Healthy Child, Healthy World.

No one organization will make the changes we need to be and see in order to have the world's children best cared for. That's why it's so very important to know the truth of We're all in this together! It will take all hands on deck from domestic to international efforts, sometimes one baby step at a time, to co-create the kind of world and social environment that we want for our children. ALL our children.

Here's but just one such domestic organization's message of hope.

Security, Stay At Home, Surprise,Single and all.... the mother vote is powerful.

The Mother Agenda and mothers themselves are CRITICAL to getting out (and to the results of) the vote in 2008.



Mothers Acting Up asks each mother* to take the pledge to bring REAL security to the forefront of every conversation-- act now!!
(*mothers and others who exercise protective care over someone small)


Moms Rising is taking a poll on how their members want to be involved.


Every Child Matters is offering free reports of the Homeland Insecurity Report, and bumper stickers declaring "I VOTE FOR KIDS."


Children's Defense Fund has backed Susie for President.

Mothers Vote.

From The Daily Camera:

Joellen Raderstorf heads the local nonprofit Mothers Acting Up, which aims to help moms become politically active in a variety of causes. She said she likes Clinton, but thinks the senator brings too much baggage to the race, which is why she gave Obama $1,000.

More here.

The year to engage.

Dearest Joy Warriors and Apron String Revolutionaries, Happy New Year and oh mamas, we're off to a good start with the highest number of actions taken in MAU history with January's MAU pledge, a promise to help bring security to the forefront of all conversations! Congratulations, and keep those pledges coming: sign if you haven't yet and/or invite your circles of friends to sign. See if your community can have the most signatures by February 15, and I'll send you a grab bag celebration package to share with your community of mamas. As Mothers Acting Up, we're serious about our celebrations, and celebrate our seriousness. To that end, my dears, after signing the pledge, I ask that you put your hearts toward what it is that makes YOU a MAU. We'll share your thoughts on this hot topic on the MAU national blog, and you can further expand your thinking by joining in spirited dialogue on the brand new list serv for MAUs nationwide. Come by and introduce yourself and start composing your list of the top ten ways to be a MAU. From the Mothership, to jumpstart the conversation, our top ten ways to be a MAU: Join MAU and receive monthly actions & newsletters. Participate in collective actions, strengthening the impact of what we all do TOGETHER. Buy the MAU Handbook for daily inspiration. And then buy one for a friend. Memorize the MAU principles and apply them in your discussions, visions, plans and actions. Make a cheat sheet and xerox it onto card stock to hand out! Contact your Members of Congress at least three times a year (bonus points if you show up with kids and share cookies or homegrown tomatoes with the staff; they will remember you!) Publicly Reclaim Mother's Day in your community, from radio shows to parades: Arise! Girlcott EVERY DAY: Use money to create social change! Write a letter to the editor and/or op-ed about one MAU action and get it published! Need encouragement? Give a yell. Participate in the annual MAU collective postcard action. Sign and send your own, then pass them out at library story-time and coffee house knitting parties! Get inspired by attending MAU Live! or by hosting a presenting MAU event. Spread the mighty Word of MAU to five friends — invite them to begin at #1! Click here for the MAU top 10 ten list with handy links to get started! We look forward to hearing from you, and encourage you to share this missive with your friends and family. It's time for all hands on deck, mamas. There's big work to be done, and we're just the ones to do it. The children say: YES! Yours for the Apron String Revolution, Paige, AKA Ms. Booty Homemaker, for the MAU Mavens Janna Vance of Longmont, CO is championing MAU as her charity of choice in Parade Magazine's America's Giving Challenge. Make a $10 donation to MAU via Janna's link and MAU has a chance win the challenge! If 1 in 4 MAUs gives and/or tells 3 friends, we'll win. Read Janna's appeal.

Earth Hour 2008.

Can One Woman's Passion Change the World?

From Boulder MAU's Janna Vance:

I started to discover my passion when I left the hospital three days after my daughter, Lillian, was born. I had to leave my sweet baby girl in the nursery. My heart broke. I knew that there were many, many people in this world that had to leave their sweet babies in the nursery for much longer and I felt for them. But, that time away from Lillian was among the most horrible and heart-wrenching of my life.

Then, a strange thing happened. Lillian was released from the hospital. But as my husband drove us home, I gazed out the window at the people walking on the streets, the parks, the world. All of it moving so fast, none of them thinking about the safety of my baby girl. And I thought, "What is this world that I'm bringing my baby home to?" She was so incredibly safe in the nursery. Even I and my husband had to go through security measures to get in to see our baby. Now, all of that would be gone. The only thing standing in between my daughter and the cruel world... was me!

