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There may not be anything stronger than the power of women standing up for other women. The power of sisterhood. Women across the world are doing magnificent things including utilizing their influence and platform to benefit others. Many times I have been asked how one gets connected, how does one become an activist? I certainly don’t have the answers, nor am I the most qualified to give them. But I’d say from what I’ve learnt from the amazing women I have met using their platform to empower other women’s lives: it is deeply personal and motivated by what is happening in your community that must change. Then, what do you do with that burden on your heart? Find ways to be innovative inspired by the belief for something better for those you wish to help empower. This month we look at women helping women. The unquestionable impact that exchange can bring. We feature Mothers2Mothers revisiting this incredible organization and catch up with their work. It is an organization solely based on a model that empowers mothers with HIV to guide and mentor other HIV positive mothers as they navigate their journey of new motherhood and caring for their own health and wellness. These women are fiercely and brilliantly finding ways to challenge cultural norms, rid the women they help of stigma and guide them to life saving resources and information. Having spent some time with them, I can honestly say, they had a tremendous impact on me. These are the unsung heroes the world should celebrate.
We also celebrate women who use their platform to bring change. Supermodel, Liya Kebede, pioneered her clothing line lemlem when she visited her homeland Ethiopia and saw the plight of traditional weavers and their crippling lack of opportunity. She built lemlem, a gorgeous and whimsical line of stunningly woven women and men’s wear crafted in Ethiopia and Kenya by local artisans. While providing employment to many in her home community, she also contributes part of the profits to maternal health across Africa. That is an astounding example to me of a woman empowering other women. Known for breaking many barriers in the fashion world, her connection to her homeland has changed lives and given others a chance to be celebrated and gain access.
Check out lemlem if you haven’t, a definite go to for me and for gifts to others.
We also feature other women who have done similar work in their fields - highlighting their considerable impact.
Let’s take the time to get to know these astounding women and their work. Because when women stand up for women, lasting change takes hold.
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lemlem is an artisan-driven brand of beautiful women resort wear made entirely and responsibly in Africa, with a core mission of preserving the local art of weaving in Ethiopia and inspiring economic growth on the continent. Meaning to bloom and flourish in the Ethiopian language of Amharic, lemlem is a label of love, celebrating women and nature. Inspired by the unique Ethiopian handwoven patterns and the vibrant colorful combinations in the streets of Africa, lemlem is all about happy colors and stripes, creating new casual and chic pieces easy to wear on all occasions.
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Our Story
On a trip to her native country of Ethiopia, supermodel Liya Kebede discovered that traditional weavers were losing their jobs due to a decline in local demand for their goods. Recognizing the beauty and rare quality of their work, Liya started lemlem in 2007 to preserve this ancient art form and simultaneously create job opportunities for local artisans.
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Since then, lemlem has expanded its presence in Kenya with ready-to-wear and Morocco with swimwear. lemlem is the first international brand made in Africa, with a core mission of inspiring economic growth in the region and preserving the local art of weaving.
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Our Mission
“By employing traditional weavers, we’re trying to break their cycle of poverty, while preserving the art of weaving, to create modern, casual, comfortable clothes that we really want to wear.”
-Liya Kebede
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Slow fashion is our passion at lemlem. We’re committed to building a strong, fair and sustainable fashion industry in Africa, taking a holistic approach to production that values and upholds artisans, their craftsmanship, and their communities.
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Our Craftsmanship
lemlem core resort wear collection is hand-woven by our artisans in Ethiopia, using traditional weaving techniques. The result is this unique cotton fabric, incredibly soft, breezy and easy to wear.
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 lemlem Foundation is lemlem's philanthropic arm. Since 2006, we have been creating a pathway out of poverty for women artisans in Africa through programs that promote better access to healthcare, job opportunities, and responsible production.
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Women’s Empowerment
The Foundation partners with social enterprises, supporting training to help women artisans in Ethiopia and Kenya build skills and prepare for jobs in Africa’s growing textile and fashion sector.
