avid runner, I was thrilled when I first heard of a new app called Charity Miles. Charity Miles has partnered with a lot of fantastic non-profit organizations and allows you to donate your miles after a run, walk or bike ride to one of their partner charities. All you have to do is download the free app, hit start, and you are on your way to doing good while you work out. Brilliant isn’t it?
This month, Charity Miles has partnered with the UN Foundation who I am honored to work with as an advocate and volunteer. Together the UN Foundation and Charity Miles is running a #VDay10k Campaignwhere people can exercise for a good cause using the Charity Miles app. How does it work? Simple.
2013 Shot@Life Champions after a day of advocating on Capital Hill.
The last four days have been absolutely amazing. I was one of 100 men and women who went to our nation’s capital to learn about and advocate for global vaccines as part of the UN Foundation’s Shot@Life Campaign. It was my second time participating in the Shot@Life Summit and was such an honor to represent the people across the United States who believe strongly in the importance of providing global vaccines for children around the world.
Last January I attended the United Nation’s Foundation Shot@Life Champion Summit in Washington DC and became a global health advocate. Along with 45 women and men across the country, I was trained in all areas of advocacy, social media and fundraising in order to become a grassroots advocate for providing life-saving vaccines to children around the world.
I wanted to share a great post today on World Mom’s Blog, where I’m a writer and contributing editor, on a fantastic organization founded by Kristyn Zalota called Clean Birth. We all know that in developing countries having a safe birth for mother and child is not a given. In fact about 800 women die around the world every day due to complications during and after childbirth.
Photo credit: Wikipedia Free Commons.
Here are some facts from the World Health Organization that demonstrate how unacceptably high the numbers are:
99% of all maternal deaths occur in developing countries.
Maternal mortality is higher in women living in rural areas and among poorer communities.
Young adolescents face a higher risk of complications and death as a result of pregnancy than older women.
Skilled care before, during and after childbirth can save the lives of women and newborn babies.
Between 1990 and 2010, maternal mortality worldwide dropped by almost 50%.
However, In 2010, 287 000 women died during and following pregnancy and childbirth.
Almost all of these deaths occurred in low-resource settings, and most could have been prevented.
Please stop by and check out the post today, “$5 Saves 2 Lives” as well as our mission to raise enough money to fund 1000 clean birth kits. Let’s give all women the chance for a healthy and safe birth!
