How MomsRising Is Working to Repair Our Democracy

Is it possible for nonprofit groups to combine effective national advocacy with grassroots activity that engages their members in civic life and develops their capacity as citizens and leaders? The health of our democracy depends in no small part on whether associations can pull this off. 

Citizens groups have proliferated since the 1970s. They bring the views of those who support them to bear on national debates over civil rights, women’s issues, the environment, family values, etc. These groups typically rely on a mailing list of donors who trade off money for time by making a contribution and outsourcing their policy concerns to professional advocates in Washington, D.C.

The new citizens groups have supplanted national associations prominent in earlier periods – e.g., the Grand Army of the Republic, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, the Farm Bureau, and the American Legion. These older associations cultivated connections across their membership at the local, state, and national levels. New citizens groups generally lack the cross-class membership that characterized traditional national associations, and they provide few opportunities for their members to play leadership roles in the organization’s work.

The result is encapsulated in the title of Theda Skocpol’s stellar book: Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management In American Civic Life. Reflecting on these trends, Skocpol notes that, “new voices are heard, and there have been invaluable gains in equality and liberty. But vital links in the nation’s associational life have frayed, and we need to find creative ways to repair those links if America is to avoid becoming a country of managers and manipulated spectators rather than a national community of fellow democratic citizens.”

One nonprofit association seeking to repair these links in creative ways is MomsRising. I recently caught up with Donna Norton, Executive VP and Chief Advancement and Strategy Officer of MomsRising, to learn more about how it operates. Full disclosure: Donna is a friend, and from prior conversations with her I have come to appreciate the innovative way MomsRising is engaging and developing its membership in its advocacy work. What follows is a lightly-edited and condensed transcript of a conversation I had with Donna earlier this summer. 

DS: Donna, for people who aren't familiar with MomsRising, what's the mission of the organization? 

DN: We're harnessing the collective power of moms to really make this nation a place where every family can thrive. 

DS: When you look back over your time with MomsRising, what are the accomplishments that you're most proud of?

DN: Well for me personally, working to pass the Affordable Care Act and then defend it has been the pinnacle of my career. It is the biggest piece of social legislation for our generation and it was not easy to pass or defend. I remember at the end of the Obama Administration, I was called into a meeting with President Obama with 30 or 40 activists. It was after President Trump had been elected and the Republicans had vowed to repeal Obamacare. President Obama was subdued at the time and he looked around and said, “Well, now it's up to you all!” I remember thinking, “Oh my God, you're going to just leave us here!” But we’ve kept Congress from repealing it. 

DS: You have a million members. What do you know about the demographics of your membership? 

DN: We have members in every state in the nation. We did an analysis a couple of years ago and found that we roughly reflected the demographics of the U.S. We have lots of moms, lots of grandmas, but we also have a fair number of men involved. We say anybody with a belly button is welcome! 

DS: How does someone become a member of MomsRising?

DN: Anyone who takes action of any kind with us is a member. So usually people come to us through an action they will take on a certain issue. Like right now, we're doing a lot of advocacy on unemployment insurance and collecting stories from people who have been helped by the COVID-19 relief legislation. People will come to us on various issues, and then they tend to stay because we remain relevant to them on other issues. 

DS: How do you select the issues that you engage the network on? 

DN: There are core issues for MomsRising that we know are important for structural change, for example, paid family and medical leave, earned sick days, fair pay, and healthcare. Those are four key programs that we know are important for moms’ economic security. Then there are other issues that will occur, like the separation of children and families on the border, for example. This was a moment in which moms were outraged and so we helped to organize mass protests in the streets to roll back that policy. For many years, we have also been working to end police violence, the school to prison pipeline, and maternal mortality.  We decide to engage based on where we think we can have a strategic voice in service to our members.  Basically, we listen to our members, and then open up avenues for their voices to be heard in the areas that they prioritize. 

DS: Mothers are typically very busy people. How do they find time to participate in MomsRising? 