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Maternal Health
We support maternal and women’s health outreach, education, and services in communities along lemlem’s supply chain in Africa.
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 mothers2mothers (m2m) employs women living with HIV as Community Health Workers called Mentor Mothers. m2m Mentor Mothers work both at health facilities and door-to-door to improve the health of communities across ten African nations. They deliver life-changing services to women, children, adolescents, and entire families. This Model improves health of communities, while delivering meaningful employment for women living with HIV. m2m is working towards the following United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): helping end the HIV/AIDS epidemic, ensuring good health, well-being, and decent work opportunities for everyone, and achieving gender equality by 2030. But much work lies ahead to achieve these goals…
How m2m Makes A Difference
mothers2mothers (m2m) ensures one of Africa’s greatest strengths—its women—are at the heart of our work to end AIDS, bring health and hope to families and communities, and create a thriving, healthy Africa.
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Why m2m is uniquely placed…
Peers Helping Peers
From the same community as their clients, Mentor Mothers have a deep understanding of the social and cultural challenges on their journey to good health. The trusted relationships that Mentor Mothers develop with their clients are unparalleled in maternal and child healthcare in Africa.
Ensuring Our Clients Stay in Care
We keep our clients in care for the long term—supporting them to start and access services, adhere to treatment, and stay in care.
An Integrated Approach
We serve entire families, not just a woman or her child. We deliver our services where our clients are—meaning we stand shoulder-to-shoulder with doctors and nurses in health facilities, and go door-to-door in local communities.
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Evidence-based Decision Making
By combining cutting-edge mHealth tools with rigorous data analysis to track our progress and measure our impact, we can quickly address service issues, develop best practices, and evolve our programming.
Powerful Track Record of Experience and Impact
m2m was founded in 2001, almost two decades ago. During this time we have revised and improved our model, expanded our services, and proven our impact. With over 11M women and children reached, and the achievement of virtual elimination of mother-to-child transmission for our clients, the numbers speak for themselves.
Strong Partnerships
To increase our scale and impact, we build deep relationships with governments and other NGOs to deliver our services. We also provide “technical assistance” services, such as training, monitoring, and research. We believe we can go both further and faster when we go together.
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 All Photos by Christopher Anderson
Fashion didn’t change for Liya Kebede, but Liya Kebede helped change fashion. Here, the 42-year-old model, entrepreneur, and advocate opens up about finding the strength that has fueled her two-decade career.
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Paris, via Zoom. Liya Kebede is sitting at a desk in a room where, behind her a wall of dark wood shelves displays a few framed photographs, papers, books. She refers to this room as "just an office that I use." As for so many of us, I interpret her answer as an effect of this year, the prolonged temporariness of working and living and living and working from home. Any surface has become the desk. Still, even on Zoom, Kebede is very much a model at home—the veneer of commonality suspended by her crisp white shirt. A button-down with a laissez-faire collar, loose exactly where it ought to be. It's the sort of shirt one buys hoping it will look the way it looks on Kebede but never does. In this era of influencer models, it seems strange to even use the words "off-duty model," but Kebede exemplifies that expression with her white shirt; how specific and from another time anything starched seems now.
 How are you? I ask. Kebede laughs. “What kind of question is that? It’s been an insane year. We’re all just trying to adjust. It’s very uncertain.” She pauses to add that as a model, uncertainty, to a lesser extent, is standard. “The whole fashion business is like that. You’re in this uncertain bubble. You get used to [it] because you don’t know when the next job is going to come, where it’s going to come from, when it is. You’re kind of just hanging around, and then someone calls.”
