VENICE- “Diane has a halo effect,” said Christy Turlington Burns on Thursday morning ahead of receiving a DVF Award that same evening for her humanitarian work with the organization she founded 15 years ago, Every Mother Counts.

Turlington Burns was flanked by her daughter Grace and Diane von Furstenberg, sitting on an animalier-printed sofa in one of the designer’s salons in the 15th-century Palazzo Giustinian Brandolini on the Grand Canal, brimming with myriad family portraits, art works and memorabilia from her travels around the world.

“Calvin [Klein] would be horrified,” von Furstenberg quipped, in a nod to the minimalist taste of the American designer, who helped propel Turlington Burns’ career in fashion.

However, it was not her supermodel stardom that was the focus of the exclusive interview and cover photo shoot with von Furstenberg, but the non-profit company Turlington Burns set up and dedicated to making pregnancy and childbirth safe for all mothers. This is a very personal project stemming from a postpartum hemorrhage after the birth of Grace in 2003. The award would be bestowed on Turlington Burns later that night by her daughter, who praised her mother for “looking outwards” following the near-death experience.

Asked about her popularity in helping to spread the message, she admitted “it hasn’t hurt for sure, but I think what’s more important is just to get the door open or have a phone picked up. But I think what I’ve I’m most proud of is the way that I approached this work from my experience. I went back to school to study public health and I really wanted to understand what was needed, how I could be an added value in this conversation.”

Von Furstenberg praised Turlington Burns’ “serious approach, she gets s–t done. We know that to inspire is about storytelling. You tell your story, but what is most important and inspiring is not the fact that you were a supermodel or successful, but what happened to you and how you did it.”

She explained that a goal of the awards is “to give grants and visibility to extraordinary women who have the courage to fight, the strength to survive and the leadership to inspire. I could just give them checks, but the idea of giving them visibility is also very important, so it’s also nice to have people who will bring this because there are always maybe three people that the public doesn’t really know. They all do extraordinary things, but some have more visibility, and by including them, you give visibility to the other women who are not well known.”

In fact, the 16th edition of the awards also honored Kim Kardashian for her work as a criminal justice advocate; Sudanese activist and Emergency Response Room leader Hanin Ahmed; general coordinator of COICA and defender of Indigenous and environmental rights Fany Kuiru Castro, and Giulia Minoli, president of Italian foundation Una Nessuna Centomila, dedicated to contrasting violence against women.

“Early on, when I started my maternal health work, you gave me the opportunity to speak in your home to a group of women, opening up your circle and your network, giving me a platform to be able to share my work,” said Turlington Burns.

“One of the things that is most important is to create connections and I always talk about that because I would like to inspire everyone to do it,” said von Furstenberg. “Every morning, I try to make a miracle by introducing someone to someone who can change their life and who would not have met without me. You don’t need to speak. You don’t need to say anything, all you need to do is focus on introducing one person to a person in a way that you’re going to get their attention. And everyone can do that.”

“What I’ve always preached is to be in charge,” she continued. “But to be in charge is first and foremost to be true to yourself. You can’t do anything unless you’re true to yourself. Own your imperfections, they become your assets and that’s what I always advocated for. Recently, now that I’m an older woman, I advocate the power of kindness, because I realized that kindness is a currency, and just like money, it compounds, and generosity is the best investment.”

“When I first started working on maternal health, the hope was to connect, like Diane was saying, and  then to try to come together in a more united sort of force, and raising awareness was central to the mission,” said Turlington Burns. “There are new audiences every day who are learning about the challenges that women face when they’re bringing life into the world, but we also have an opportunity to invest in community-based solutions. There are incredible women, largely, approximately 90 percent of our grantees are women that are actually exemplifying models of care that are what women need and want. They’re respected, they feel safe, they feel seen in their communities. And so it’s been really important for us to lift up those individuals, those models of care, and we do that through film-making and storytelling.”

After the first film “No Woman, No Cry” in 2010, Every Mother Counts launched in 2015 the “Giving Birth in America” series and Turlington Burns is executive producing the documentary “Perilous Passage: Birth in America”  with a Paramount company called Republic Pictures.

