Fighting Climate Change with "Mothers Out Front"

One evening, when my daughter Sophie was four years old, I was sitting on the bed in her room reading her a book about coral reefs. As I sat there showing her the beautiful pictures, with their explosion of color, it suddenly struck me that she will likely never in her lifetime see a healthy coral reef because of the impacts of climate change.

My mind quickly went to all the other magic in the world that Sophie is likely to not see, and all the suffering that will take place—all because of climate change. And I wondered how I would ever explain to her how we had let such terrible things happen.

I grew up knowing about climate change. Twenty-seven years ago this June, my father, a former U.S. Senator from Colorado, co-sponsored the first Congressional hearings on what was then more commonly referred to as global warming. I remember family dinner table conversations about how scientists had figured out that our burning of fossil fuels was dramatically warming our planet.

My parents developed friendships with some of the leading scientists in the nation, who were frequent guests at our house. But no matter how surrounded I was by the topic, it's not something I spent a lot of time thinking or worrying about. You could say that I was a climate denier, in my own way. Until I became a mother.

Despair... Then Possibility

Sitting there in Sophie's room, with my younger daughter sleeping next door, I was struck by a sense of despair. No matter what I did to care for my children, I felt helpless to protect them from this enormous, overwhelming threat to their future. I wasn’t a political leader, a scientist, or an engineer. What could I possibly do? 

It made me want to put what I knew to be true away in a little black box and throw away the key, or to crawl into a hole and hide. But there was also a part of me that thought I couldn't possibly be the only mother out there who felt this way.

Around this same time, I met Marshall Ganz, a veteran organizer and professor at the Harvard Kennedy School. I had read about Ganz's involvement in the Obama campaign, and when I realized he worked close to where I live, I requested a meeting. In our first 30-minute meeting, Ganz made me feel a whole new sense of possibility for what people like me can do when they work together with others. 

He said that transformational change is always driven by social movements—large numbers of people who are drawn together out of shared values and their shared sense of outrage at the reality that flies in the face of those values. And he explained that there are proven approaches to engaging people around an issue or challenging and enabling them to aggregate their resources in such a way that puts pressure on our leaders to act.

After spending time with Ganz, I felt as if the sun had come out from behind the clouds, and I started to envision a million mothers coming together out of a shared concern for their children's future in the face of climate change.

Getting Mothers in the House

This was the genesis of Mothers Out Front, a growing movement of mothers who are calling on our leaders to take bold action to enable a swift and complete transition away from fossil fuels. 

Our primary means of engaging people is through house parties, where mothers come together in small groups to learn some about the science and urgency of climate change. At these parties, mothers share their stories, build relationships, and talk about what it means to build a movement. 

Since our first house party in Massachusetts in January 2013, we have facilitated 170 house parties in 34 towns, with over 1,100 mothers in attendance. We have 10 volunteer community organizing teams who make our work across the state possible.

A year ago, we launched our first Massachusetts campaign, Power Up for Our Children’s Future, which is about choosing clean and renewable energy for the sake of our kids. Our campaign operates at three levels: individual, community, and statewide. At the individual level, we’re encouraging people to switch their households to clean renewable energy for their electricity. 

So far, nearly 700 households have made the switch. At the community level, our community teams are working with businesses, elected officials, and municipalities to make that same switch. And statewide, we’re working to have Massachusetts commit to meeting new energy needs with clean renewable energy and to draw the line against fossil fuel infrastructure.   

From inception, our goal was to learn how to effectively organize mothers here in Massachusetts, and then start organizing in other states. In November 2014, we started working in New York, where we have an organizer based in Rochester, and will soon have a second organizer in the New York City area. 

We plan to be organizing in two additional states before the end of 2015 (we are still evaluating which ones), and to add 3–4 more states in 2016. Our vision is for a national movement of mothers, of all ages and backgrounds, organizing at the local, state, and national levels.

Ultimately, Mothers Out Front is about bringing mothers’ voices and power to bear on the greatest threat to our children’s future: climate change. As mothers, we are called to protect, and our protective force has never been needed more.