Christy is one of Condé Nast Traveler's Visionaries 2012: 12 Remarkable Citizens

Who

Model and founder of Every Mother Counts.

Because

She has used her high visibility—nine U.S. Vogue covers, marriage to Ed Burns, friendship with Bono—to bring mainstream attention to the issue of maternal health.

Photographed

By Tarun Khiwal in Mumbai on March 16, 2012.

The Story

While her comrades from the earliest days of fashion modeling are fighting for child support and dating oligarchs, Christy Turlington Burns, it turns out, has become a bit of a wonk. As the founder of Every Mother Counts, an action and mobilization campaign designed to improve maternal health around the world using film, music, and social media, she is a font of information: “Almost 360,000 women die every year during pregnancy and childbirth,” says Turlington Burns, “and it’s 90 percent preventable.” These days, she spends much of her time on the road, screening her documentary about maternal mortality, No Woman, No Cry, at global health conferences and medical schools. “A lot of doctors are very emotional when they see it,” she says. “The film puts a human face on the data. It’s exciting because they have the opportunity to take the information into their daily work.” The roots of her commitment are personal. In 2003, after delivering her first child in New York, she suffered a life-threatening complication. Had she been in a village in the developing world, she would have died. Turlington Burns, now 43 and a mother of two, serves on the ­Harvard Medical School Global Health Council and, last March, delivered ­remarks at the UN Commission on the Status of Women. For the moment, she has put her studies for a master’s degree in public health at Columbia University on hold because she has more urgent work to do. “It’s not just about childbirth. It’s about how we value women in the world,” she says. “If we allow women to die in the act of giving life, it proves their low status. This is an equity issue.”

The Big Trip

“My life is changed every time I go outside my realm. It’s important to see the world and meet the ­people. Before I traveled to Tanzania in 2009, I felt I understood a lot. But when you visit a community and a woman opens her door at such a personal time in her life, you realize that each woman is an individual. It brought my respect for women to another level.”

Give

Donate old cell phones at everymothercounts.org; the proceeds from recycling them go to new phones for health workers.

For more photos of Christy in India with the Harvard School of Public Health's Dean's Board of Advisors, click here. 

About this year's Visionaries:

Condé Nast Traveler has always believed that the art of travel cannot be separated from the state of the world. Over the years we have featured trailblazers such as Kofi Annan, for his work at the United Nations on human rights; former president Jimmy Carter, for his efforts to foster world peace; and Nelson Mandela, for his fight for freedom—among many others. This year, a Cambodian activist and an Oscar-winning actress, a water engineer, a crusading journalist, an entrepreneur turned social activist, a supermodel— and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, globe-trotting diplomat extraordinaire—complete our 2012 list of visionaries who are making the world a better place.