DN: Moms are incredibly busy, so we make it really easy for them to take action in whatever amount of time they have. Signing a petition might be the easiest action. We’ve had people write us and say, you know, I'm so busy I'm taking care of kids and I'm working full-time and I don’t have any extra time, but it means so much to me to be able to sign a petition or share an action on social media at the end of the end of my day before I collapse into my bed, to just do something to try to make our world a better place.  Some people say, “What difference do petitions make?” Having spent a lot of time in Congress, they actually make a lot of difference when they are delivered directly to leaders. If you have petition signatures from constituents, you will get in the door with a lot of our policies.

From there we often gather stories from our members about particular issues. After you sign a petition there's a page that comes up and says share your story. With every petition that goes out we get thousands of stories and then we go through and pull out the most compelling stories. We deliver those stories, often in books of stories that are organized by state, to legislators. And we pitch them to the media. For instance, over the last month, we’ve had our volunteers sharing their stories about how COVID is impacting their families covered by dozens of news outlets including the New York Times, NPR, PBS NewsHour, Vogue, and NBC.

It's also part of our process of leadership development because people don't always feel like they're experts on a given issue, but they are experts on their own stories. If you would tell them, go talk to your legislator about unemployment insurance or about health care reform, they often will feel like, I don't know anything about that! But if we say, just tell legislators your story because they need to know what the lives of their constituents are like, then people really feel much more empowered. 

We also have big social media in layers. Every week we have lots of social media actions from Facebook live to Twitter storms, Instagram and more, about different issues. Moms spend a lot of time on social media - you have to go where moms are to organize them. 

We also have on the ground actions that people can do, particularly when we’re not in a pandemic.  Right now, we're starting to roll out our get out the vote program.  Volunteers across the country are in the process of handwriting notes on more than 1.6 million postcards to low frequency mom voters that we will send out closer to the elections.  Initially, our goal was one million handwritten postcards and we have already blown through that goal so now we are aiming for 3 million! This is part of a multifaceted effort we are launching to get out the vote of millions of moms who are low frequency voters.  

DS: Say more about leadership development and coaching. Are there other ways that you look to develop your members.

DN: People can come to monthly Keep Marching circle meetings that we started after the first Women's March. Volunteers come monthly to learn about different issues, or get advice about how to organize their own circle in their community. How do you pull a petition together? How do you do a press release? Also, we bring moms together around different issues. For example, we recently brought diverse moms together to help us create a definition of high-quality early learning. We try to engage parents and develop their leadership through everything we do.  

DS: Talk about your inclusion ethic. What are the things you do to get to the table anyone who wants to join in, but may not always feel included?

DN: Well, we work to center, uplift, and further empower the people who are most impacted by the policies we are working on. That means knowing that gender justice, racial justice, and economic justice are intertwined.  One never happens without the others.  So, to be a member is free. There's no cost -- anyone is welcome. We try to eliminate any barriers to participation. For example, when we're bringing moms in to speak at Congress, the cost of covering lunch at the airport can be prohibitive for somebody who's talking about the importance of SNAP or another Federal program for low-income families. So, we send volunteers money in advance of their travels that they can use to pay for these costs. 

DS: Are there any other things that you want or ask your members to contribute on a regular basis? 

DN: No. We are always asking people to participate and support our issues in any way they can. We have what we jokingly call an aggressive rainbow of welcome. We got rid of the idea of a ladder or a hierarchy of engagement for our members, because we know people have many different constraints.  Somebody who can participate on the ground in person does not have a higher status than somebody else in our minds. In our ladder of engagement people should be able to interact in any way that works with their lives, because people's lives are so difficult. We know that's the way mothers’ lives are. You can get overwhelmed by another child, a sick parent, or now, losing a job, or trying to work with a toddler in your lap. 

DS: How do you think about the mix of internet-based versus in-person activities?

DN: We have a constant mix!  We're always experimenting with how we can best integrate online and the ground activity using emerging technology tools and platforms. Both are super important, but there is a way to participate for everyone, whether or not they are able to do something in person. For example, we did a petition for COVID, and collected thousands of stories, and then created books of stories. And then we have a small group of people who can actually go to visit with the legislators and share their stories in person. But they're bringing the books of hundreds more people to share their stories and represent the people who can't be there. And they are representing tens of thousands more people who cared enough to sign onto this action, and the hundreds of thousand people who have done something around it on social media. There are layers of people who are supporting and lifting each other's voices from on the ground to online. 

