Planetary Health Guest Lectureship focuses on keys to movement building

Kelsey Wirth, MBA, board chair and co-founder of Mothers Out Front, delivered the third annual Planetary Health Guest Lectureship, Building the Power We Need to Create a Better World for our Children. The lectureship, which was held April 26 in the Bentson Health Community Innovation Center, focused on the keys to movement building.

As the director of planetary health, Teddie Potter, PhD, RN, FAAN, FNAP, said she utilizes the Planetary Health Education Framework, which identifies movement building as one of the five core domains that comprise the essence of planetary health knowledge, values and practice. “You can understand the principles of planetary health, you can value the importance of it and why it’s critical to the future, but if you don’t understand how to move things forward and create policy and create organizational teams to work on these efforts nothing gets done.”

Wirth was inspired to start Mothers Out Front after becoming a mother and feeling despair about how climate change will impact her children’s lives. “I felt a huge amount of energy in that outrage and I felt that I couldn’t possibly be the only mother out there who felt this way and I wanted to find out a way to connect with other moms,” said Wirth.

Struck by how few opportunities people had to meaningfully engage in addressing the problem, she set out to change this under the guidance of veteran organizer and social movement scholar Marshall Ganz. He identifies the five key components to community organizing as creating relationship, shared stories, structure, strategy and action.

Mothers Out Front started 10 year ago with house parties, filled with camaraderie and commitment for action. From there, they formed community-based teams that began speaking with elected officials. Eventually they launched statewide campaigns and work has spread to other states.

“Our moms have helped stopped the construction of gas fired power plants. They’ve convinced city councils to require that new homes and buildings use only clean renewable energy. They’ve secured more accurate air population monitoring in their neighborhoods. They convinced school districts to switch from dirty diesel school buses to clean electric school buses so that their kids don’t have to breathe toxic diesel fumes. And the list goes on and on,” said Wirth. “As our movement grows, we can win more campaigns that change policy and make people’s lives better. But to be as powerful as we can be we must create a movement where moms and other caregivers from all backgrounds feel like they belong.”