Sarah Brown and Heidi Klum with their awards at the Jefferson Hotel Friday, October 28, 2011
Susan G. Komen for the Cure honored Sarah Brown, wife of former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, for her Global Leadership. Their annual gala, took place at the Kennedy Center and also honored Dr. Charles M. Perou, Ph.D. for Scientific and Medical, Dr. Ellen V. Sigal, Ph.D. for Advocacy, Dr. Sandra M. Swain, M.D. for Community and First Lady Betty Ford was posthumously honored with the Lifetime Achievement award, which was accepted by her daughter Susan Ford Bales. The event was hosted by NBC’s Hoda Kotb and featured performances by Natasha Bedingfield, Miri Ben-Ari, Afro Blue, and Denyce Graves-Montgomery.
Across town at the Building Museum, the International Women’s Forum presented super-model Heidi Klum with the Hall of Fame Award. Afterwards, Brown and Klum gathered with friends at the Jefferson Hotel – check out the full story in The Washington Post’s Reliable Source.
Sarah Brown, the Global Patron of the White Ribbon Alliance and the wife of former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, returned to New York to advocate for governments and non-governmental organizations to lead the final push to prevent maternal death, the United Nations Millennium Development Goal #5.
“One-thousand women die every day in pregnancy and childbirth in avoidable, tragic circumstances,” said Sarah Brown, Global Patron of the White Ribbon Alliance. “We have seen some great progress in recent years to reduce these numbers, but our campaigning call continues.
Ms. Brown led the WRA’s ‘Wake Up Call for Women and Newborns of the World’ breakfast meeting, co-hosted by Arianna Huffington and Donna Karan, making a direct appeal for everyone to find their own way to help the maternal health campaign.
The packed event was part of the 2nd Annual Women: Inspiration & Enterprise (WIE) symposium and included the Second Lady Dr. Jill Biden, Ambassador Nancy Brinker from the Susan G. Koman Foundation, NBC’s Bonnie Hammer, CNN’s Hilary Rosen, Susan McCue from Message Global, actress Fran Drescher, author Rachel Simmons, Lucy Doughty and Theresa Shaver from the WRA.
Sarah Brown’s work with the White Ribbon Alliance began in 2008 and has since grown by “leaps and bounds” to a world-wide movement for improving the health care and livelihood of pregnant women. On MSNBC’s Mitchell Reports, Brown appeared with Angela Nguku of the WRA – Kenya and continued to voice the call to provide mothers everywhere with the basic supplies to have a healthy birth and avoid preventable deaths.
‘The mother is at the heart of her family, and at the heart of her community, so when you’re loosing a mother, she looses her life but her newborn is very unlikely to survive, and her older surviving children are at such risk without their mother, and the community’s lost a core member of that world too. When you’re losing a mother, you’re losing so much more than that single woman’s life,” said Brown.
As world leaders gathered in New York for the opening of the United Nations, so did some of the world’s most powerful leaders in business, media, philanthropy fashion and politics, with one purpose: to empower and inspire women around the globe.
White Ribbon Alliance Global Patron Sarah Brown, president and editor-in-chief of the AOL Huffington Post Media Group Arianna Huffington, and famed fashion designer Donna Karan kicked off a day of powerful panel discussions at the WRA’s ‘Wake Up Call for Women and Newborns of the World’ breakfast. “1,000 women die every day in pregnancy and childbirth in avoidable, tragic circumstances. We have seen some great progress in recent years to reduce these numbers, but our campaigning call continues. The message from the WRA Wake Up Call is that the world’s powerful women care and will act for their sisters everywhere,” said Brown.
Panelists discussed maternal mortality as a key issue to solving some of the world’s most dire problems and that it is a preventable issue that requires widespread awareness and change in the way we think about women in society.
The packed event came on the last day of the 2nd Annual Women: Inspiration & Enterprise (WIE) symposium which featured such guests and speakers as Dr. Jill Biden, Ambassador Nancy Brinker, Fran Drescher, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, Christy Turlington Burns, Barbara Bush, Anita McBride, Mark Dybul, Ray Chambers, Van Jones, Susan McCue, and Deborra Lee-Furness.
Check out Sarah Brown and Angela Nguku of the WRA, Kenya were featured on MSNBC’s Mitchell Reports talking about safe motherhood.
It’s a British invasion of a different sort: Gordon Brown, the Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, has taken America by storm while on book tour for “Beyond the Crash: Overcoming the First Crisis of Globalization.” Monday night, Brown exchanged bon mots with Jon Stewart on The Daily Show, even sticking around for an extended interview that can be seen exclusively online.
“But in Globalization, you know, we would very much like to sell them our products, and we have quite a few of them,” stated Stewart. “But, the demand in the rest of the world. Globalization – isn’t this the problem that Western countries face in a post-Imperial world? Life was so much easier when we had colonies. We could go in and just suck out every last bit and exploit.”