Hers is a career and lastingness, the familiarity of a Face. To Liya Kebede, we attribute key "moments," like the sleek plunging provocativeness of Tom Ford's Gucci or Nicolas Ghesquière's Balenciaga revival, or Gap's boyfriend trousers, or more recently, a collaboration with Pierpaolo Piccioli on a collection of candy-colored operatic puffers for Moncler. It's perhaps why some editors have characterized Kebede's career as evergreen, attaching personal nostalgias of the business to her likeness. The girl who Vogue Paris devoted an entire issue to nearly 20 years ago. And soon after, in 2003, a contract with Estée Lauder—Kebede was then the only Black woman to serve as their representative in the company's 57-year history. More work followed. The synthetic frills of Victoria's Secret pageantry. The beautiful backstage chaos of an early Marc Jacobs show. The world, long before "likes," when influence wasn't a matter of documentation necessarily, and when the runways and magazines were plainly so white.
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Kebede’s impact and rootedness in the mainstream can be attributed to her range and multiplicity. An early-aughts Tommy Hilfiger ad might have included rugby stripes, dock furniture, golden hour, Carmen Kass, and Liya. In another Gap ad, Kebede is dressed like Audrey Hepburn in the jazz club scene in Stanley Donen’s Funny Face, the 1950s musical about a reluctant model. The ad reads, KEEP IT CLEAN, with Kebede issuing a mix of Hepburn’s incandescence and Janelle Monáe’s dapper, easy style. In 2006, for Estée Lauder, Kebede stood beside a white horse, the words “Mythical Beauty” accompanying both model’s and mare’s stares.
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She has walked for everyone and been photographed by everyone, and been called “exotic” and “ethnic” too many times to count. She’s worn Louis Vuitton and Alberta Ferretti on the red carpet at Cannes and in Venice, having crossed over to screen on occasion. She’s portrayed the romantic intimacy of a family with Jake Gyllenhaal for Calvin Klein Eternity, done the gingham-blazer-madras-shirt thing for Jenna Lyons’s J.Crew, and worn, for years now, the multi-hyphenate title of maternal health advocate and entrepreneur (of her own company, Lemlem, a clothing line she founded in 2007 to support women artisans and protect traditional Ethiopian weaving techniques).
“She was really going against the grain of where runway models had gone,” says Robin Givhan, senior critic-at-large at The Washington Post. “There was Iman, and then there was Naomi Campbell, and then there was Liya. I think the question is, Was Liya the beginning of an end to this idea of ‘the only one’ and diversity being a trend?” She adds,“Diversity lasts when it no longer has to be the subject of a story.”
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Biography
 A French film director spotted Liya Kebede whilst the model was still a high school student, attending the Lycée Guebre Mariam in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Having completed her school studies, Kebede moved to Paris to pursue a career in modelling.
Kebede established herself in Paris’ modelling scene quickly. Less than a year after her arrival in the city, she walked for Ralph Lauren and BCBG Max Azria, which led to Tom Ford selecting Kebede personally to be a Gucci exclusive for Autumn/Winter 2000 season.
Ford’s longtime collaborator Carine Roitfeld , then editor of French Vogue, awarded the model yet more prestige when she dedicated the entire May 2002 edition of the publication to Kebede — a first in the magazine’s history. In addition, the model has graced the covers of Italian, Japanese, Spanish and American Vogue, as well as i-D, Flair and Time’s Style & Design edition.
The model has appeared in campaigns for Gap, Yves Saint-Laurent, Victoria's Secret, Emanuel Ungaro, Tommy Hilfiger , Revlon, Dolce & Gabbana, Escada and Louis Vuitton and entered the record books when in 2003 she was the first black model ever to be awarded an Estée Lauder contract.
Although Kebede still models for the likes of Tom Ford, Donna Karan and Roberto Cavalli, she is now focused on philanthropic ventures. These include Lemlem, a clothing line founded to protect traditional Ethiopian weaving techniques and support women, which is sold at Barney's, J Crew, Net-a-Porter and numerous boutique shops. Kebede has also been a Goodwill Ambassador for the World Health Organisation’s Maternal, Newborn and Child health division since 2005. In 2013, Kebede was named one of Glamour's Women of the Year for her philanthropic work through her Liya Kebede Foundation.
She has two children and resides in New York.
