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Original Mother’s Day Proclamation: Call to Feed Gaza

By Diana Oestreich,Lisa Sharon Harper,Sharon Risher,Cece Jones-Davis,Ariel Gold

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How can we celebrate Mother’s Day while another woman’s child is being starved?

We are reading the Mother’s Day Proclamation, originally called “Appeal to Womanhood” to appeal to all women to raise their voices to feed the children of Gaza.

All children are our children.

Will you use your voice and join us?

Write your name in the comments to honor Mother’s Day by calling for life saving Food to be immediately allowed into Gaza.

Tag your Representatives, Pastors, and fellow Moms

Repost and Share…it matters!

The original Mother’s Day Proclamation, penned by Julia Ward Howe in 1870, was not a celebration of motherhood but a feminist conviction that was a call to arms for waging peace and ending war. She envisioned mothers being powerful brokers of peace between nations in conflict.

Share this Mother’s Day Proclamation to use your voice to unite with mothers around the world to demand the children in Gaza be fed instead of starved on Mother’s Day.

We call for:

  • Immediate entry of life saving food and humanitarian aid to Gaza
  • The immediate release of all hostages
  • Abolishing Israel’s systems of occupation and apartheid

Now is our time to use our voices and unite women to fight for every child in Gaza’s future like it’s our own.

 

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A post shared by Diana Oestreich (@dianaoestreich)

About the Authors


Diana Oestreich

Diana Oestreich is an author, activist and Soldier-turned- Peacemaker.

She’s a nationally recognized speaker at the intersection of peace, faith and justice.  Showing up right where we live is how we disarm violence and fight for justice and joy.

She teaches how we can show up right where we live to wage peace across the lines that divide us and unmake violence. She’s a combat medic and Conscientious Objector. Faith fuels her anti-war activism. She served on the battlefield of the Iraq war and was awarded the Army Commendation Medal and the Iraq Campaign Medal. She is an RN, formerly working with hospice and cancer patients before becoming a Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner connecting healthcare to justice by advocating for victim survivors in the courtroom.

Her book Waging Peace: One Soldier’s Story of Putting Love First was Amazon’s #1 new release in war and peace.

Waging peace exposes the false divide between loving our country and living out our higher call to love our enemies–whether we perceive our enemy as the neighbor with an opposing political viewpoint, a religion that is different than ours, or the person born across our borders. By showing that us-versus-them is a false choice, this book will compel each of us to choose love over fear. Diana’s determination and courage to cross divides and wage peace is an inspiration to many and is on display through her work challenging our acceptance of violence and empowering us to find our own story to change the world through storytelling, justice and joy.

Diana is a trusted guide to help us understand the violence tearing apart our churches, communities and country. She empowers us to identify our own rural, urban, political or religious divides to cross our own “enemy lines” in order to remake the world and heal all that’s tearing us apart. Waging peace led her back to Iraq working to empower refugees to reclaim their lives from violence, to Syrian refugee camps and the shores of Palestine and Israel. From her son’s middle school to the middle east, to her local courthouse lawn for homeless rights or to Iran with a team trying to heal the divides between our countries by performing lifesaving heart surgeries for kids, peace means showing up.

Diana is the founder of Waging Peace Project, a movement activating everyday people to commit small acts of courage right where we live to wage peace because Justice and Joy cannot wait.

She has appeared on The King Center’s Beloved Community Global Symposium, news channels, and award-winning podcasts to challenge the narratives of our most divided issues: gun violence, racism, christian nationalism and injustice. Her work has appeared on the award-winning Sharon Says So podcast, the Webby winning For the Love podcast with Jen Hatmaker and conferences discussing Justice, faith, peacemaking, activism with kids and how her posture of love shapes how she parents and shows up for her neighbors.

Diana, her partner Jake and two sons live along the shores of Lake Superior on Ojibwe land. They are an Ethiopian-American family woven together through adoption and a shared love for bad jokes, Bocce ball and competitive card games.

More articles by Diana Oestreich >


Lisa Sharon Harper

From Ferguson to New York, and from Germany to South Africa to Australia, Lisa Sharon Harper leads trainings that increase clergy and community leaders’ capacity to organize people of faith toward a just world. A prolific speaker, writer and activist, Ms. Harper is the founder and president of FreedomRoad.us, a consulting group dedicated to shrinking the narrative gap in our nation by designing forums and experiences that bring common understanding, common commitment and common action.

Ms. Harper is the author of several books, including Evangelical Does Not Equal Republican…or Democrat (The New Press, 2008); Left Right and Christ: Evangelical Faith in Politics (Elevate, 2011); Forgive Us: Confessions of a Compromised Faith (Zondervan, 2014); and the critically acclaimed, The Very Good Gospel: How Everything Wrong can be Made Right (Waterbrook, a division of Penguin Random House, 2016). The Very Good Gospel, recognized as the “2016 Book of the Year” by Englewood Review of Books, explores God’s intent for the wholeness of all relationships in light of today’s headlines.

