Citizen Christy
Christy Turlington Burns: Model, Activist, Mother, and March Issue Cover Star
As a model, activist, and mother, Christy Turlington Burns has been lucky enough to experience the power—and pleasure—of travel in all of her life's roles.
She has been traveling all her life, but these days, at 45, Christy Turlington Burns is perhaps more mobile than ever. She still works as a model, of course, but more important, she is often on the road with Every Mother Counts (EMC), an international, New York–based nonprofit she founded in 2010. After the birth of her daughter, Grace, in 2003, Turlington Burns suffered a scary, yet manageable, complication. The incident made her start thinking about the millions of women who don’t have access to adequate medical care. In fact, as she learned, pregnancy is the leading cause of death globally for teenage girls—and 90 percent of those deaths are preventable.
Today, Turlington Burns’s work takes her everywhere from Uganda to Tanzania to Florida, where she donates the money she raises to educating midwives and building hospitals. But long before she was crisscrossing the globe on behalf of women’s health, Turlington Burns was no stranger to the inside of a plane. Both of her parents worked for Pan Am, and as a child in San Francisco she traveled frequently, including a month-long stay in her mother’s native El Salvador. Then, later, there was the traveling she did as a model—a shoot in Biarritz on Monday! a Milan runway the next day!—the type that sounds more glamorous from the outside.
But it was a recent trip to tour a hospital in Haiti on behalf of EMC that reminded Turlington Burns of both the power and the pleasure of travel itself. "When you’re in this line of work, you can begin seeing places only for their problems and deficits," she says, explaining why she felt it wasn’t just restorative but necessary that she spend a few days sightseeing in Haiti. "It’s nice to remember that there are wonderful, thriving parts of these communities as well."
That lesson—of what other cultures, other places, can both teach us and inspire in us—is one she hopes to pass along to her own future frequent fliers, ten-year-old Grace and eight-year-old Finn. "There’s a world map in our house," she says. "We mark the places I’ve been. It helps to give them context." Lately, they’ve also been marking the places they’ve visited together: Paris, for one, for Grace’s tenth birthday (her daughter’s temporary conversion to vegetarianism changed the plans for duck confit at Joséphine Chez Dumonet, but put no damper on the midnight macaron binges at the hotel Le Meurice); and Barcelona, after Finn developed an intense interest in soccer. "People said, 'You’re going to Spain for a football match?'" Turlington Burns says. "But it was much more than that. Soccer just provided an opening. We had amazing food, we walked everywhere, we went to the Picasso Museum."
It was their safari in Tanzania, however, that may have brought the lesson home most profoundly. On that trip, Turlington Burns took Grace to the homes of some local women who have received micro-finance loans, and she says that she was thrilled to hear her daughter ask the questions which relief workers spend their lives struggling to answer: "She wanted to know what the responsibility of wealthy Tanzanians was to these women. She was able to start thinking about responsibility and the different roles we all play. After that, she really understood my travel more. It was like: I get to have you as my mother, but I can share you, too."