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Alicia Keys
 Alicia Keys is a modern-day Renaissance woman—a 15-time Grammy Award-winning artist/songwriter/musician/producer, an accomplished actress, a New York Times best-selling author, a film/television and Broadway producer an entrepreneur and a powerful force in the world of activism.
She co-founded Keep a Child Alive in 2003 as an emergency response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic, KCA has since established itself as a global leader in the fight against HIV/AIDS by providing children, young people and their families with comprehensive treatment, care and support to not only survive but thrive for a lifetime.
Today, KCS is broader in its outlook and more focused on its mission than ever before. To improve the health and wellbeing of vulnerable children, young people, adults and families around the world, with a focus on combating the physical, social and economic impacts of HIV/AIDs.
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Glenn Close
Bring Change to Mind is a nonprofit organization dedicated to encouraging dialogue about mental health, and to raising awareness, understanding, and empathy.
Actress & activist Glenn Close co-founded Bring Change to Mind in 2010 after her sister, Jessie Close, was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and her nephew, Calen Pick, with schizoaffective disorder.
Every individual who speaks out inspires another. And another. That’s how we’ll end the stigma around mental illness. That’s how we’ll Bring Change to Mind.
BC2M is committed to deliberate action through centering diversity, equity, and inclusion in our decision making, program creation and delivery, and partnerships. Some of those action steps include: creating additional race and mental health resources for our clubs to access on our online portal, inviting special guests to speak to our youth about racial injustice and how to protect your mental wellbeing, and facilitating educated conversations around this topic with our youth leaders.
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Ava DuVernay
LEAP is the Law Enforcement Accountability Project, a propulsive fund dedicated to empowering activists as they pursue narrative change around the police abuse of Black People.
Our mission is to disrupt the code of silence that exists around police aggression and misconduct. We will no longer accept this. We will tell the true stories. The goal of LEAP is to elevate activist storytelling around police brutality and murder through funding short-term projects in film, theater, photography, fine art, music, poetry, literature, sculpture and dance. Change begins with the stories we tell each other about the police and Black people. This is our work. The fund is powered by advocates who believe in police transparency and visibility.
“...if the courts won't do it, if the police unions won't do it, if the departments won't do it, then the people can do it.”
— Ava DuVernay
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Rihanna
CLF was founded in 2012 by Robyn “Rihanna” Fenty in honor of her grandparents Clara and Lionel Braithwaite.
CLF is shifting how the world responds to natural disasters through emergency preparedness and community resilience projects. CLF’s education work tackles barriers to access through holistic initiatives around the globe. Through the voices of Rihanna and her fans, CLF also advocates for policy and systems change while mobilizing people to take action in response to the world’s injustices.
Current programs include primary and secondary education programs in Malawi, Barbados, and Senegal; emergency response programs in the Caribbean and across the globe; and the Clara Lionel Foundation Global Scholarship Program.
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Stand With Breonna
Saturday. March 13th, 2021 marked one year since police killed Breonna Taylor during a botched raid. Her family and millions of others continue their demand for justice.
Breonna was asleep at home when a rogue task-force of the Louisville police broke down her door in the middle of the night and murdered her. They were attempting an illegal drug raid in the wrong neighborhood for a suspect that they'd already arrested earlier that day.
The police officers have yet to be arrested or charged. Breonna's family saw no progress in their fight for justice, so they reached out to our team at the Action PAC. We need all hands on deck!!!
 Add your name: We’re calling on the Louisville Metro Police Department to terminate the police involved, and for a special prosecutor to be appointed to bring forward charges against the officers and oversee all parts of this case. We’re demanding that the Louisville Metro Council pass new rules banning the use of no-knock raids like the one used to break into Breonna’s home.
Since the launch of this petition, Commonwealth Attorney Tom Wine has recused himself from the investigation into the LMPD conduct that night, the FBI is now investigating the killing of Breonna Taylor, the LMPD Police Chief, Steve Conrad, announced his retirement, and all charges have been dropped against Breonna’s boyfriend, Kenny Walker, but our work is not done.
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