Volunteers hand out treats on the Pearl Street Mall as part of the seventh annual Mothers Acting Up Mother’s Day rally on Sunday.

Volunteers hand out treats on the Pearl Street Mall as part of the seventh annual Mothers Acting Up Mother’s Day rally on Sunday.

Thumping grooves of world/reggae band The Ancestral Voices with Danae Shanti resonated down the Pearl Street Mall in front of the Boulder County Courthouse yesterday afternoon. The sound alerted passersby of the seventh annual Mothers Acting Up Mother’s Day Rally.

Music, dancing, and brightly colored costumes captivated the audience, while a series of tables featuring representatives from local activist organizations engaged those interested in learning more about their cause.

“I hoped that lots of people would come out, that there would be lots of new people and that it would be a very celebratory day – and all of those things happened,” said Joellen Raderstorf, Co-Founder of Mothers Acting Up, a local grassroots organization dedicated to providing a variety of opportunities for mothers seeking a voice in their community and world.

Raderstorf, along with the many other volunteer participants satisfied with the success of the day’s event, noted that it fostered a more accurate representation of what Mother’s Day was originally intended to be.

“Mother’s Day was started in the 1800s when Julia Ward Howe did a Mother’s Day proclamation,” Jennifer Parsons, two-year Active Volunteer for Mothers Acting Up told the Colorado Daily. “Mothers Acting Up hopes to bring mothers together and get them active on Mother’s Day in order to reclaim the holiday. Mother’s Day was not initially about brunch and flowers, it was a call for women to get together and talk about issues of the day amongst themselves and how they could be influential in what was going on in the world.”

That’s not to say flowers were left entirely out of the picture, however. Raderstorf noted that 1,000 free-trade roses were passed out as free gifts to mothers as they stopped to watch the event with their families.

“There were moms and kids on stilts handing out the roses, we carried them along the parade route, and we had them at the Pearl Street Mall,” she said. “What I love most about that is the roses were grown and harvested by women who were paid fair wages whose kids will now be able to school because they are in a fair-trade situation. We were celebrating the strength of mothers and it was a direct action that by taking that rose and supporting fair trade, they were connected with mothers in Kenya.”

The event featured volunteer representatives from local groups, including Mother’s Acting Up, UNICEF, New Era Colorado, Women for Women International, and CODEPINK. The event began at 11:30 a.m. at the Boulder Public Library where participating families began decorating signs, strollers, wagons and bikes for the march from Library down the Pearl Street Mall to the courthouse, where events continued until around 3 p.m.

There was even a large canvas banner which presented mothers with the opportunity to scribble down a “Mother’s Day Wish For the World,” – part of One Sky campaign with the aim of presenting the banner in Washington D.C.

“It was a successful event because a lot of people wanted to stop by the table to see what we were about,” said Anne Toepel, Active Volunteer and Co-Founder of the Denver-Boulder Chapter of CODEPINK – a grass roots organization dedicated to ending the war in Iraq and redirecting war funding toward domestic human needs. “So there was a lot of getting the word out and trying to educate people – give them an alternative to the mainstream media.”