Fight Like a Mother

by Shannon Watts

  And that brings up an important point: you have to be very careful about whose voices you let in your head. If your only sounding board is someone who may have good intentions but just wants you to stay safe, you might get discouraged at the exact moment when you need encouragement to keep going. If you were brand new to being a vegan, you wouldn’t want to go to a barbecue festival. Make sure the people you surround yourself with have fortitude to spare for those moments when you might start questioning your path.

  Every volunteer I entrusted in those early days treated our organization like a start-up. They made it clear that they understood we were building something of value from scratch. They were willing to put in long hours, overcome constant obstacles, and sacrifice the comfort of their former lives to save the lives of strangers. In return, despite the thousands of miles that separated most of us, we became the closest of friends and allies, united against a formidable opponent, and driven to create a safer, better future for all our kids.

  Together, we hung in there through all the obstacles that threatened to dismantle the plane we were building, even after we’d already taken off and were up at ten thousand feet.

  Learn What You Don’t Know from the People Who Know It

  Even though I absolutely believe in building the plane as you fly it, I also think it’s a good idea to read a manual now and again. Whether you’re starting a movement or getting involved in an existing one (Moms Demand Action is always open to new volunteers!), it’s vital to learn what you don’t know—as long as you also keep in mind that you’ll never know everything. Get up to speed, but don’t spend more time than necessary on what’s happened so far or else you’ll be too busy looking backward to make a difference.

  I knew that I was no expert in the history of gun policy when I started that Facebook page. I had a lot of learning to do. We all do. So one of the first things I did was to reach out to every expert I could find. Some I found online, some were recommended to me, and some were people who were already nationally known. Most I didn’t know personally. In some cases I cold-called them, and in others the women who were helping me made the connection. It really didn’t matter how many degrees of separation stood between us—they were all receptive to my requests for help and graciously gave me access to their guidance and insight.

  Given my original desire to join something like Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), I knew I wanted to speak to Debbie Weir, that group’s CEO. I didn’t know how to reach her, so I called the MADD helpline and was blown away when Debbie herself answered the phone. I told her about my Facebook page and the subsequent outpouring of support, and over the course of the next few weeks she spent hours with me and other volunteers on the phone explaining how MADD had organized to take on the alcohol lobby and the lawmakers beholden to it.

  Debbie taught me so much about working with survivors of trauma, how it’s a whole different ball game from working with your typical volunteer, and how to help organize them while being respectful of everything they’ve been through. She was an invaluable resource who became an ally. I’m happy to report that years later, she also became the managing director of Moms Demand Action, and we are so lucky to have her.

  Another woman I reached out to right away was Laurie Kappe, a California gun safety lobbyist I had met just a few months before on a yoga retreat. She and I sat next to each other every day at lunch, and she would regale me with stories about legislative campaigns that at the time, frankly, I had no interest in. I was there to seek inner peace, after all! After Sandy Hook, she was one of the first people I reached out to and was hugely knowledgeable and helpful. Laurie counseled me to be moderate in our messaging. She told me to be clear that we are not anti-gun, but rather to focus on finding nonpartisan solutions that could unite people in both blue states and red states.

  I also relied on the expertise and knowledge of women who had been doing this work for years, including Donna Dees-Thomases, who had planned the Million Mom March in May 2000 after a 1999 shooting in California, and Nina Vinik at the Joyce Foundation, a Chicago-based public policy foundation.

  Because the initial name of the Facebook page was One Million Moms for Gun Control, Donna had already been receiving a lot of inquiries from people thinking our organizations were connected. She was so gracious about sending those folks our way; Moms Demand Action is really built on the shoulders of the work she began, and I am so thankful for her tireless contributions over the decades.

  And Nina counseled me to advocate and lobby, not just hold marches and rallies. She connected me to organizers who volunteered their time and expertise to help Moms Demand Action create the organizational structure that has served us so well (more on that in just a moment).

  All these women helped us refine our strategy, messaging, and tactics. Along the way, they brought donors and partners into our fold and sent volunteers our way from all corners of the country. The help is there if you are willing to ask for it.

  One of the best ways to track down specific experts is online, through Google and LinkedIn. Or crowdsource for ideas on experts via Twitter and Facebook. Once you have names, pick up the phone and start cold-calling. Ask everyone you speak to whether they can recommend three other people you should call. Follow up on every lead because you never know when you’ll be connected to someone who can help support your work in significant ways. And always, always thank people with an email after they’ve given you their time.

  You can’t afford to be shy. Don’t let your inner critic talk you out of making the ask. You may be able to build a rudimentary plane that will at least take off with only limited knowledge, but if you want that plane to really go the distance, you’ll need to borrow the expertise of others.

  Trust the People Who Want to Help You

  In those first weeks after creating the Facebook page, I was getting calls from women (and a few men) who offered their talents pro bono to help me get the new organization off the ground, including trademark lawyers, medical professionals, website designers, graphic designers, social media experts, advertisers, and professional organizers. Without this outpouring of support from total strangers, Moms Demand Action never would have been able to get to the cruising altitude it enjoys today.