DS: How are you organized. Do you have state and local chapters and staff, or is it a national structure? 

DN: We have staff in 18 states who cover work, as well as support our members, in every state in our nation. There’s about 40 of us now on staff and we're spread out. It's nice to be all virtual, so all our money is mostly going into programming. We are well-placed compared to a lot of national organizations to do work in states because we have staff and members that are spread out across the country. There are certain states where we have what we call a State Moms Force where we have a staff person that's really focused on mobilizing people at the state level. We started our first State Moms Force in North Carolina. Now we have them in Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Washington State, New Jersey and California. We’re increasingly able to work in powerful ways at the state level and it is definitely a direction we want to keep increasing. 

DS: What are you finding that the State Moms Forces enable you to do that you couldn’t before?

DN: We move a lot of state level policy forward that not only helps that specific state, but also helps create momentum for necessary national policy change at the federal level.  We also find a lot of spokespeople on the ground through our state work. We have a big impact on policy in the states and voter engagement at the state level. In North Carolina, for instance, we've had people credit us for the governor winning in the last election because we had moms all out at the polling station entertaining kids during the long lines at the polls. That's what you can do when you have a big state presence.  

DS: You also describe MomsRising on your website as a new media outlet. Say a bit more about the shape of that outlet and how it weaves into the work we've been talking about. 

DN: For many years, it’s been harder than it should be to get moms’ voices heard through the traditional media. Trying to get an op-ed published in the New York Times is often an incredible struggle. So you really didn't hear moms’ voices very much. But with the advent of new technologies like blogging and social media, we don't need the New York Times anymore to get our opinions out. We can be a media outlet in our own right.  In fact, we have a reach to an audience of  5 million over social media so we can tweet things out from our blogs and get a huge readership. We also have 3,000 bloggers blogging for MomsRising. And we have a weekly podcast that's covered and carried by dozens of radio stations across the country. 

DS: What proportion of your members participate with you in Spanish? How have you cultivated that pathway for people?

DN: MamásConPoder is a big part of MomsRising.  We have Spanish language followers on social media and also via email. We also do a lot of tweet chats and Facebook lives in Spanish. In fact, we just did a webinar on what programs are available for people in this COVID era and we had simultaneous translation in Spanish, which was a major feat. A lot of Spanish language media is following us. There's not actually a lot of content going out in Spanish on our issues, so MamásConPoder has an important role in reaching Latinx moms.

DS: Given your network’s focus on equity and inclusion, how are you responding to the police killing of George Floyd and the wave of protests it ignited across the country?

There are 1.7 million students in schools with police, but no counselors. Our nation’s priorities are off. We need to open avenues to lift students and we must end the school to prison and deportation pipeline. The current situation is not okay. The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world and study after study shows that structural racism is embedded in every aspect of our criminal justice system, starting with who is pulled over and who experiences police brutality, through who is arrested and charged and who serves time, and more. That’s why we are doubling down on getting police out of schools and getting kids the resources they need.

DS: Most national advocacy groups are focused on policy wins in DC. You are cultivating a grassroots network and engaging your members, even those who are stretched and stressed, in your advocacy. Is there an impact you seek to have on the members themselves?

DN: Well, together with our members we want to achieve our outcomes. We want to win needed change. And we are also big advocates for democracy. There is so much skepticism out there about whether your voice matters, a feeling of our system being broken. We are fighting hard to give people hope, to make them see and experience how their voices matter, to give them ways to raise their voices that are effective, and to report back wins. And we do win!

DS: Is there anything we haven't talked about you’d like to mention before we wrap up?

DN: Just that we are focusing on the love and the joy of being a mom, relating to moms in their roles as moms. There is a solidarity in motherhood. We focus on that love and that joy and integrate it into organizing—and into power!