...on the Road with Every Mother Counts - San Francisco to Salt Lake City

We stayed on in San Francisco for an additional day and even though the rain seemed to stay with us, our spirits were anything BUT dampened.

We started out Friday morning driving out to Antioch, CA to meet up with some friends at Containers to Clinics (C2C) and their partners at Allied Container Systems. Their collaboration is all about innovation and it was exciting to see the containers in person after learning about C2C’s founder Elizabeth Sheehan’s mission. The whole idea behind C2C is to utilize shipping containers not just as a vessel to send life-saving medical equipment and supplies overseas, but to make the shipping container itself a fully functional clinic. These two organizations are already partnering to send container clinics to Haiti, where C2C is already providing medical care on the grounds of what used to be a Children's hospital in Port au Prince. Now they're working on improving the prototype and taking the project to scale. This is a unique model and one that can revolutionize access and treatment for families especially those who are far from a facility.

We then drove back into the city where we had a couple of great meetings with members of the San Francisco community who are as energized on the issue of maternal health as we are. One such group is the Consortium of Universities for Global Health. We were especially excited to chat with them given the launch of our education modules this week and to brainstorm ways to get the modules more widely distributed and to engage students everywhere on the issue.

Last but definitely not least on the agenda was a meeting with our friends at BabyCenter. All week I've been walking into the headquarters of companies that are built on the idea of community and service. Partnering with like-minded brands such as Starbucks, Google, and BabyCenter after so many years of relying on their respective services is especially meaningful. They each truly have their own spirit and energy in person that so seems to fit their inspiring missions. The passion and commitment of Starbucks, the innovation and energy at Google and the total embodiment of moms helping moms that came through at BabyCenter. I can’t think of a better way to have ended the week than to brainstorm with our friends there about ways BabyCenter and Every Mother Counts might be able to collaborate by connecting moms with moms around the world. Look forward to sharing more about this soon!

But the week was hardly over. Saturday we woke up to more rain and headed to the Fairmont Hotel to help Amnesty International celebrate its 50th anniversary. It's inspiring to be amongst a ballroom full of activists who have been defining the fight for human rights for so long. Amnesty International believes—as do I—that one of those critical human rights is the right to good maternal health and I was thrilled to get to share that message with the conference and to sit on a panel with my good friend Nan Strauss (who I mentioned form my UCSF blog) as well as Angela Burgin Logan—who survived a near miss with maternal health herself, Ramatu Fornah, a tireless advocate for improved maternal health in Sierra Leone and Nathanael Johnson—a local reporter who took it upon himself to track down the face of maternal health right here in California and bring light to that ongoing challenge.

I was very happy to reconnect with Maddy Oden who lost her own daughter Tatia and newborn granddaughter to maternal mortality. Amnesty’s Mother’s Day campaign features a photo of a pregnant Tatia and Maddy and I were both invited to sign our names to a card to Speaker John Boehner asking that he support the bill the Chairman Conyers introduced to improve reporting standards on maternal deaths in the U.S. I had the privilege to interview Maddy for NO WOMAN, NO CRY as well as a number of other US family members who lost loved ones in maternal deaths in recent years and I think of them often as I track the domestic side of this issue.

We flew to our final city of the tour from the Amnesty conference and landed in Salt Lake City in the afternoon with just enough time to drop our bags and change our clothes for the Planned Parenthood Utah event in which I was invited to speak. Our incredible host Missy Bird was the star of the evening. This was an incredibly inspiring evening honoring a variety of real heroes for women and families here in Utah which included some amazing elected officials who have been fighting the good fight for Planned Parenthood families.  I met so many families, fathers and daughters and mothers and daughters and Girl Scouts at this event that I wish the rest of the country could have seen them all coming out to support Planned Parenthood at this critical time.

I’m now getting ready to go to the final screening of the ‘tour’ then head home. We’re screening here in Salt Lake City at the Salt Lake City Film Center and I look forward to seeing some of our Utah friends there!