Gloria is a campaign innovator focused on the strategic combination of powerful messaging, technology and data, and grassroots organizing in order to drive engagement, build on-the-ground power, and move issues forward. Prior to MomsRising, she was principal for Internet communications strategy at Turner Strategies, where she launched online communities around issues ranging from climate change and democracy to civil rights and women's health. Gloria conceived and helped found the influential 2009 Fem2.0 conference and the Fem2.0 online community. As communications director for the media futures think tank, the Institute for the Connected Society (iFOCOS), she was an early adopter of online platforms, including blogs, Facebook, and Twitter, and was a driving force in building the We Media conferences into a must-attend event for the media vanguard. She speaks Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, and French with varying degrees of fluency.
Blog Post List
February 20, 2013
On February 1 4, Lisa P. Jackson stepped down from her post as the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. She will go down in history as the first African-American leader of the Environmental Protection Agency, but we will also remember her as a mom. With her own experience of spending nights in the emergency room with an asthmatic child, she understands from the bottom of her heart the importance of clean air for kids. As EPA administrator, she did for families across the country what we couldn't for ourselves: Lisa Jackson made the air we all breathe a little cleaner. Moms...
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February 19, 2013
Last Decemb er, as the Newtown story was unfolding, I called my husband to see if he had heard… and as he as answered the phone, I just started tearing up. I could barely get my words out. Even now, I sometimes find it difficult to talk about it. Was it because there were so many young children? That the shootings were so senseless and random? That I could far too easily picture my own children’s faces among the Sandy Hook first graders? Perhaps it was because all through the fall last year, I was dealing with sending my daughter off to college for the first time. She left a hole in our home...
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February 4, 2013
When one mom I know turned on her TV and saw the breaking news about a gunman at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, CT, she stood up and started shouting, “No!” and throwing pieces of laundry she had been folding at the TV screen. Another mom I know got straight into her car to bring her first-grader home from school to spend the rest of the afternoon huddling under the covers with him. As for me, I picked up the phone to share my shock over the horrific story with my husband, but when he answered, burst into tears before I could get a single word out. The fact is, on December 14,...
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January 26, 2013
We all knew there was a toxic strain of gun culture in American society, a love of guns beyond reason and uncompromising in its advocacy of firearms for all. We all knew, but occupied by families and work, and distracted by other worries like healthcare or the economy, we could and did pretend that the proliferation of guns, inevitably leading to gun violence, had nothing to do with us. What happened in places like Colombine , Blacksburg , Tuscon ... Those happened elsewhere in America, not close to home in our own immediate communities. Then came the shootings in Newtown , CT, on Dec. 14...
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January 15, 2013
Have 10 seconds to spare? Today, moms are at the Danbury, CT, Walmart--just minutes away from Sandy Hook Elementary--urging Walmart to keep its promise to stop selling assault weapons . And these moms need a little telephone back up, which you can provide from the comfort of your home or office. Can you help us strengthen our moms’ message? Take two minutes to call Walmart headquarters today (right now!) to let them know that families don't want assault rifles on our store shelves. *Just click here to make a quick call now: http://action.momsrising.org/call/Walmart_CTBackUp2/ Why are we doing...
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January 8, 2013
Walmart has banned music with explicit lyrics , but continues to sell assault weapons like those used in the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting. Ridiculous. Walmart carries a full range of assault weaponry that has recently included the Bushmaster AR-15 , which was used in the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting of 20 children. It was also used to kill the 12 people in an Aurora, CO, movie theater last summer; and the 10 people in the 2002 sniper shootings that terrorized the Washington, D.C. area for almost a month. This gun is designed to take down as many targets as possible. And this study finds...
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November 13, 2012
MomsRising is excited to offer everyone who submits a post to the Clean Air and Environmental Justice Blog Carnival the following thank you gifts: 1) Pacha's Pajamas soundtrack and eBook ($14.00 value). This family clean air conversation starter is a children's pop musical that inspires kids to be superheroes for the planet. The lead character Pacha overcomes asthma and helps organize a huge festival in nature to bring balance to the planet. This story is a great way for families to start and further conversations about clean air. The soundtrack's featured artists include Yasiin Bey aka Mos...
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October 2, 2012
Why we need our Presidential candidates to talk about climate change Personal appeals and more than 160,000 signatures for climate change to be included in Oct. 3 Presidential debate, delivered to The NewsHour offices. This summer, the United States experienced record-high temperatures and devastating droughts and floods – extreme weather conditions that experts ascribe to climate change. And how scary were the unprecedented wildfires in Colorado that displaced thousands of families? Yet, President Obama and Governor Romney have barely talked about it. Parents would never allow their children...
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August 29, 2012
Ninety-eight percent of American medical students swear an oath on completion of their studies, most likely a variation of the Hippocratic Oath , which dates back to the fifth century BC. The Hippocratic Oath commits physicians and other healthcare professionals to practice medicine ethically and honestly, and is surely one of the reasons society has traditionally held doctors in the highest esteem. Society trusted that doctors put patients first, that they at the very least upheld the basic Hippocratic tenet of “ Do no harm .” These day, Americans have become too knowing to put doctors on...