And what of the other children in the world? Was there someone to stand up for them? Would they be safe? Would they all have the support to grow up to be the people that I would want my daughter to share the world with?

That is precisely why I am joining the Parade Magazine America's Giving Challenge. I am competing to gain the most new supporters for my charity, Mothers Acting Up. If I win, I will receive $50,000 for the charity of my choice! But the challenge ends in just 17 days, so the time is now.

Mothers Acting Up works to ensure that someone does look out for the world's children, and so much more. I have had the opportunity to spend a little time with the MAU team in Boulder, CO and they are the most amazing, passionate and inspiring people I've ever met. MAU works in the local community to increase awareness of all issues related to children and the world we will pass along to them. MAU works to ensure that our children will have a planet that is environmentally balanced, politically fair and joyful in its diversity.

I am not sure that my passion can change the world, but I know that my passion and your support can help sustain this wonderful organization to foster world change!

I am asking you to please give $10 to Mothers Acting Up and help me toward my goal of winning the America's Giving Challenge. The challenge awards the person who reaches the largest number of new supporters. Therefore, if you can inspire your family members, friends and colleagues to give I stand a real chance of winning this challenge. So, please pass it on. And thank you for caring.

Click here to give: http://www.networkforgood.org/pca/Badge.aspx?BadgeId=109713

Find more about MAU at www.mothersactingup.org And keep up on my progress on the Boulder MAU Blog.

In great appreciation,

Janna Vance

Political Moms Make Family Values Their Baby

Political Moms Make Family Values Their Baby Run Date: 01/09/08 By Alison Bowen WeNews correspondent Mothers' groups are talking to presidential campaigns about family values. It's time, says a founder of Moms Rising, to focus on paid sick days for workers, equal pay for women and affordable health care for all. (WOMENSENEWS)--Wobbling forward on stilts is one way to gain attention. That's why four founding members of Mothers Acting Up have been visible high above the crowds in more than 80 events since the group launched on Mother's Day 2002. "It became such a perfect metaphor for Mothers Acting Up," says Juliana Forbes, communications director for the Boulder, Colo., group focused on political advocacy for children around the world. "One of the biggest hurdles is really becoming public and visible in your community. If you're up on stilts, you are so visible. Everyone's looking at you." Building on their strategy of mobilizing active members to

It's time for mothers to decide.

Learn more about how to act up right here!

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...

Declare Yourself Independent From Junk Mail!

And just think of how much you'll reduce waste and demand for same, thereby protecting the environment For Kids' Sake!

Fall Calls to Action!!

At a recent United Nations summit meeting there was special session focused on improving the lives of the world's children. It was agreed that no authentic progress would be made until one fundamental question had been addressed: how do we get the people of one nation to actually care about the children of another nation?

From (M)other, MAU Live: Theatre for Empowerment



It's time to prove to the world, especially the U.S. Congress, that we DO care about the children of another nation AND are willing to make time in our hectic lives to prove it.

Congress will soon vote on ANOTHER $145 billion dollars for the war in Iraq (President Bush may ask for $190 billion, in addition to the $100 billion allocated at the beginning of the summer.) Our children and the children of Iraq are not safer and cannot afford this war, financially, emotionally or morally. It's time we expose the disproportional impact of war on children!

For ONE WEEK - Sept 14-21 - CALL your Members of Congress EVERY DAY to demand that we stop funding the war in Iraq (horrifically impacting hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children), and start spending our vital resources on protecting the world's children. SCHEDULE 10 minutes RIGHT NOW in your calendar, every day for one week, to call both your Senators and your Representative.

Your messages could sound like this: "My name is ______, I am a Mother Acting Up and I passionately urge the Senator/Representative to vote NO on the Iraq War supplemental spending bill. One of many reasons to Vote NO is: _______________. This war is not making our children safer; vote NO on more war funding. Thank you." (If you want to add a Mama Grizzly Bear growl to further get your point across, go for it.)


Click here for MAU's top ten reasons to VOTE NO and all you need to make your FALL CALLS TO ACTION.






Take action with your children: Chalk messages for Peace in public places with your children and/or friends. Bring activism into the daily life of your family. Along with beautiful peace signs and words of peace, give a call to action: "Ask Representative X at xxx-xxxx to VOTE NO on WAR FUNDING, for children's sake!"


Prioritizing the world's children is our charge mamas. Gentlewoman: practice your message aloud, stretch your fingers and begin dialing!


In spirited partnership,
The Mavens at MAU Central

Bianca Bean on Beth!

Beth and M(other) is the word on the blogging mama street....


and yes, Bianca, and all, her show is available to come to you. Just ask how!
Holler at MAU beheard@mothersactingup.org

Shut down: build community, save energy.

Here's what this blogger will be doing this weekend instead of spending time here.