A columnist at Sojourners Magazine and an Auburn Theological Seminary Senior Fellow, Ms. Harper has appeared on TVOne, FoxNews Online, NPR, and Al Jazeera America. Her writing has been featured in CNN Belief Blog, The National Civic Review, Sojourners, The Huffington Post, Relevant Magazine, and Essence Magazine. She writes extensively on shalom and governance, immigration reform, health care reform, poverty, racial and gender justice, climate change, and transformational civic engagement.

Ms. Harper earned her Master’s degree in Human Rights from Columbia University in New York City and served as Sojourners Chief Church Engagement Officer. In this capacity, she fasted for 22 days as a core faster in 2013 with the immigration reform Fast for Families. She trained and catalyzed evangelicals in St. Louis and Baltimore to engage the 2014 push for justice in Ferguson and the 2015 healing process in Baltimore, and she educated faith leaders in South Africa to pull the levers of their new democracy toward racial equity and economic inclusion.

In 2015, The Huffington Post named Ms. Harper one of 50 powerful women religious leaders to celebrate on International Women’s Day. In 2019, The Religion Communicators Council named a two-part series within Ms. Harper’s monthly Freedom Road Podcast “Best Radio or Podcast Series of The Year”. The series focused on The Roots and Fruits of Immigrant Labor Exploitation in the US. And in 2020 Ms. Harper received The Bridge Award from The Selma Center for Nonviolence, Truth and Reconciliation in recognition of her dedication to bridging divides and building the beloved community.

Lisa is host of the Freedom Road Podcast, cohost of The FOUR Podcast and author of her weekly column on Substack, “The Truth Is…”. Her much anticipated book, Fortune: How Race Broke My Family And The World–And How To Repair It All, (Brazos, Available now) is now available!

Check out Lisa’s column, “The Truth Is…” on Freedom Road’s Substack.

View the Fortune Book Trailer

Get your copy here.

More articles by Lisa Sharon Harper >


Sharon Risher

Rev. Sharon Washington Risher was born and raised in Charleston, SC. She heard the call to ministry in 2002 and left North Carolina to attend Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, where she earned her Masters of Divinity degree. Sharon served as Staff Chaplain and Trauma Specialist at Parkland Hospital and as Associate Pastor for Congregational Care at Rice Chapel AME Church in Dallas, TX.

On June 17, 2015, a horrific tragedy happened: Sharon’s dear mother, Mrs. Ethel Lee Lance, was killed in Charleston at the Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, along with two cousins, a childhood friend, and the others murdered in that massacre. Since that time, Sharon has been an advocate for revising gun laws, and is a spokesperson for the grassroots advocacy groups Everytown Survivor Network and Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America. She has appeared on CNN, BBC Radio, Good Morning America, and CBS and has been interviewed or written for Time, Marie-Claire, Essence, Texas Monthly, Vogue, and VOX.

Her advocacy work brought her to the White House, where she witnessed President Barack Obama sign executive orders pertaining to new gun laws. Sharon has shared her story of loss, forgiveness, racism and gun law reform with audiences across the United States. She is the author of “For Such a Time as This: Hope and Forgiveness after the Charleston Massacre.”

Sharon has two grown children and enjoys reading, cross-stitching, growing tropical plants, listening to a variety of music and being a mother to her fur dog-child, Puff-Daddy.

More articles by Sharon Risher >


Cece Jones-Davis

Cece Jones-Davis, an ordained minister, artist, speaker, and advocate, has dedicated her life to pointing people to the ALL-powerful and the least-powerful. Working at the intersection of faith, art and social justice, she is especially passionate about seeing God’s Kingdom come in the areas of racial healing, women and girls’ issues, and criminal justice reform.

As a criminal justice advocate, she established the Julius Jones Coalition and is the backbone of the Justice for Julius campaign, raising awareness about Julius Jones, who has been on Oklahoma’s death row for over 20 years.

Cece is a 2021 Heartland Emmy Award Nominee for her work in co-hosting Painful History, Evolving Future on the KFOR news channel, was awarded the 2019 Phil Wahl Abolitionist of the Year Award by the Oklahoma Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty (OCADP), and received a Special Congressional Recognition for her efforts in civil rights and social justice.

She has also served as a brand ambassador for Tampax to help reduce the stigma of menstruation, particularly among women of color.

Today, she continues to fight for equitable access to proper sanitation and menstrual products, while raising awareness of how girls’ and women’s wellbeing and advancement are harmed by the lack of access. Her work in menstrual advocacy has been featured in The Huffington Post, Essence.com, Self Magazine, Yahoo! Health, Teen Vogue and many more.

More articles by Cece Jones-Davis >


Ariel Gold

Ariel Gold is a Jewish faith activist and organizer with the Rainbow PUSH Coalition and a board member of the Waging Peace Project. She was the executive director of the Fellowship of Reconciliation USA from 2022-2025 and the former co-director of CODEPINK: Women for Peace from 2015 to 2022. She is a contributing author to Reclaiming Judaism from Zionism: Stories of Personal Transformation, edited by Carolyn L. Karcher and Bayard Rustin: A Legacy of Protest and Politics, edited by Michael G. Long, and is published in The Nation, The Forward, Waging Nonviolence, Ms. Magazine, Responsible Statecraft and more.

More articles by Ariel Gold >