Happy Mother’s Day: Celebrating the Power and Inspiration of Mothers Everywhere

This Mother's Day, we've rounded up some news, commentary, and inspiration for you; all centering on mothers, motherhood, and the women who nurture, lead, protect, advocate for, and raise future generations.

Whether you're a mother yourself, are thanking and spending time with your own mother or the guiding women in your life, plan to honor mothers and great women who have supported and inspired you, or have a complicated relationship with motherhood and how (or if) it fits into your vision; we want to invite every woman to honor the strength, resilience, intelligence, and compassion that she and all the women around us bring to so many lives each day. Click through to enjoy the stories.

What Daughters Learn When Mom Is the Boss of the Family Business: A survey by global organization EY has found that women at the helm in family-owned companies helps other women—family members and unrelated women—to see themselves in leadership roles. Entrepreneur Magazine examines the effect, including the benefits of exemplifying leadership qualities, the rising tide of women leading companies or being considered for the top spot, the power of personal examples, and more.

The 50 Most Powerful Moms of 2018: Working Mother Magazine highlights fifty inspiring, powerful women who are leading the way while leading their families. The list amplifies some of the most important voices of the moment, honoring "women in power who raised their voices, gathered their communities, leveraged their status and demanded respect, safety, and equity for women in the workplace."

Employers Ranked on Maternity Benefits: A key to helping women succeed is providing for mothers and helping them continue to thrive in the workplace—paving the way for more secure futures for women while allowing companies to continue to benefit from their work, leadership, and insight; as well as helping them attract the best candidates. An annual ranking shows which companies do the best job prioritizing maternity benefits and family-friendly policies such as realistic maternity leave, flexible work schedules, and affordable child care—and areas that appear to be improving for working moms.

Motherhood Means Love: Mother’s Day Quotes From Around the World: The Global Fund for Women has collected a selection of quotes about mothers, motherhood, protecting one another, safety, the power of our voices and more from mothers across diverse backgrounds, cultures, and experiences. Share in the inspiration and unifying power of womanhood and motherhood; and celebrate mothers, women, and human rights all year long.

Image: Global Fund for Women

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Shelter Helps Stigmatized Young Mothers Build Happy Families in Sudan

This article originally appeared on the Women & Girls Hub of News Deeply, and you can find the original here. For important news about issues that affect women and girls in the developing world, you can sign up to the Women & Girls Hub email list. By Hannah McNeish

In Sudan, girls and young women who have children are often abandoned by their families and stigmatized in their communities. A shelter in Khartoum gives these mothers a home and works to help them build their families.

KHARTOUM, Sudan – Nour Hussein has been dreaming of happy families since she was a little girl, when she and her sister were put in Sudan’s largest institution for “lost” children. After her mother, who suffered from a mental-health illness, was placed in a psychiatric hospital, Hussein and her sister were sent to Mygoma, a state-run home in the capital, Khartoum. At around five years old, Hussein and some of the other children were transferred to private care homes. She moved again when she was 12 and eventually tracked down her mother six years later.

Although she got the chance to nurse her mother until her death, Hussein vividly remembers what it was like to grow up missing her. “Nothing in the world will give you anything like what a mother gives you, nowhere in the world,” she says.

Women and girls in Sudan who have children out of wedlock – even in cases of rape and incest – are often cast out by their families. “There’s no way to live in the community with your child without a father, especially if the girl is not married. The family doesn’t accept the child. They say, ‘Go away from this home until there is a father,’” says Hussein. “They will put the girl in the street, and police collect her and put her in an institution.”

There are many of these institutions, mostly government-run, dotted around Sudan, full of children whose mothers chose to have them instead of risking backstreet abortions. But mothers aren’t allowed to stay with their babies. To keep their children means to be ostracized from their communities; rejoining their families means having to leave their children behind.

So in 2010, Hussein and several friends from her childhood days in care homes set up the Shamaa shelter, a place where instead of abandoning their children, mothers could stay with them and work towards building a family. Since opening, the shelter has helped 815 women and girls, giving them a place to live in a quiet Khartoum neighborhood, and providing medical and psychosocial services during pregnancy, birth and the first stages of motherhood.

The women and girls can stay as long as they like – from a few months up to a year – while Hussein and her team look after them and their babies as they go through mediation with parents and partners.

In most cases, and only when the young mothers agree, Shamaa helps to arrange a marriage with the child’s biological father. If he is deemed unsuitable or is rejected by the girl or her family, Shamaa helps to find the girl a new partner from a pool of what the organization calls “volunteer fathers.” These men, whom Shamaa finds and heavily vets, agree to marry single mothers out of a sense of duty to care for a vulnerable child, which the Quran highlights as a great act of kindness.

“All these girls, we help them, and now they are inside our community and living with their families, with the real father or sometimes a volunteer father,” says Hussein. “We make families.”

Zara, a 30-year-old teacher with a 13-month-old baby, thought her life was over when she discovered she was pregnant and the father refused to marry her. “I was so afraid,” she says, adding that she was scared of her brothers. When asked how she thought they’d react, she switches from Arabic to English. “Maybe kill me,” she says.

Now Zara is about to start a new life outside the shelter with an engineer who started off as a volunteer father. “I love him,” she says with a grin, as she presses one hand to her chest and cradles her baby with the other, her engagement ring glinting under the strip light in a room bare but for three single beds, all occupied.

“Shamaa has given me everything. First, it was a safe place to be with my baby, and now they have found someone for me to marry so I can live with him and my baby.”

Shamaa is also working with Sudan’s Ministry of Welfare and Ministry of Interior to get more than 2,000 children and young people who were abandoned or born out of wedlock birth certificates, social security numbers and passports. Giving a child legal status in Sudan requires that the mother be married to the father or at least get him to sign a form officially recognizing the child as his.

Struggling to pay for its shelter due to funding cuts from larger charities, Shamaa will soon have to downsize. But its work will continue, says Hussein, whose first name, Nour, means “light” in Arabic.

“We need to make a light in our community,” she says, to make people realize “that these children are not guilty” and need to be nurtured by families to avoid them ending up in large institutions, where development disorders are common.

“We are all Sudanese. These children, they must accept them, they must love them.”

The names of some of the women in this story have been changed to protect their identities.

Wow! Etsy now offers 26 weeks of paid parental leave

Work-life balance just got a little more attainable for employees of Etsy: Starting April 1, the progressive company will offer both men and women who become parents 26 weeks of paid parental leave during the first two years of their child's life. This is huge--well above the current policy and what most companies offer. We hope this is part of a larger trend for making family life and a career attainable to more people. Read more below, and click through for the whole story.

blogs.babycenter.com - Another big tech company has joined the generous parental leave policy club!

On Tuesday, Etsy announced that any employee who becomes a parent will have 26 weeks of paid time off work, effective in April.

One of the cool aspects about this new policy is it includes new moms and dads — regardless of whether or not the baby was adopted — and it includes parents who used surrogates.

“Many traditional parental leave policies don’t treat people equally, including single parents, adoptive parents and parents who use surrogates,” Etsy chief executive Chad Dickerson wrote in a company blog post. “While we recognize the unique toll of giving birth, we believe that all members of a family benefit from generous, inclusive leave. We’re proud to be a pioneer in building a diverse, inclusive workplace and helping to shape how U.S.-based companies think about parental leave and gender equality.”

Parents at Etsy will be able to spread their 26 weeks of leave over the two years following the birth or adoption of their child. At least eight of these weeks are required to be taken continuously within the first six months. The 18 remaining weeks can be used flexibly over two years.

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