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July 20, 2012
Hey, it’s summer! That means we can rip electronics out of our kids’ hands and tell them to “go out and play!” But tragically, many of us will need to think twice about booting them outdoors because of air pollution. Studies have shown that air pollution can stunt growing lungs , particularly in children who spend a lot of time in the open air. Exposure to air polluted with nitrogen dioxide, acid vapors and particulate matter (soot) has been found to have the greatest association with impaired lung growth. Not let kids play outside?? How ridiculous! That’s why we need to clean up the air, and...
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July 2, 2012
MomsRising today launched six-figure TV ad buys in Ohio and Pennsylvania to express gratitude for Senator Sherrod Brown’s and Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey’s courageous votes to turn back a proposal to block EPA’s life-saving limits on mercury and other toxic air pollution. “Thanks to the leadership of Senators Brown and Casey, the Mercury and Air Toxics Standard , an essential public health protection, remains intact,” said MomsRising Executive Director and CEO Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner. “The more than one million mothers we represent across the country offer their gratitude and are literally...
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June 27, 2012
Tomorrow, Lisa P. Jackson, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, will testify in front of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology for the first time. It won't be pretty. By the very title of the event , Strengthening the Scientific Backbone of the EPA: An Examination of Agency Practices and Foundations for Regulations Affecting the American Economy , anyone can see that its main purpose is to discredit EPA science. When the EPA’s scientific credibility is weakened, industry lobbyists have a much easier time in their efforts to block new public health protections...
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June 21, 2012
Yesterday, Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe tried to use the obscure Congressional Review Act (CRA) to get rid of the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS) Rule . I am thrilled to report that his efforts came to naught. Because of tens of thousands of letters and phone calls from moms and families across the country – from people like you contacting your lawmakers to express your concern about air toxins on the health of children and everyone we love – the Senate rejected the measure in a 53-46 vote. Before the MATS rule, coal-fired power plants could spew as much mercury, arsenic and metals...
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May 25, 2012
Yesterday, MomsRising brought some of our moms and kids to the public hearing about proposed standards for carbon pollution at the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington, DC. We were part of a huge coalition effort by public health, environmental and civil liberties organizations to express to the EPA the general public's broad support for clean air. It was a beautiful day for advocacy, and we even got to meet the Lorax! We shot our own video testimony outside the EPA before heading inside. You can see the individual testimonies here . When we went in to testify, it was right before...
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May 23, 2012
You know how easy it is to take someone for granted, especially after a long, committed relationship. Then one day, the romance is totally gone, and so is that person, leaving you mourning over the itty bitty pieces of a broken heart. You never knew how good you had it until it was gone. Don’t let your love for clean air suffer a similar fate. Air pollution is unlikely to leave you with a broken heart, but it could definitely leave your kids and other loved ones with weakened lungs and other ill health effects. Don't take clean air for granted — give it some love tomorrow to help make sure...
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April 10, 2012
From ages one to seven, my daughter Cole had severe asthma. There were long periods when she and I would be out of commission one week out of four -- she too sick to go to daycare and I at home to take care of her. At the time, we lived in Tokyo, Japan, and I have vivid memories of hunkering down in our shoebox apartment for days on end, struggling to keep a resistant toddler attached to the nebulizer, desperate for her to get better quickly and wondering how patient my employer really was with my frequent absences from work. I remember spending long, lonely nights keeping vigil next to Cole’...
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March 28, 2012
Did you know kids bre athe up to seven times more air than adults? According to the American Lung Association, when they breathe smog, it’s like getting a sunburn on their airways, and can possibly provoke asthma attacks, stunt their growing lungs , and could even lead to cancer . We have good news on the horizon: Yesterday, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed new rules to curb power plants’ emissions of carbon pollution, which traps the heat that literally "cooks up" smog . But we can't celebrate yet. There's still much work to be done before we have cleaner air for our kids...
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March 21, 2012
A couple of days ago, MomsRising held its first-ever Internet radio program. Executive Director Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner moderated a mom-to-mom discussion entitled, The “Controversy” of Clean Air in the Middle of an Asthma Epidemic, which was co-presented by the Moms Clean Air Force and Mocha Moms . Rowe-Finkbeiner was joined by the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Administrator Lisa P. Jackson ; Dr. Sumita Khatri , co-director of the Asthma Center at the Cleveland Clinic; and Lydia Rojas , a life-long asthma patient herself who recounted her daughter Stephanie’s deadly experience...
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March 16, 2012
From Julia in Indiana: How Our Current Polluted Air Affects My Family We in Indianapolis suffer from air pollution. I witnessed this first hand when my asthmatic child was gasping for breath in the city, yet he didn't have to use his inhaler one time on a family trip to Canada. When we arrived back in Indianapolis, panic set in as my little boy started wheezing again. He cannot attend parades or festivals in downtown Indianapolis because he says, “Mom, it is just too hard to breathe in the city. I'd rather just skip the festival.” How sad that he cannot enjoy events that give our city, state...
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