On today’s inspiring episode of Raise the Line with host Michael Carrese, you’ll hear the remarkable story of Shannon Watts who, in response to the Sandy Hook Elementary mass shooting, started and led one of the largest grassroots organizations in the U.S., successfully mobilizing millions of volunteers to push for stronger gun safety laws. She is now bringing insights from that experience to a new mission: helping women to identify and act on their values, abilities and desires which she describes in her recent book Fired Up.
Millions of Americans were saddened and outraged by the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting in 2012 that took the lives of twenty children and six adults, and were left feeling helpless about the epidemic of gun violence in the U.S. that, sadly, continues to this day. But for our guest today, Shannon Watts, her feelings of devastation about the shooting turned to rage and fueled her unlikely rise to leading Moms Demand Action, which she grew into one of the largest grassroots organizations in the country, mobilizing millions of volunteers to push for stronger gun safety laws. “I wanted to stand shoulder to shoulder with a badass army of women because that’s who gets things done in this country,” she says.
In this inspiring conversation with Raise the Line host Michael Carrese, Watts pulls back the curtain on how the group achieved its successes and the philosophy of "losing forward" that kept volunteers showing up year after year. In her recent book Fired Up, Watts describes how she is bringing insights from that experience to a new mission: helping women identify their values, abilities, and desires and acting on them without waiting until everything is perfect.
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Michael Carrese
Hi, I'm Michael Carrese, welcoming you to Raise the Line from Elsevier, an ongoing exploration of how to improve health and healthcare.
Today, we're happy to welcome Shannon Watts to the podcast, a leading force in organizing and mobilizing women to create political, electoral, and cultural change in the United States.
A former communications executive turned movement builder, Shannon founded Moms Demand Action in response to the Sandy Hook tragedy, growing it into one of the largest grassroots organizations in the country, mobilizing millions of volunteers to push for stronger gun safety laws.
Recognized as one of TIME's 100 Most Influential People and a Forbes 50 Over 50 Changemaker, among many other honors, she is also the author of Fight Like a Mother: How a Grassroots Movement Took on the Gun Lobby and Why Women Will Change the World, and her 2025 New York Times and USA Today bestseller, Fired Up, which explores how women can harness their ambition and agency at any stage of life.
That book led to the creation of Firestarter University, a program designed to help women explore their dormant desires and transform their lives, and Bonfire communities, in-person gatherings across the country to help women tap into their political, professional, and personal power.
I'm looking forward to exploring her journey and what it takes to turn individual spark into collective impact. Thanks so much for joining us today.
Shannon Watts
Great, I'm happy to be here.
Michael Carrese
So we always like to start with learning more about our guests, and you, before you became an activist and headed in that direction, were a VP and communications exec for Fortune 500 companies, and then a stay-at-home mom of five. So what was your journey toward activism?
Shannon Watts
I had never been politically involved at all, really, except to donate small dollars to a few candidates, but I certainly didn't understand how the legislative system worked. I was at home, as you said — it was about a five-year period when I was staying home to take care of my kids. They were middle school to college.
I was folding laundry, and I had the television on in the background, and I looked over and there was a breaking news chyron that there was an active shooter inside an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, a place I'd never heard of. Like so many other people that day, I just sort of stopped what I was doing and sat on the side of my bed and just watched this horrific tragedy unfold. The 20 children and six educators were slaughtered in the sanctity of an American elementary school.
I was devastated and in tears. At some point in the middle of the night, that sadness turned into just abject rage. So when I woke up the next day, even though I was not knowledgeable about politics or organizing or even gun violence — I had grown up in the 1980s when Mothers Against Drunk Driving was so influential and made such a significant change legislatively, culturally — I thought there needs to be a group of moms who takes on the gun lobby the same way they took on the alcohol lobby. Not thinking that person was me, just thinking, I'll go join that.
I looked online and I couldn't find anything at all. It was mostly think tanks run by men in Washington, D.C., or smaller disconnected organizations, also mostly run by men, in cities and states. I just thought, I want to be part of an army of women. That's who gets stuff done in this country.
I had 75 Facebook friends at the time. I was not exactly a social media phenomenon, but I just put this clarion call out into the zeitgeist on a new Facebook page. What happened was that my 75 friends shared it with their friends, and on and on. It was actually one of the first things that became truly viral on Facebook. That was the beginning of my political career.
Michael Carrese
Wow, so totally an unexpected turn for you. For the younger folks in our audience, Sandy Hook was a real landmark — I think, except for probably the Columbine shooting, that was the biggest moment when the country was riveted on gun violence. Listening and thinking back to that time, I can see how the iron was hot and ready for somebody to strike.
That must have been a wild adventure, all of a sudden starting to create this national organization. Why don't you talk us through a little bit about it — you had some big wins, obviously, but there was, I'm sure, a bumpy ride too. So talk to us about both ends of that.