  This was another important lesson I learned: although you’ll have to ask for some of the support you need, much of it will seek you out. You have to be receptive to those unsolicited offers, even if you don’t know what to do with them right away. (In those early days, I put every email I received offering to help in some way in a folder called “volunteer offers” and would go through and respond to those emails when I had time. Now we have a whole structure set up to handle offers of help from potential volunteers—see here for more on that.)

  When I was a manager at General Electric, the people who reported to me would tell me that I was a good manager but that I was intense. I would constantly make lists, assign tasks, and then check in with people to see whether they had completed them—I was a taskmaster. I quickly learned that working with volunteers—especially when you’re working on a cause, such as gun violence, where the volunteers have likely experienced some form of trauma—requires a totally different approach. You can’t micromanage. Volunteers give their time out of the goodness and generosity of their hearts. No one is making them carve an additional workweek out of their already busy schedules; they’re doing it because they care. In return, they deserve trust, patience, and gratitude.

  One early morning, just days after starting Moms Demand Action, I found myself on a conference call with an amazing team of talented women—Harvard-educated pediatricians, a journalist, a professional organizer, a business leader—several of whom were also gun violence survivors. They were looking to me to lead, but they also were clearly more than competent and not in any way junior to me. In fact, they were pretty intimidating. They clearly had their own opinions and ideas about how to make Moms Demand Action successful, and my not listening to their advice would have alienated them�
�and rightly so. In that moment, I consciously decided to take a leap of faith and trust every single volunteer to do what they did best and to always assume they’d follow through on their commitment. What also helped me make that leap in thinking was the fact that, even if I’d wanted to micromanage, I didn’t have the time. It was all I could do to keep track of the big picture.

  Resist the Urge to Do It All

  Since starting Moms Demand Action, I’ve seen the same cycle play out over and over again: a high-performing woman steps into a leadership volunteer position and ends up taking on all the work herself. Despite offers of help from other volunteers, she keeps her knowledge close to the vest and holds on to all the responsibility for meeting her deliverables. She creates the strategy, and then she executes on every single tactic. As a result, she feels overextended and stressed out, and eventually she burns out and quits.

  There is a tendency among women—and I am totally raising my own hand here—to want to own everything, in part because we’re multitaskers, in part because we’re not usually well-versed in asking for help, and in part because we’re pretty darn competent. We trust ourselves to get the job done and done well, and we don’t have the same level of trust in others.

  Every month, I get notes from the organizing managers of our state chapters telling me which volunteers could use a thank-you call. Then I call them and thank them from the bottom of my heart for their efforts and their courage. (I have been known to bawl on people’s voice mails; but it’s the good kind of tears.) Once in 2018, when reading through these notes, I saw the name of the group leader from Austin, Texas, Nicole Golden, with the comment next to it, “She could use a pep call, she’s been a bit overwhelmed lately.” Nicole had been with Moms Demand Action since we were still called One Million Moms for Gun Control. She’d been instrumental in getting our Texas chapter up and running, and she’d been working even harder to accommodate the influx of volunteers we got after the Parkland shooting. I made it a point to call her first.

  After I thanked her for all the work she’d been doing, she began to cry. Through her tears, she told me, “I get so much satisfaction from this work, and I know I’m good at it, so I do it all myself. I’ve tried delegating, but it’s been discouraging, so I’ve continued to take on too much.”

  Nicole had been in her role for five years. She was amazingly effective at advocacy and organizing work. Lately, in addition to all of the legislative meetings and hearings she’d been coordinating in the wake of the May 2018 school shooting in Santa Fe, Texas, Nicole had been sitting with a gun violence survivor every day at trial. It took her getting to the verge of breakdown to see that she hadn’t divvied up her work enough. I think we can all relate.

  Nicole’s also the stay-at-home mom of two kids, who were two and five years old when she first got involved with Moms Demand Action. Her work with us was intertwined not just with her life, but with her identity—she describes the past five years of her life as “raising babies while also growing this baby organization.” That personal investment is great, but it’s a double-edged sword. In Nicole’s case, any time she thought about delegating some of her work, she talked herself out of it.

  By the time she and I got on the phone, Nicole was considering dropping out of Moms Demand Action altogether. She confided in me that she’d had a hard time finding someone to take over some of her responsibilities. She also confessed that it felt like she’d been on her phone, messaging other volunteers and scanning social media, seemingly nonstop. Her emotional health was taking a hit, and she and her husband had started arguing.

  These are telltale signs of burnout: blurred lines between “work” and “life”; stress that can bloom into anxiety, depression, or both; and strained relationships. As important as the work we’re doing is, it’s not worth sacrificing your health or your marriage.