“We are hopeful that it will debut before the mid-term elections [in America], again to continue to keep maternal health top of mind, looking at the impact of an already very precarious maternal health state in the U.S. post-rescinding of Roe v. Wade/Dobbs decision, reversing rights that women have been working so hard to fight for, and that will actually have a deep impact that we can’t even see just yet in terms of the numbers of mortality and trauma as a result of those very, very draconian policies,” she said. “We hope to influence policy-change as well, because that still is a lever for change in the way that kindness is a currency.”

She lamented an increase in childbirth mortality in the U.S. since the ‘80s, “We have a problem around race that has made access to care and quality of care very different for women of color. Even women of color with a college education have a higher chance of dying in childbirth than an uneducated white woman, and that is shocking. We pay more for health care per capita than any other developed nation in the world, and we have the worst outcomes.”

Turlington Burns has made Every Mother Counts her main job and her “third child,” following the birth of Grace’s brother Finn. She has traveled around the world supporting the organization and said it has partners in 31 U.S. community-based grantee organizations and 18 global grantees (nine countries around the world total): Tanzania, Kenya, India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Indonesia, Guatemala, Haiti and U.S.

“I find that I get the most inspiration by being physically right there,” she said.  “Once people have experienced the work we’re supporting, they are lifetime supporters, they advocate, they  donate, they share stories. When you bring people together, the most surprising things happen. When possible, we also deal with policy-makers, ministers of health, sometimes prime ministers or presidents.”

The DVF Awards were created in 2010 by the designer and the Diller-von Furstenberg Family Foundation to recognize and support extraordinary women who are dedicated to transforming and inspiring the lives of other women, granting each honoree $100,000 for their nonprofit organization in order to further their work.

Over the years, the DVF Awards have amplified the voices of women from more than 30 countries with grants to further their work in the areas of climate change, immigration, and fighting human trafficking, among others.

Von Furstenberg has been staging the awards in Venice since 2022, a city she loves and compares to a woman, “mastering the art of solution, seduction and resilience over the years. For the winter of my life, I decided to live several months a year in this beautiful palazzo I walked into when I was 19 [with her first husband Prince Egon von Furstenberg, the nephew of Countess Cristiana Brandolini d’Adda, sister of the late Fiat tycoon Gianni Agnelli], and I had never seen anything so glamorous in my life. I think it would be nice to make Venice the Republic of Kindness.”

The yearly awards have been timed to coincide with the Venice Film Festival, which has helped to bring added visibility, just as choosing high-profile honorees or presenters, ranging from Hilary Rodham Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Oprah Winfrey and Amal Clooney.

Cue Kardashian, with her 355 million Instagram followers and successful business ventures, such as Skims.  “People know so much about Kim, but they don’t see the prison work she does. I checked it out and she does unbelievable, real work.”

Von Furstenberg decided to ask Chris Young to present Kardashian with the award for added meaning. Young was freed after Kardashian’s advocacy and clemency from President Trump four years ago. He had received a life sentence for a lower level drug offense in 2014 exactly on August 28 but von Furstenberg believes “this is not a coincidence. ‘God comes incognito,’ said Einstein. It’s energy and we have to believe in energy because we are now fighting against such mediocrity and greed, which makes it a very, very hard soup to drink.”

Later on Thursday, Kardashian, wearing Maison Margiela, spoke about how she discovered law “about seven years ago when I wanted to help get someone out of prison for the first time. I think I was really naive to our justice system, and I didn’t really know how it worked until I really did the work and got in and saw what was going on. Justice reform is a new path that I’m just figuring out and wanting to figure out how to change policies. He was the second person I went into the White House for after Alice Johnson to ask for his clemency. We didn’t get it that way, but we didn’t stop. We got it through other avenues of the courts. And any chance that I get to tell people’s stories, I love that opportunity.”

Kardashian said that she never worried about balancing her public persona with her activism or that people would not take her seriously. “I think you just have to focus. When I first went to the White House, I thought, now do I have to start dressing differently and posting what I post differently? And absolutely not. I want people to see the work that I do and maybe relate to the stuff that I do that’s not my advocacy work, and then maybe be intrigued by that. I think you just have to be yourself. Fight for what you believe in. And I think people, anytime something is really authentic to who you are and what you’re fighting for, you just have to be yourself. Once you realize that you can make changes, it makes you want to be vocal.”