Empowering women around the world
Move the apostrophe this Mother’s Day and shift the gift.
The Mothers’ Day Movement (MDM) seeks to transform Mother’s Day into Mothers’ Day with gifts that benefit women — mothers and children — who live with poverty, deprivation, and oppression.
More than $37.7 billion will be spent on Mother’s Day this year in the United States. The MDM mission is to harness this commercial potential in a transformative way and shift our spending priorities on the day that honors mothers.
“It’s time to move the apostrophe so that it becomes not just Mother’s Day honoring a single mother but Mothers’ Day, an occasion to try and help mothers around the globe as well,” Nicholas Kristof wrote in his New York Times column on May 8, 2010.
Kristof and his wife Sheryl WuDunn’s book published in 2009 — “Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide” — was the inspiration for MDM’s 2011 founding. The book’s title, according to its authors, comes from a Chinese proverb: “Women hold up half the sky.”
Kristof and WuDunn raise awareness of the oppressive conditions in which so many women live and the importance of empowering women as the world’s greatest untapped resource.
Their book moved Eva Hausman, one of MDM’s founders, to do something to help transform this oppression into opportunity. A retired social studies teacher and longtime Simsbury resident, now living in Stamford, Hausman raised $5,000 for the Fistula Foundation, with a match bringing the amount to $10,000. Learning that many women’s lives in Africa and Asia are ruined by the untreated, yet easily treatable, childbirth injury known as obstetric fistula made Hausman want to help change this.
Hausman, her daughter Greenwich resident Kim Athan, and their close friend Greenwich resident Stephanie Norton, subsequently took the lead in founding MDM.
“It was the catalyst that opened our eyes,” Norton said in a recent interview, referring to the book. “We can’t stand by and let this happen,” she said, adding that her experience in reading the book had been a visceral one. It brought her to tears.
Norton recalled a meeting in Athan’s living room in which participants felt a responsibility to address the need. It was a feeling that “we have to do something.” The MDM founders structured their organization based on the earlier fundraising that Hausman had done for the Fistula Foundation.
Since 2011, MDM has been raising money for 501(c)(3) nonprofit organizations that address global conditions such as lack of reproductive and maternal health care, educational deprivation, infant and childhood malnutrition, child mortality, situations of enslavement, lack of clean water, absence of economic opportunity, and gender-based violence including rape and sex trafficking.
MDM itself is not a 501(c)(3) organization. It is structured to funnel 100% of Mothers’ Day donations to the nonprofit organization. Staffed entirely by volunteers, MDM receives no contributed funds. Each year, it selects one nonprofit for which it fundraises through its website. That money goes directly from the website to the nonprofit. The collective impact of the money raised for nonprofits since 2011 reaches across the globe.
MDM’s chosen beneficiary this year is the African Education Program (AEP), which empowers children, youth, and women in the south-central African country of Zambia. Its Learning & Leadership Center in Kafue offers resources and training in education, health, entrepreneurship, and leadership development, preparing women to become leaders in the transformation of their communities.
Four Pennsylvania high school students founded AEP in 2004 as a school project focused on under-resourced Zambian communities affected by an HIV/AIDS pandemic. One of those students, Julie-Ann Savarit-Cosenza, is now the executive director of AEP.
Among the needs AEP addresses are those of children who have lost one or both parents to AIDS. It also educates girls on issues of sexuality. Nearly one-third of Zambian girls give birth before age 18. Child marriage is common. And the HIV rate for women is almost twice that for men.
AEP is also the first organization in Zambia to address the special needs population.
That AEP is run by former students who return after pursuing higher education is testament not only to the sustainable impact of its work but also to its role in empowering women who hold up half the sky.
The MDM mission is to harness this commercial potential in a transformative way and shift our spending priorities on the day that honors mothers.