Fight Like a Mother

by Shannon Watts

  Overcome Doubts

  One of the NRA’s biggest criticisms of me—aside from the fact that I’m a woman—is that I’m “Astroturf,” which is to say, “fake.” Because I graduated from college and had a robust career before staying home with my kids, and because I occasionally took on some consulting gigs when I wasn’t employed full time, I’m accused of not being a “real” stay-at-home mom—which NRA leaders perceive as being someone whose biggest achievements are cooking and cleaning. A “real” stay-at-home mom—and probably any woman—couldn’t possibly create an organization as successful as Moms Demand Action. That’s why the NRA refers to me as a “Bloomberg whore” or “puppet”—in part because Moms Demand Action partnered with Mayors Against Illegal Guns (which was started by Michael Bloomberg) to form Everytown for Gun Safety, but also because there just has to be a man behind anything so effective.

  It’s a sad but true reality that you can almost always expect a group led by older white men to be skeptical of women’s ability to do great things. Yet there’s a way we spin a version of this narrative in our own heads when we think about getting involved in the effort to effect change. It shows up in thoughts like “Who am I to get out there and think I can do something to solve this?”

  A crucial component of being an effective volunteer is not talking yourself out of the impulse to do something. Because that’s what we so often do—we see a Facebook post about an issue we care about and we think, “I have to do something about this.” But then that little voice of doubt chimes in and says: “I don’t have the bandwidth to get involved. What can one person really do anyway? Someone else can take care of this better than I can.”

  I can’t tell you anything that will 100 percent eradicate that voice of doubt—it’s probably ingrained in all of us. So we may not be able to make that self-doubt, that is, our ego, go entirely away, but we can learn how to pay less attention to it. I think of dealing with the ego as being similar to the way you deal with that well-meaning relative who always makes subtle (or not so subtle) judgey comments at the Thanksgiving table: you view the comment in your mind as a cloud and watch it float away. Whatever tactic works for you to turn down the volume on that voice, use it. Because truly, that voice is the only thing standing between your desire to make change and your ability to do so. And the world needs you to stop giving that voice so much credence.

  As a woman, and as a mom, you are as powerful and as awe-inspiring as lightning; the question, then, is how to contain and then direct that power so it doesn’t disappear in a flash.

  How We Bottled Lightning

  I frequently describe the beginnings of Moms Demand Action as catching lightning in a bottle—that’s the only accurate way to describe going from seventy-five personal Facebook friends to six million supporters and hundreds of thousands of volunteers in just five years. Many organizations would give anything for that kind of grassroots power, and I’m incredibly grateful we tapped into it and harnessed it.

  As I’ve said, it all started with a post to my personal Facebook page that said I wanted to start a conversation with other moms about gun violence. One of my seventy-five friends saw it—ironically, he was a man and a gun owner I barely knew whom I’d met through another friend—and connected me to a woman in Brooklyn. This woman was all over our mission and went on to gather a big group of friends who also lived in New York City to organize a march across the Brooklyn Bridge on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, which then drew in to our cause a lot of other people. Simultaneously, some women from the San Francisco Bay Area reached out to me and offered their help—and became instrumental in helping us organize volunteers into chapters.

  The strangers I met through this one Facebook post ended up doing a lot of the behind-the-scenes, time-consuming work of birthing an organization—navigating the process to become a nonprofit organization, creating basic materials and tools to bring new volunteers on board, and creating individual Facebook pages for each state chapter. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I’d stumbled on a formula for going from outraged to engaged: I got connected to others who wanted to help, we divvied up the duties, and then we started taking one action after the other. We stayed in contact with each other and collaborated, but we also each ran with whatever project we claimed. There was no micromanaging. Everything else snowballed from there.

  This is the exact same formula that we still use to this day to continue growing our volunteer base by reducing the possibility that doubt will derail someone’s desire to make a difference: we quickly connect people to other people in their community, we encourage them to take action, and we empower them to take ownership.

  Welcoming prospective volunteers into an organization and giving them something to do or a place to go is essential when cultivating your army. In fact, many people have told me that the reason they joined Moms Demand Action was because we were the only organization to return their call. When someone has that moment of knowing that they want to get involved to right a wrong, we want to capture that momentum before the voice of doubt kicks in, or the news cycle moves on, or daily realities cause that person to lose interest. That’s why we make it a point to engage anyone who expresses an interest in volunteering as quickly as possible in four ways:

  Personal welcome. Someone from our robust welcome team personally calls each person who signs up to volunteer and welcomes them into the organization. It’s such a simple thing, but it makes a huge difference in creating engaged volunteers who feel valued. To give you an idea of just how much energy we devote to this effort, in the first half of 2018 alone, our welcome team made more than eight thousand of these calls.

