Some months you feel the whole ecosystem at once. June was one of them — and it started on Capitol Hill.
On June 3, I spent the U.S. Breastfeeding Committee’s Day of Advocacy walking the halls of Congress with a group of fellow North Carolinians — Kat Fisher, a colleague from the maternity-care industry; Angela Tatum Malloy of Momma’s Village; and Tina Sherman of MomsRising. Office after office, we carried the same ask — invest in the families who feed the next generation. There’s something clarifying about making that case out loud, one-pager in hand, remembering that policy is really just a lot of rooms full of people deciding what we owe one another.
But the moment I keep returning to is standing beside Kat.
During Hurricane Helene, I sent more than a few frustrated emails to the infant-feeding industry. Families in western North Carolina needed support, I wanted to work with anyone who could help, and the International Code of Marketing of Breast-milk Substitutes — the very Code we uphold in Step 8 — meant we couldn’t simply partner. It was one of the hardest tensions of that season: holding a line you believe in while babies need to eat now.
So to stand on Capitol Hill beside an industry colleague — both of us there for families — moved me more than I expected. I don’t take it lightly, and I know the Code questions are real and worth taking seriously. But I felt something shift: industry showing up, people inside big companies choosing to advocate, and a field willing to hold space for movement toward the World Health Organization’s guidance. Change so often looks like that — slow, and then suddenly sitting next to you in a congressional waiting room.
From the Hill, I moved to the National Breastfeeding Conference & Convening, and to the particular joy of presenting to a room full of people who have given their careers — and often their hearts — to this work. Congresswoman Alma Adams opened the conference, and it never stops being powerful to watch one of our own legislators name this work from the front of the room. If Capitol Hill is where you make the ask, the convening is where you remember who you’re making it with.
What struck me across all of it was how aligned the field has become — the new National Plan, the evidence base, the community frameworks, each written for a different set of hands, all pointing the same way. (If you’ve followed our “One Cloth, Many Hands” series, this is that cloth, seen from the inside.)
I came home carrying that energy straight into our own statehouse — but that’s a story for another post.