We Gather Women to Create Civic Change—but That’s Only the Start to the Magic We See
The first three months of 2026 have felt like a decade. ICE raids have swept through neighborhoods. A partial government shutdown rattled federal workers. War rages in the Middle East. And through it all, our phones haven't stopped buzzing with the same desperate message from friends, colleagues, and strangers: What can we do?
The issues are vast. The answers, it turns out, are closer than you think.
Look to Minneapolis. As ICE agents moved through their communities, women didn't freeze—they organized. They coordinated food and clothing drives. They formed networks to walk children safely to school. They flooded social media and packed city council meetings, many of them speaking publicly about politics for the very first time. They didn't wait for a think tank to weigh in or for a national nonprofit to tell them what to do. They organized themselves.
We’ve each spent years helping women find their footing in civic life, and what we've learned is that the most powerful and effective ideas in politics don’t begin in Washington, DC.
They start in women’s living rooms.
In 2012, after the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, Shannon created a Facebook page that became Moms Demand Action, now the largest women-led grassroots organization in the nation. For more than a decade, its volunteers helped pass hundreds of gun safety laws, blocked the gun lobby’s agenda in statehouses 90 percent of the time, elected thousands of gun-safety candidates, and helped secure the first federal gun safety legislation in a generation.
After the 2018 midterms, Katie left a twenty-year career in national politics to organize suburban women through personal relationships, not political parties. She founded Red Wine & Blue from her home in suburban Ohio, and it has since grown into a network of more than 650,000 diverse suburban women—many of whom had never done anything “political” before. Through friend-to-friend organizing, these women have helped flip school boards, stop book bans, and increase voter turnout by double digits.
Writer and activist Rebecca Solnit recently told the New York Times: “A huge amount of the important work is done by nice ladies… changing the world is more like caregiving than it is like war.” She’s right. Our wins don’t happen through algorithms or ad campaigns. They happen when women come together in community.
And that’s exactly why we’re joining forces to build the largest, most powerful network of women-led communities in the country—one built to turn this energy into lasting local power.
In Shannon’s recent bestselling book Fired Up, she wrote about “Bonfires”—small groups of women gathering around shared values to build community and pursue personal, professional, and civic fulfillment. Almost immediately after the book came out, women began forming these groups themselves. Today, women in more than a dozen states have launched Bonfire groups, bringing together neighbors and strangers to learn from writers, artists, and activists—or simply to spend time together, whether hiking, visiting a museum, volunteering, or sitting in someone’s backyard.
Meanwhile, Red Wine & Blue launched a program to help women do something similar at scale: build and grow local groups in their own communities. The original goal was modest—to surpass Moms for Liberty’s 300 local chapters. Red Wine & Blue has nearly tripled that number in just two years, growing to 800 active local groups in communities across all 50 states. In 2025 alone, those groups held more than 4,000 in-person events, from book clubs and craft nights to rallies, food drives, and candidate forums. They made friends. They supported their neighbors. And they flipped school board seats.
By bringing Bonfire groups into the Red Wine & Blue Network, we’re giving women access to organizing infrastructure, digital tools, one-on-one coaching, and peer-to-peer support. We’re helping them grow, connect across geography and difference, and build something political parties have never been able to create: an interconnected, collaborative movement built on trust, not transactions.
Something else remarkable happens when women come together in community: their activism changes them. Women often volunteer because they’re looking for a way to create change, but then they find something more—mentorship, friendship, laughter, courage, and lifelong support. They create communities rooted in shared values that help them clarify what they believe and discover they are capable of far more than they imagined. Emboldened and strengthened by new support systems, women use the skills they gain to pursue promotions, leave toxic relationships, start nonprofits, launch campaigns, and encourage one another to take on roles they once believed were out of reach.
Our organizations have become real-life laboratories for women finding their people and, in turn, their power. But in a post-pandemic, hyper-polarized, social-media-saturated world, that can't just happen online. Women are hungry for community in real life. That’s why, on March 30 at 7:30 PM ET / 4:30 PM PT, we're hosting “Get Offline, Find Your People”—a live event to launch this partnership and welcome anyone who wants to join. Yes, it will be on Zoom, but the whole point will be to show you the amazing things other women are already doing in their communities and then connect you to people where you live.
Whether you're ready to start a local group, find one near you, or simply stay in the loop, this is your invitation.
You don’t need politicians, pundits, or policy wonks to tell you how to make a difference. Sometimes all it takes is a handful of nice ladies willing to show up for one another—and for their communities.
The answers, it turns out, are closer than you think.
RSVP here for the “Get Offline, Find Your People” event.
Shannon Watts is a mother, an activist, and the author of the New York Times bestseller, Fired Up! She’s also the creator of the Substack, “Playing with Fire.”
Katie Paris is a mother, an activist, and the founder of Red Wine & Blue.
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