  Invitation to an event. After that, a state membership lead and her team take over and make it a point to invite new volunteers to show up at an actual event as soon as possible. We want to get our eyes on you so that we can start to get to know you and you can start to get to know us and feel like you’ve found a welcoming home. That event may be a monthly chapter meeting, or, if your state legislature is in session, we may send you right into your statehouse for a gun bill hearing. I’ve heard from so many people that attending their first meeting really cemented their dedication to becoming a Moms Demand Action volunteer. A typical tweet from first-timers sounds something like this: “Just went to my first Moms Demand Action meeting and no one gets shit done like a bunch of focused, angry moms!” I recently heard from a man who had worked in our New York City Everytown office for years. After moving on to a job in California, he was still devoted to the cause. He said, “I’m embarrassed to say I just went to my first Moms Demand Action meeting last night and it was amazing. There was laughter, there were tears, there was cake.”

  Once you’ve attended a Moms Demand Action meeting, you feel like you’ve found your people, especially if you live somewhere where you feel isolated because you’re outnumbered by people who don’t share your views. And it’s not by accident—we make our meetings inviting and warm, as well as incredibly productive and efficient. I can’t take credit for that, though—that’s due to the time and talents of our chapter leaders, who have really taken these meetings and run with them. This is another key piece of our “keep volunteers engaged and fulfilled” strategy: let them lead, and trust they’ll hit it out of the park.

  Take on a task. As part of our strategy of empowering volunteers to lead, after you attend your first event we encourage you to take on a task that is dependent on what you want to do—you could work with the legislative lead to help support a good gun bill or block a bad gun bill. Or you could work on our Be SMART initiative to prevent unintentional deaths from kids getting ahold of unsecured firearms. Or you could help plan an event or become part of the welcome team.

  Become a leader. Eventually, we’ll ask you to take on a leadership position for your local group or state chapter. And not just because we want to share the workload, although, of course, we do. It’s because we know that volunteers are more likely to stay in the fight if they feel personally inv
ested in the cause and rewarded for that investment. It’s important for volunteers to feel they have skin in the game, and Moms Demand Action benefits from the unique talents each of our volunteers brings to the table.

  Because I founded Moms Demand Action and act as a spokesperson, people often thank me for my work. But it’s not my work that’s made our organization successful—it’s all of our work collectively across the country that has helped us grow and win. After all, there is no I in mom. Everything we do, we do collectively.

  A principle that inspires me greatly and informs our culture of collectivism is Shine Theory—a term that was coined by Ann Friedman and Aminatou Sow, co-hosts of the podcast Call Your Girlfriend, that describes “a commitment to collaborating with rather than competing against other people—especially women.” In other words, when we let women shine, we all benefit from the glow.

  It’s because of Shine Theory that Moms Demand Action won’t stand for women doing only the behind-the-scenes work, which so often happens in other grassroots organizations. Our volunteers get to do everything, and that includes setting the priorities and getting the glory. Adhering to Shine Theory not only makes the work more fun and fulfilling, it also encourages greater performance. Our culture of collaboration is what helps us get so many wins. And winning is very motivating!

  Of course, it isn’t only wins that we celebrate, because, as I’ve said, we very much believe in the value of losing forward. So we celebrate our losses too—especially when those losses hurt. Nothing helps you move through disappointment better than having an army of women pick you up, dust you off, recognize your hard work, and remind you just how many soul sisters you have supporting you. As they say, Don’t let the bastards grind you down—and having the support of other women fighting by your side will help keep your spirits and your strength up.

  What to Do When Volunteers Leave

  Although we help boost each other up when we get knocked down by external forces, I have to acknowledge the ups and downs that can arise internally, too. Inevitably, we periodically do have unhappy volunteers—or groups of volunteers. And sometimes that unhappiness comes out very publicly in a big online explosion.

  As helpful as social media can be for a grassroots organization, they also can have a downside. Primarily, social media make it easy—sometimes too easy—to share with the world how you feel about a personal issue instead of sharing it with the person you have the issue with. Sometimes volunteers will leave the organization. And chances are that their departure will get shared on social media. This is a new nuance to organizing online that there isn’t much expertise on how to manage.

  Moms Demand Action has a policy that urges volunteers to communicate any complaints or concerns privately before sharing them publicly. We always aim to remember that we’re a family, and we try to handle internal disagreements the same way a family would—in other words, we don’t want to air our dirty laundry in public. It’s also a priority for us to treat one another with kindness. As most of us have experienced in this internet age, it’s all too easy to be unkind or critical online when you’re not looking someone in the eye, or even talking to them on the phone.

  One way to ward off the worst of the Facebook flameouts during times of controversy is to hold private forums where people can express their concerns and, in turn, you can update them on your thought process. We’ve held many conference calls to do just that. Whatever format you choose, it’s better to have them earlier rather than later, even if you haven’t fully figured out an official stance yet. You can share your current thinking and ask for feedback. Ignoring a problem or putting it on the back burner is a surefire way to turn an issue into a crisis.