  During our call, Nicole and I brainstormed ways for her to step back and protect her state of mind by setting up some better boundaries around her social media use. Shortly after we hung up, Nicole transitioned into a spokesperson role, so she’s still very much involved with our cause, but not so much with the day-to-day operations. And she’s beginning to look for a career that uses the skills she’s developed in her work with Moms Demand Action, such as writing and giving speeches and speaking to the media. That’s what sharing the load does—it helps you see new opportunities for yourself that you would likely otherwise be too stressed to recognize. Nicole is now putting a résumé together for the first time in twelve years, and she’s excited to realize what she’s qualified to do. “I might even have to trim my résumé down a little,” she told me.

  I know how much you’re capable of—really, I do. (If you don’t believe me, reread the previous chapter.) But it’s a whole lot harder to be effective if you’re overwhelmed. For the sake of your own sanity and health, your family’s sanity and health, and the cause you care so much about, please, resist the urge to do it all yourself. It seems like the right thing to do, but in the end, it can only end up hurting everyone.

  Trying to do everything on your own is problematic for several reasons. First and foremost, it rebuffs the people who want to help—and trust me, you are going to need help! It’s simply not possible for a movement to rest on the shoulders of one human being. By keeping other people on the sidelines, you diminish your impact and your longevity. It also prevents people from being trained for other leadership positions, which means that ultimately it’s a path to burnout. It’s also not inclusive: trying to own everything deprives volunteers of feeling like they have skin in the game. It can be demoralizing for them.

  I can’t stress this enough: in order to be a successful leader you’ve got to ensure that the workload is shared. Sharing the work in an organized way keeps engagement high and builds a foundation for long-term growth.

  Here’s how Moms Demand Action approached it: We created a senior team of qualified volunteers who each agreed to take on a specific chunk of work. I asked each of those volunteers for a serious commitment. In return, they got a title and a lot of ownership (I didn’t step in and meddle). The positions on our senior team include membership lead, legislative lead, events coordinator, social media lead, and more.

  Our senior team had—and still has, to this day—regular team calls to check on progress and to monitor workloads. Those senior team members found volunteers to help them with their work and had their own separate calls with their teams to divide the tasks and determine deadlines.

  For example, the woman who served on the senior team as our events lead is the one who decided we would have lemonade stands at the Capitol and in our communities to raise both awareness about the Manchin-Toomey vote and money for our organization. After the senior team signed off on the idea, she worked with volunteers who’d expressed an affinity for event planning to design the lemonade stands, create the messaging and handouts, and plan the calendar for where and when the stands would be set up. Then she worked with the communications senior team lead to make sure we got media attention.

  I found that this strategy of giving volunteers a ton of ownership and autonomy over their respective jurisdictions worked incredibly well. Because we were all women on a mission, we worked collaboratively and quickly.

  Another piece of my management style that had to change was how I rewarded people. When I was a corporate manager, I could give high performers raises and promotions. But that’s generally not possible with volunteers. The new way I recognize a job well done has become one of my very favorite parts of my work with Moms Demand Action: making thank-you calls, like the one I made to Nicole. It’s one of the ways this work has changed me most—I love coming from a place of gratitude instead of hierarchy so much that I’ll never go back to a more traditional power structure of “do this because I say so.” Self-help books and Oprah tell us all the time to focus more on gratitude, and I can tell you now that it truly does help you to look for and pay more attention to the good things that are happening in your l
ife. It’s even changed my parenting style. Now, I’m much more likely to text my son to thank him for remembering to put his dishes in the dishwasher before he leaves for school than I am to yell at him when he forgets. (And I notice that he’s more likely to remember, too.)

  Course Correct as You Go

  If the thought of making a misstep or an outright mistake gives you agita, gird your loins, because messing up is part of being an activist. Making mistakes is inevitable when you’re tackling a thorny issue—there simply isn’t one right way to make the world a better place. The good news is that once your plane is up and flying, you can always readjust your flight path.

  One of the very first recalibrations I had to make was changing our name. When I started that Facebook page in our kitchen, I winged it—no focus groups, no consultants, and no surveys. Without anyone to help me pressure-test the name, I called it One Million Moms for Gun Control.

  It wasn’t until I told my daughter Emma, who is gay, about the group I had started that I learned that One Million Moms was a religious organization that had worked to unseat Ellen DeGeneres, who is also gay, as JCPenney’s spokesperson. Oops.

  Yet I didn’t make any official moves to change the name until a couple of weeks later, when I got a call on my cell phone from a Washington, DC, area code. I answered and was shocked to hear the voice of Rep. Carolyn McCarthy on the other end. Known on the Hill as “the gun lady,” Representative McCarthy had been inspired to run for Congress in New York shortly after her husband and son were shot in a mass shooting on a Long Island Rail Road commuter train in 1993.

  Once she had me on the phone, Representative McCarthy skipped the pleasantries and got straight to the point: “We need mothers to rally around the issue of gun safety. We’ve been waiting for the mothers,” she said. “But you can’t use the words ‘gun control.’ They’re too polarizing. You’ll have to change your name.”