Author Archives: Carolyn
Why Women Hold the Key to Development—and Peace
My latest revelation on development came in an unlikely place: not a refugee camp for Syrians or a small hut in Nepal but in a beautiful building in Venice built in the mid-1700s—Scoula Grande di San Giovanni Evangelista—which was the site of a ceremony for the Pilosio Peace award. Pilosio is an Italian construction company […]
It’s Back to School– Are Your Kids Safe?
As of this month, American parents have sent 69 million children back to school and child care. But many have no idea what protections exist to keep kids safe in the very places they’re supposed to be protected. According to a new Harris Poll online survey, 63 percent of U.S. parents with children in […]
How A Silent Girl Named Serenity Finally Found Her Words
This blog originally appeared in The Huffington Post. An early start on learning means everything when it comes to a child’s future. Yet too many children living in poverty in America and around the world don’t have access to a quality early education. In fact, children from low-income homes hear an average of […]
Gaza’s Miracle Tomatoes
Crossing through the Israel’s Erez Crossing checkpoint and seeing the bleak landscape as you pass through the Fatah and Hamas checkpoints inside Gaza, it’s hard to imagine anything growing at all—let alone a flourishing garden. As we walked down the narrow pathway enclosed in wire mesh in the “no man’s land” of the Access Restricted […]
Time to stop talking….
I spent last week at the Clinton Global Initiative and the UN General Assembly meetings in New York. There was much talking about issues of international development, about the rights of children to an education, about saving children dying from preventable things like pneumonia, about making sure that the world is free from hunger. But […]
Living in Limbo
Syrian children across the region have it very tough. There are now almost three million refugees who have fled Syria since the war started more than three years ago and an estimated 50% of them are children. They spread across five countries, with the highest number in Lebanon—nearly 1 million refugees living there in informal […]
Moms are the Heroes
We’ve all heard it before in one form or another: “Don’t get between a mother and her baby,” “There is nothing better (or worse depending on your position!) than a fired up mom” or “Mothers are their kids’ best advocates. However you phrase it, I see evidence of this everywhere I go for my work […]
No Birth Should Be Left Up to Chance
This blog first appeared in the Huffington Post Giving birth ranks among the scariest moments for any mother. It certainly was for me. I was living in Hong Kong at the time when my second of three children was born. And he was born in a hurry. He came so fast that I actually […]
From the Philippines, With Love
The following blog first appeared on The Huffington Post. _______________________ Love. If there is a single word that best describes what I witnessed during my visit to the Philippines last week, then that’s it. Love of family. Love of community. Love of people. Love of life. So what better day than Valentine’s Day […]
Guatemala: Heroes against Hunger
It’s hard to reconcile the beautiful highlands of Guatemala, where I was in mid-January, with this stark fact: the child malnutrition rate here is the highest in the Western hemisphere. Roughly 5 out of every 10 Guatemalan children suffer from chronic malnutrition. All
