Instead of going out on Friday night, Phoung Lien Nguyen threw a party for her friends and classmates on campus at Pacific Lutheran University (PLU) in Tacoma, Washington. Like all of the best college parties, Phoung Lien's had food, music, games and a theme: women and the environment.

Nguyen, a senior biology major at PLU, interns with GreenPink: Washington, a coalition of women's health and environmental organizations that are joining forces to empower related social justice movements. Coalition partners include the Sierra Club's Global Population and Environment Program, Planned Parenthood of Western Washington (PPWW) and One By One, a Seattle-based non-profit working to end obstetric fistula – a devastating childbirth injury.

GreenPink parties, like the one Nguyen threw early this November, are at the crux of the GreenPink mission: to create a dialogue about the interrelatedness between women's reproductive rights, access to voluntary family planning, and environmental sustainability. GreenPink parties are one of the forums used to create a comfortable platform to raise two things: awareness about these issues and $300, the equivalent of one reparative surgery for a woman with obstetric fistula.

Katie Fontana, a senior religion, women and gender studies major at PLU, who attended Nguyen's GreenPink party, had a positive experience of activism finding "places of unity where we can start making change right now."

"One of the most important things is to have the very specific example of how environmentalism and feminism are linked in a very important way," said Fontana. "With all these ‘isms'… it feels like you have to choose between them, but this is a great example of how working for a woman's health is not just working for a woman's health but for a community and an ecosystem."

GreenPink parties provide a "great way to introduce people into the interrelated issues of women's health and environmental protection," according to Cassie Gardener, conservation organizer for Sierra Club's Global Population and Environment program. While introducing people to the complex linkages between women and the environment, says Gardener, GreenPink parties have the added opportunity to apply these connections to the issue of obstetric fistula, which offers a tangible way to take action.

"We have found a lot of success in working with One By One in making the connection between global women's health and the environment," said Gardner. "Providing people with tangible ways to take action and providing $300 that can really make a difference to a woman's life and thus to the life of her community is a really tangible and inspiring thing for an activist to do."

Nguyen's GreenPink successes extended beyond meeting and exceeding the goal of the $300 needed to repair a fistula. Her audience was engaged, inspired and wanted to take even more action.

"It was just so cool because after I talked about the issues people were coming up to me and saying, ‘I would like to help you with this,' and contributing ideas… …People heard this message and it clicked inside their minds and they wanted to help," said Nguyen.

GreenPink: Washington currently works with twelve college-aged interns throughout Western Washington, like Nguyen, who will work to educate their campuses and communities about the connection between women and the environment.

"Young people are a really powerful group of constituents for organizing change," said Gardener. "One of the really huge reasons we prioritize youth leadership is that more than half of the world's population is under 25. It's really up to young people to take a leadership role on global health and environmental challenges."

Nguyen hopes to use her internship with GreenPink to inspire her peers to step up to that challenge. "I would like my campus to learn more about the US policies that affect the rest of the world on issues of health care and women's health and the environment," said Nguyen. "A lot of times talking about these issues is a wonderful opening of the door, but then letting people know that their voice matters, and their vote matters is really, really powerful."

Voice, along with choice and access, are the keystones of GreenPink's philosophy that "women with voice and choice protect the earth, and that access equals power." Of the over 6.6 billion people on this planet, one-third live in extreme poverty, surviving on less than one dollar a day, according to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). Because an estimated 70 percent of the world's poor rely on the land for income and subsistence, according to the Population Reference Bureau, environmental crises like water scarcity, deforestation, and climate change have the greatest impact on poor people in developing countries.

Among this demographic, women, who constitute 70 percent of the world's poor, feel the brunt of this ecological impact and have an incredibly vested interest in sustaining the environment and its resources for the survival and well-being of their families. This stress is compounded because they do the bulk of the household work including fetching and carrying cooking firewood and water over greater and greater distances as these resources diminish. This overwork exacerbates their already low caloric intake as compared to their male counterparts. Girls are often malnourished as a result and their bodies can be strained during pregnancy and childbirth. Child marriage plays a role as well, creating larger family sizes when girls begin their childbearing earlier. The issues of health, resources and poverty are compounded when their family sizes have grown beyond that which they have the means to provide for. Thus, according to the UNFPA, there are 200 million couples worldwide in want of family planning and maternal services that cannot obtain access to them. If provided access to voluntary family planning and the choice to have smaller families, "women would be healthier, children would be healthier and resource demand would simply go down," said One By One co-founder and executive director Heidi Breeze-Harris.

"This is simply the opportunity to offer choice to women who want choice – to space pregnancies and have smaller families if they so choose. We want to help them live healthier lives and have the power to create a climate were they can make the choices that could save their lives and the lives of their children." said Breeze-Harris.

Currently, GreenPink interns are learning how to advocate to congress on three pieces of federal legislation that address the international issues of child marriage prevention, treating obstetric fistula, and reinstating funding for UNFPA, an international development agency which provides reproductive health programs for the worlds poorest countries.

Although GreenPink has a global focus, interns will also lobby the Washington state capital for local reproductive justice issues like medically accurate and comprehensive sexual education in public schools.

"When we look at issues that are a thousand miles away sometimes it's easy to forget what is happening in our own backyard. By rolling up our shirt-sleeves, and taking time to work on issues locally, sometimes we realize we are all working on the same things ultimately." said Tim Mcleod, community/outreach educator for PPWW.

Despite the fact that coalition work is far-reaching and complex, the coalition partners agree that Green Pink ultimately strengthens all of their individual missions. It allows all three organizations to broaden their reach as well as offer a richer training and activist experience to participating interns.

"We (at PPWW) have begun to realize that a more holistic approach to supporting family planning includes working with other groups that have similar missions and goals," said McCleod.

GreenPink is also challenging the general mandate for non-profits to narrow their message down to a twenty-second sound bite. "Talking across issues is always more difficult. The conversations are not as tidy or as simple. But therein lies the beauty of it. No one group is going to have the silver bullet. For people and the environment to exist healthily it is going to take a lot of deep thinking and powerful action from everyone." said Breeze-Harris.

In asking constituents and supporters to spend more time and mental energy to grasp the interconnectivity of issues, GreenPink essentially invites the public into a mutual relationship and into the creation of a movement.

"I want to participate in this bigger conversation because this is one of the conversations that have the power to change the world." said Breeze-Harris. "We're hoping to be members of a movement. We're hoping that GreenPink becomes bigger than itself."