“Look, Jon, it was easier for us when you were the colony,” joked Brown. “We should never have let you go.”
Then Brown faced the crew over at MSNBC’s Morning Joe on Tuesday morning. Joe Scarborough wrapped up the interview by saying, “This is so important, because, coming from him – not because he’s a former Prime Minister – but Chancellor of the Exchequer for a very long time. This is a book Americans need to read.”
But it all started here in Washington, DC on Saturday night at The Jefferson Hotel with Connie Milstein. See Washington’s famous faces and hear Brown’s remarks on WHC Insider.
Gordon Brown, Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, and wife Sarah, were in Washington this weekend to launch his U.S. book tour. The Browns were greeted by top politicos, global financial leaders and media types at a stately affair held at the Jefferson Hotel. The party was co-hosted by long-time friends Connie Milstein, owner of the Jefferson Hotel and her husband, J.C. de La Haye St. Hilaire, and Ted Greenberg & Tammy Haddad.
Brown charmed the A-plus crowd, including the Obama Administration’s David and Susan Axelrod, Austan and Robin Goolsbee, Ambassador Elizabeth Bagley, Bill Burton andLaura Burton Capps, Stephanie Cutter, Bruce Reed, Eric Lesser and Katie McCormick Lelyveld, as he had a little fun describing his post PM life as well as giving his assessment of the global economy.
Here are Brown’s comments as reported by Politics Daily on AOL –
“In brief remarks, Brown — among the first world leaders to rescue troubled banks at home in 2008 — warned that “for the time in 200 years, America and Europe are being out-produced, out-invested, out-traded and out-exported” by other nations, and that the solution to the global crisis was to tap into a billion middle class consumers in Asia who in 10 years will have twice the buying power as Americans.”
Brown repeated that same message on ABC News “This Week with Christiane Amanpour” saying that while Asia and China had to consume more, “Europe’s got to reform its markets. America is prepared to invest in the future, while doing its fiscal consolidation. And that would mean, in my view, that you would have this exit strategy from a crisis based on high growth and high employment and not low growth and what I fear is high unemployment for a decade.”
The former prime minister — who earlier in his career spent a decade as finance minister — warned that the immediate danger “is that people cut back in education, which is vital for the future, that people cut back on their international contacts, because they think the solutions lie in national answers to their problems, when they lie in global cooperation. And I think the danger is, you have a ’30s-style protectionism where people relapse into currency wars, as we’re seeing, or trade wars or banning takeovers that have got cross-border ramifications, or simply a protectionism in of the mind, where anti-immigrant sentiment gets to the point that we’re not really talking to each other in a way that means that we have a coordinated world.”
A crowd formed around media celebrities including new CNN host Piers Morgan and his wife Celia Walden, Arianna Huffington and Glee’s Matthew Morrison.
Notables in the crowd: Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Managing Director of World Bank; Ambassador Capricia Marshall; Alan Greenspan and Andrea Mitchell; Terry McAuliffe; Rima al Sabah, Bob Barnett and Rita Braver; Bruce and Bonnie Reed; Robert and Ellen Bennett; Hilary Rosen and Kate Harold; Sam and Danielle Feist; Dan and Rhoda Glickman; Shelby Coffey; Anita McBride; Sally Quinn; NBC’s Savannah Guthrie, and the BBC’s Rome and Amy Hartman.
“Beyond the Crash” is published by Free Press/Simon & Schuster.
Watch the Gordon Brown US Book Premiere Party hosted at historic Jefferson Hotel
Gordon Brown, the former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, is celebrating the publication of his new book, “Beyond the Crash: Overcoming the First Crisis of Globalization” at an exclusive party this evening in D.C., with remarks expected by Gordon Brown, as well as co-hosts Tammy Haddad & Ted Greenberg and Connie Milstein & J.C. de La Haye St. Hilaire.
WHC Insiders can watch the event starting at 5:30pm and see Gordon Brown’s remarks here on WHC Insider at approximately 6:00pm.
Update: If you missed the LIVE feed check out the video below:
The Women: Inspiration & Enterprise symposium on September 20th, hosted by the White Ribbon Alliance for Safe Motherhood, is designed to be a “dynamic new annual conference for women” alongside the Clinton Global Initiative and UN General Assembly.
Hosted by Sarah Brown, Donna Karan and Arianna Huffington, the symposium will focus on empowering women in a new media standpoint while being able to network with like-minded and powerful members of the global community. Much like the educating experience that the May 2010 Women Deliver event profiling filmmaker Christy Turlington Burns‘ documentary No Woman No Cry.
One of the most compelling users of Twitter has been Sarah Brown, wife of British Prime Minister Gordon Brown; she’s been tweeting to raise awareness of the global campaign for maternal health as the Global Ambassador for The White Ribbon Alliance. The WRA for Safe Motherhood is uniting people in 142 countries to demand government action to end the unnecessary deaths of women during pregnancy and childbirth through the Million Mums Campaign.
