By Courtney Westlake, Senior Correspondent
Friends and fellow mothers Becky Aud-Jennison and Anna Fermin are keeping one goal in mind as they set plans for their new organization: to inspire positive change.
Aud-Jennison, a psychotherapist in Springfield, and Fermin, a Chicago singer-songwriter, recently founded a group called MOMSthatROCK! Concerts for a Cause, an organization that is a call to action through the universal language of music.
Fermin, who is a mom to sons ages four and four months, and Aud-Jennison, who is the mother to a blended family of nine children, are already rocking and rolling after just five months since the inception of MOMSthatROCK!
The two friends not only created this organization because of Fermin’s inspiring music, but also met because of it as well. Aud-Jennison had been a fan of Fermin’s for a while before they met, after seeing Fermin in concert with her band, Anna Fermin’s Trigger Gospel. Every time Aud-Jennison was in the Chicago area, she began to check to see if the band was playing. Eventually, the two met when Aud-Jennison accompanied her husband to a symposium for his job in Decatur, where Fermin was performing.
“We just clicked,” Fermin said. “I always knew we’d work together on some level.”
The pair got their chance to impact the world, like they’d always dreamed of doing, after Aud-Jennison was inspired by a movie she saw with her daughter Rachel called “A Powerful Noise.” The movie highlights the lives of three women in Mali, Vietnam and Bosnia who overcome numerous challenges to create lasting change in their communities. It also details what organizations like CARE, a humanitarian organization fighting global poverty with an emphasis on women, are doing around the world.
After seeing the movie, Aud-Jennison contacted Fermin with a new vision and MOMSthatROCK! was born soon after.
The goal of the organization is to provide aid for the global empowerment of girls and women, to improve health care and education and to help end global poverty by staging rock concerts regionally, nationally and even internationally.
The reason for the goal of ending poverty through the empowerment of women comes from telling statistics and research found by the International Center for Research on Women, Aud-Jennison said.
“When an educated girl earns an income, she reinvests 90 percent of it in her family, compared to 35 percent for a boy; yet 99.4 percent of international aid money is not directed to her,” Aud-Jennison said. “I used to think ‘why do this stuff when there are things going on within our own country?’ But CARE is about reform and empowering women. This is exciting and a fundamental way to do something; we have Anna’s talent to help us spread the word about these causes. So we hit the ground running.”
Aud-Jennison acknowledges that she is working about 80 hours a week on their new initiative, videoconferencing with Fermin much of the time throughout the day. Aud-Jennison currently maintains a blog for the organization’s Web site, momsthatrock.com, and updates regularly, as well as utilizes Twitter and Facebook to spread the word about their actions. The first two MOMSthatROCK events recently, however, were the stepping stones for the organization.
The first MOMSthatROCK! concert was held in Chicago on June 20 at the Fulton Street Collective with performances by kid rocker Jeanie B! and the Jelly Beans, soul singer Anne Harris and Anna Fermin’s Trigger Gospel. The organization followed up with that performance the next weekend with a show at Aud-Jennison’s home on Lake Springfield on June 27, which included performances by blues group Suzy and the Smokers, indie folk singer Brandon Carnes and Anna Fermin’s Trigger Gospel.
Both were daytime events to encourage families to bring their children, and an “art jam” was also held for the kids to create artwork to send to children in India.
“We want to help fight global poverty one concert at a time and feature performers who have also become moms,” Fermin said. “We’re bringing social activism to an audience who might not be exposed, bringing social activism to music fans. We are coming together and doing what we can to help the poverty-stricken around the world.”
Fermin, who is also pursuing a solo career in addition to performing with her band, said she is thrilled that she is able to combine her love of music and philanthropy.
“I wanted to start giving back to the community, and it made sense to put the two together and do concerts for CARE,” Fermin said. “The name MOMSthatROCK! was an idea I had when I first became pregnant. I was really excited about being a mom and a rocker, and I wanted to tie my passion for both together.”
The organization also collected “change for change” during these events to benefit an orphanage in Kenya where Aud-Jennison’s daughter Rachel volunteered for a month in June. The orphanage was recently founded and currently serves 22 girls.
“It took one movie to bring this home to us to empower women and girls in developing countries; maybe (MOMSthatROCK!) will ignite interest in others to give back and look into these causes,” Aud-Jennison said. “We’d like to build a coalition of moms. I really think we have the ability to affect global change.”
“CARE has a big mission of not coming in and dropping band-aids,” she added. “They are creating a lasting change and actually working with leaders and community members in these countries.”
And MOMSthatROCK! is not only planning their own concerts to benefit the poverty-stricken, but they are also open to helping other organizations plan benefit concerts as well.
“We are here to do what we can to help CARE specifically, but we know there are a lot of people beyond the scope of CARE in need. There are people doing amazing things in communities around the world, and we want to reach out to them,” Aud-Jennison said.
The organization is currently planning shows in Springfield and in Wisconsin in the fall and would also like to eventually coordinate a few screenings of the movie, “A Powerful Noise,” which inspired the founding of the organization.
“We’re hoping to bring concerts to every major town and city across the country and internationally,” Fermin said. “We feel a strong pull toward the Philippines and Africa, so we’ll see where it goes from there.”
Courtney Westlake is a freelance writer from Springfield.
