Goal 13: Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts.

In the fall of 2006, Vanessa Rule stepped outside the movie theater after watching An Inconvenient Truth and stood shell-shocked, trying to absorb the scale and speed at which climate change was occurring. At the time, her two kids were aged 3 and 6, and Rule had spent many nights lying next to them while they fell asleep. “I felt life moving from generation to generation. The instinct to fight for your young is unbelievably powerful. If we can tap into that, we’ll be able to do amazing things,” she said.

That’s the premise of Mothers Out Front, an organization of mothers, grandmothers, and caregivers who “can no longer be silent and still about the very real danger that climate change poses to our children’s and grandchildren’s future,” as their website states.

The instinct to fight for your young is unbelievably powerful. If we can tap into that, we’ll be able to do amazing things.

The organization’s concrete goal is to transition society from fossil fuels to renewable energy as swiftly, completely, and justly as possible. “We feel really strongly about the just transition,” Rule explained. “We want communities most affected yet least responsible for burning of fossil fuels and climate change to play a big role in shaping the future we need. And we want people whose livelihoods depend on fossil fuels to transition in a way that doesn’t sink them economically, and that actually creates more opportunities and stronger, safer communities,” she said.

Rule recalled, “Climate change had been taboo in my friend group of mothers. It was a voice of doom and a bummer.” So Mothers Out Front built its constituency by holding house parties which provided a quick overview of latest climate science, emphasized the situation’s urgency, and concluded with a review of social movements as one of the most effective ways to create change. They referenced abolition, civil rights, marriage equality, women’s suffrage, even the American Revolution. But the real value of the parties was for moms to speak about and listen to how other moms were feeling about the climate crisis.