On Friday night Sarah Brown, who passed the million followers mark over the weekend, hosted a Tweetup (a gathering of Twitter friends) at Number 10 Downing Street. The invited guests originally had been surprised by a tweet from Brown, asking for a mailing address; some thought her account had been hacked or speculated a Christmas card was coming. But an invitation to a Number 10 Tweetup for the Million Mums Campaign caught everyone by surprise. Read more…
The Important Dinner for Women isn’t important because of the women who are there (though there were lots of important women there: Queen Rania, Indra Nooyi, Sarah Brown, Ann Curry, Susan Axelrod, Naomi Campbell, Wendi Murdoch, Nicole Kidman, Naomi Watts, Tyra Banks … the list goes on), but because of the important cause that brings them together.
Cindy Adams quotes Sarah Brown in her NY Post article:
“Women are more likely to die giving birth than to go to school. Women are considered zero. A woman’s only asset is her body. And each year half a million die in childbirth.”
Wednesday evening: Rome
July 8, 2009
I visit the Sant’Edigio Community, situated in a beautiful old monastery in the heart of Rome. A poignant moment on arrival to see a tiny little iron turnstile in the wall, where poor and desperate unmarried women in years long past had to tragically abandon babies without disclosing their own identity.
Today the 120,000 strong Sant’Edigio community across the world address new crises. With their hugely dedicated staff we talked about the work they are doing to fight HIV/AIDS in Africa aiming to offer a treatment in Mozambique and Malawi that matches the treatment you can find in Italy or the UK. In many of the poor countries I’ve visited, AIDS often has a female face. Pacem from Malawi has come to share with us her journey from her own HIV positive diagnosis to treatment and life now as an activist for Sant’Egidio, sharing the message of life after testing.
HIV is spreading fastest amongst women and young girls, and elderly women are often the ones left holding families and communities together in the epidemics wake. I am concerned that HIV-positive women are often denied health care, information and services. This can mean they pass the infection onto their baby during pregnancy, childbirth or breastfeeding even though there are effective ways of preventing mother to child transmission. The DREAM programme created by Sant’Egidio works in partnership with communities to overcome these barriers to treatment and care and offers hope and dignity to thousands of vulnerable people across Africa.
I am with Margarita Zavala from Mexico and Margarida Barroso whose husband is the Presidient of the EU and has herself just returned from a visit to Mozambique. We all know that we will follow up on today’s meeting to learn more, and I hope to engage them in the maternal mortality campaign I support.
After the visit, I returned to the British Embassy for a short break and then back out to the final visit of the day with the spouse group. We are hosted by the Italian President’s wife at the Quirinale Palace with a fascinating tour and a drink at the end. We all left ready to meet in L’Aquila in the morning to visit the town and witness the effects of the terrible earthquake here. I have made my way to L’Aquila tonight to find Gordon after his meetings and hear how his day has gone.
Sarah Brown, the wife of Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister, promised to provide a behind-the-scenes glimpse of the G8 Summit in L’Aquila, Italy, when she began a blog about the “spouses’ summit”.
Sarah Brown and the other G8 spouses will be hosted at the three-day summit in L’Aquila by Clio, wife of Italian president Giorgio Napolitano Photo: PA
Mrs Brown and the other G8 spouses will be hosted at the three-day summit in L’Aquila by Clio, wife of Italian president Giorgio Napolitano, as PM Silvio Berlusconi is currently going through a divorce.
While the world leaders are tied up in meetings on the economy, climate change and aid, the wives – and one husband – will follow an alternative programme, including visits to people affected by the devastating earthquake which struck the town in April and an audience at lunchtime today with Pope Benedict XVI.
The two most glamorous spouses, Michelle Obama and Nicolas Sarkozy’s pop star wife Carla Bruni, are expected to miss the meeting with the Pope – Mrs Obama because she and her husband have a separate meeting and Ms Bruni because she is arriving at the summit late.
In her first post on the G8 blog Mrs Brown said she was looking forward to meeting up with the other “first ladies”.
“Up at the crack of dawn to set off for the G8 in Italy!” she wrote. “There’s a busy few days ahead for me as part of the spouses programme while Gordon is at the summit.
“But I’m really looking forward to meeting up with the ‘other halves’ – some of them I have met before from last year’s G8 and the G20 in London. They are all very interesting people and I’m hoping to get to know them better and to discuss some of the issues that we all feel strongly about.
“It looks like we have some interesting visits lined up. There is some time planned in L’Aquila, the venue for the G8, to meet people affected by the devastating earthquake there in April, as well as visits to some great organisations and historical sites in Rome.
“Hopefully I can give you a flavour of what we have been doing through this blog – and I’m planning to post plenty of pictures from the trip, so make sure you check back regularly.”
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