  All that being said, it’s impossible—and wrong—to try to shut down dissent. Every organization must allow debate; but it’s important to set up protocols that help keep the debate from veering into personal or unfounded attacks.

  Inevitably, there will be instances when our volunteers will disagree with where Moms Demand Action is headed as an organization—to the point where they may leave in a minor, or major, revolt. We’ve experienced this a few times, but the first and the biggest time was after we decided to become a part of Everytown for Gun Safety.

  To set the stage on how that development came about, it’s important to know that during our first year of existence, we raised about $200,000. That seems like a lot, and for a brand-new organization it was, but it wasn’t nearly enough to grow the army we knew we needed to do the work we wanted to do.

  We used that money to fund a few organizing manager positions, to pay a monthly retainer to a PR firm, to buy swag, and to hire a fundraiser. The more people our fundraiser met with, the more it became clear that people don’t give money to organizations run by women they’ve never heard of. We got the message again and again that we needed an influential partner with name recognition, and I started to see that this feedback was accurate.

  I felt very strongly that we would not survive without more resources. Although our fundraising efforts were bringing in some money, it wasn’t enough. (It’s really unfortunate that it is so difficult for grassroots movements to raise funds.) We were living month to month, and we often didn’t know whether we’d have enough money to pay people. Still, we knew what we’d created was valuable; I certainly didn’t want to just give it away. I wanted to enter into a marriage that would provide benefits to both parties.

  So I started reaching out to all kinds of advocacy organizations—many of them related to gun safety, but some not—to explore a potential partnership. I said to them, “We have this grassroots army to give you, what can you give us in exchange?” Ultimately, we had the most in common with Mayors Against Illegal Guns (which is now part of Everytown); they were also pivoting to states and corporations, and they had a lot of human and financial resources.

  During the summer of 2013, I met with Mark Glaze, the executive director of Mayors Against Illegal Guns at the time. We met in Montana and rode a ski gondola up and down the mountain a million times talking over how it could all work. We finalized the deal internally at the end of 2013, and Michael Bloomberg and I announced our partnership formally on The Today Show in April 2014 (where I also got to meet Cyndi Lauper in the greenroom; oddly, she thought I was Mike’s bodyguard—I guess she could see my inner badass shining through!).

  Even though partnering with Everytown relieved Moms Demand Action from living month to month, we still encourage all volunteers to fundraise for us and we train them on how to do so. A tactic that’s been very effective—a birthday fundraising ask on Facebook—combines the power of volunteers with the power of social media.

  It was Debbie Weir, the former CEO of MADD who became our managing director in 2017, who told us we had to teach our members how to raise their own money in addition to the budget they receive from Everytown. This is because there will always be things to spend money on that aren’t in the budget; and if you don’t know how to raise your own money from the very beginning, there won’t be time for you to weather the learning curve when something urgent comes up that requires extra funds. As powerful as having a large volunteer base is, you still need money to help you have more reach and more impact, so don’t fall prey to the desire for someone else to take care of it for you.

  Recovering from Growing Pains

  Our partnership with Everytown turbocharged our effectiveness and growth, but it also ushered in a wave of many of our original volunteers leaving. Granted, most of our volunteers were thrilled because they knew we now had access to important resources—mainly money, research, and clout—that would help us win more and last longer. But some were put off by what they felt was a loss of freedom. We were implementing a new strategy and structure, and that change was too much for some volunteers who were used to having more leeway. And other volunteers were just plain ol’ tired after working hard for more than a year, and they felt like the organization was in a good place and so they stepped away.

  While you�
�re never going to get 100 percent agreement in any organization, particularly one that focuses on life or death issues, this was a painful experience. I had disappointed people who had given their time and talents to our organization, and I lost friends I’d been in the trenches with since the inception of Moms Demand Action. But in retrospect, the change was necessary to facilitate new growth, even though it was not fun to live through.

  To regain our momentum, we turned to the list of people who had contacted us after Sandy Hook and the Manchin-Toomey loss and wanted to get involved; now that we had the volunteers and staff, we could effectively welcome and enroll them. We also developed a strategic outreach plan of hosting talks across the country to spread our message and invite new folks to join us. It took about six months to really hit our stride again, as these efforts took time, but it was a fundamental part of helping us grow into the force we are today.

  Welcoming an Influx of New Volunteers

  We have the bittersweet advantage of working on a cause that people are forced to reckon with repeatedly—we see a bump in volunteers at the start of each school year, when kids as young as preschoolers start having to do lockdown drills and their parents begin to worry that the next school shooting will be in their town. People also come to us when there’s a shooting in their family, in their community, or after a national shooting tragedy—we took in hundreds of thousands of new volunteers after the shooting in Parkland, Florida, alone.