Hello, welcome to a very special day on Kelly Corrigan Wonders.

So we put together this little series called About Your Mother, where we're talking to

super famous people about their moms in honor of an

organization that I have recently fallen head over heels in love with called Every Mother Counts.

I don't know if you've heard of it. It was started by Christy Turlington Burns 14 years ago.

You know Christy because she's been on like a thousand magazine covers with Cindy Crawford and Linda Evangelista.

Anyway, she started this nonprofit to help make pregnancy and childbirth safe for all mothers everywhere.

And so she hosted this learning tour in Tanzania. And I went and there were, say, I don't know,

15 women on this thing. And we went to hospitals and we listened to lectures by OBGYNs.

We talked about policy and systemic change with advocates and activists. And we learned about birthing centers and doulas and midwives and how this work gets done

on the ground.

So Christy and her team at Every Mother Counts have raised $42 million and put that to work

in nine different countries with on-the-ground organizations that are helping to make pregnancy

and childbirth safe and respectful and equitable for all women everywhere.

And I was struck by how well-named the organization is, the idea that every mother counts.

And the way I was seeing it and thinking about it was

totally informed by my previous life working as a fundraiser for United Way, which was my first

job out of college. And I did it for a really long time. I did it in Richmond, Virginia,

I did it in Baltimore, Maryland, and then out in San Francisco. And the most effective thing I ever did

as a fundraiser, and I was always

trying to do it, but it wasn't that easy to convince people, was to get executives out of their

offices and into the parts of downtown where they would typically never go so that they could see

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