Worldwide: children's mortality rate going down!!

UNICEF recently disclosed the good news: our investment in children's wellbeing pays off.

Global mortality rate for children under five is on the decline!

Global Action for Children, formerly a campaign, now a full-on organization, tells us all about it in their hot off the presses press release!

Congressman Cooper on the policy of the Iraq war.

Noting that everyone he talks to / hears from in Nashville (consider that Nashville's MAU community has been visiting his office every Tuesday for months!), Cooper talks tough in Sunday's Tennessean.

We like her. We really really like her.

“Surely this [award] belongs to all the mothers of the world. May they be seen, may their work be valued and raised. Especially to the mothers who stand with an open heart and wait. Wait for their children to come home from danger, from harm’s way, and from war. I am proud to be one of those women.“ --Sally Field, accepting her Emmy on September 16, 2007

So what did you think of Sally Field's acceptance speech (for lead actress in Brothers & Sisters) at the Emmys on Sunday night?

It's been a hot topic around the MAU offices with emails and links pinging from screen to screen, passionate dialogue ensuing.

Ultimately, though she screeched (wild Grizzly mama, anyone?), though she stammered and got flustered (don't we all at some point do that, particularly when we are passionate?), though she cursed (placing the God before the damn, something -- which, whether you'd choose to speak that way publicly yourself or no-- not even deemed censorship worthy by the FCC (in a 2004 ruling)), Sally spoke up for and about and *as* a mother. Both as a fictional mother of a son departed for war, and as a real life mama.

Could she have been a better spokesperson with more modulated tones and less alienation from the cursing? Sure. I thought so at first. And I was so bummed that her entirely eloquent words about mothering got lost in the brouhaha.

But in talking and talking about it, and in weighing and measuring what the Fox network found so reprehensible (censoring, for what it would appear, the personal-is-political content of Fields' speech by cutting the camera away and going to silence), I've come to see that in so calling attention to Fields' gaffe in the the field of societal mores, Fox helped assure Fields' position as not a lightning rod, but a beacon of light itself, to be heard and seen again and again expressing completely appropriate outrage that the children which have been passionately loved and mothered so well, the children for whom we wait to return from war, even go in the first place!!

Were it up to us as a whole, we mothers would declare ourselves and our children-- be they twenty months or twenty years of age-- free from the violence and the outrage of war. We would find another way.

Sally, we thank you for speaking from the Mother Heart when in this present day world it is so unfashionable to do so. We thank you for wearing your Mother Heart on your tear stained sleeve, and for daring to deliver a message for which you will be both reviled and championed. A mother's work, never done, should not ever be a popularity contest, and is, in the end, done for the sake of our childre. ALL our children.

If mothers ruled the world...

Local mothers continue their worldly role

How is it that a handful of local women take on the task of benefiting the world's children when their main office consists of a carriage house near downtown Boulder?

The four founders of Mothers Acting Up (MAU), a grassroots organization whose mission is to passionately and publicly advocate for children around the world, make it possible by following their own recipe for change.

Five years ago, Beth Osnes, Joellen Raderstorf, Juliana Forbes and Erica Shafroth decided to bring some joy and positivity into their activist work. They were disturbed by the decisions their federal leaders were making and how the consequences - ranging from environmental degradation to exploding military budgets - were affecting children everywhere. These mothers combined their proactive desires and determination to be heard in the political sphere and thus created MAU.

"Activism is often thought of as aggressive, angry, dangerous and risky, (more here....)

UP! Up with children.

Moms Speak Up across the nation. Come on over.