Shannon Watts
Well, I think it's important to understand that there is a fine line between naivete and stupidity, and I was definitely straddling that line. Thankfully, I didn't know what awaited me when I started this Facebook page. First of all, the threats of death and sexual violence to me and to my kids began immediately. I never imagined I'd be a public figure, so my address and my phone number and my email, everything was publicly available, and people were coming to my house. They were sending me texts, they were DMing me, it was just nonstop. Certainly in those early days that gave me pause — subjecting my family to something that is unsafe. I've talked about the fact that I was a suburban mom. So I thought, I'll just call the local police department and they'll keep an eye on the house and the neighborhood. I'll explain what's going on and they'll be helpful.
This was Indiana. They sent an officer out to my home and I told him what was going on. He said, "Well, ma'am, that's what you get when you mess with the Second Amendment." It was very much in that moment that I realized, okay, I either need to back down or double down. There's sort of no fine line here. I just have a personality that I doubled down. Also, look, if I lose my kids, I have nothing left to lose. I think we all felt very much like our kids were in danger after that horrific shooting tragedy.
Then the other thing I realized very early on was, first of all, that we would need a funding partner, and I was grateful to find Mayor Mike Bloomberg, former mayor, who invested a lot of money in our organization to really help turbocharge what we were doing. We didn't really change much about our brand or our strategy, but that money was crucial to allowing me to pay the people who had been volunteering. The other thing I could tell was, when you take on the most powerful, wealthy special interest that ever has existed, you are going to lose a lot. I didn't want to lose volunteers who felt like it was a waste of their time.
Part of the culture became this idea of — Babe Ruth said, you can't beat the person who never gives up. If we just kept going, which a lot of women had tattooed on their bodies, this "keep going" motto, and also "losing forward," which is just the idea that you're going to lose a lot of battles on the way to winning the war. Maybe you lost this particular legislative battle, but you now have more relationships with new lawmakers, you grew your chapter, you learned something, so that you could win the next time. That happened over and over again, and that, I really think, was the secret to retaining volunteers. It's not hard to get people to come into the organization after a shooting tragedy, or after their kid has gone through a lockdown drill. It is hard to get them to show up year after year and selflessly donate their time and talent. I think the difficulty became: how do we make sure we retain volunteers? I think another part of that formula is joy. It can't just all be heavy, sad, tragic — people need joy.
Just to give you an example, we decided early on we would have this annual meeting where we brought leadership in. It started out as like 60 people, and now it's thousands and thousands of people, and there's a wait list. I said, let's have a dance party at the end of this weekend. We're going to be hearing all these stories, we're going to be hearing them from gun violence survivors, we're going to be talking about heavy stuff. People were like, "Oh my god, that's not appropriate, that's not—" I was adamant, and it was so popular. Women went to the hospital with dancing injuries — that's how the dancing was going. Everyone on the questionnaire said, "I will come back because of the dance party at the end." I think joy is something we sometimes miss as organizers too.
Michael Carrese
That's interesting. What was your biggest win in those early years?
Shannon Watts
Well, in the early years, it was just creating the credibility and the sense that there was an opposing force to the gun lobby, because remember, back in 2012, a quarter of all Democrats in Congress had an A rating from the NRA. Democrats. Senators like Mark Warner, who had an A rating, were voting with the gun lobby, and we had to convince them that these women who were showing up at their fundraisers, at hearings, in district offices — that those women had the power to either have their back or have their job. We had to convince them of that, and we did do that. Mark Warner now has an F rating from the NRA and he's a very big fan of Moms Demand Action.
I think in the early days that was the heavy and hard part. What I'm most proud of — not only just passing 500 gun laws, getting 500 restaurants and retailers to stop allowing open carry in their stores, electing hundreds of our own candidates to office, including three members of Congress, the new Virginia governor — we passed the first federal gun safety legislation in a generation, with the help of fifteen Republican senators, which everyone said, that we had a snowball's chance in hell of doing.
What happened was, after the shootings in Buffalo at a grocery store by a white supremacist, and in Uvalde at yet another elementary school by a man with an AR-15, the nation was so angry. We're certain that what happened was that Mitch McConnell saw polling that said if Republicans vote against the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act — which was spearheaded by President Biden — there would be a price to pay at the midterm elections. Of course we had marches and rallies, and there was so much work to get that over the finish line, but that happened in 2022, a decade in, and it was a seismic shift in American politics.
Michael Carrese
That was definitely another landmark moment, of the good kind, let's say. So you take all of this amazing experience and all of these lessons, and you shift into empowering other women to do similar things — I mean, not at that scale, but making a shift in their life and getting engaged in a different way than they were before. You came up with what you call the fire formula. Tell us about that.
Shannon Watts
When I started Moms Demand Action, I was 41 years old, and within the five years or so before it, I had gone through a major metamorphosis in my life. I had stepped out of a marriage that I had gotten into that was not working. I was in a career that didn't light me up and I wasn't happy. I really took those five years to just figure out, who am I and what is it that I want to do? I ended up remarrying and trying new things, and by the time Moms Demand Action happened, I had a very good sense of who I was in terms of what are my values, what are my abilities, and what are my desires. It really wasn't until I had the hindsight to realize: when you practice bringing those things together over and over again — and first of all, you have to know what they are — that is how I use the metaphor "living on fire," which is really just a way of looking at what's limiting you and what's calling you.
I saw so many thousands and thousands of women come into the organization and do the exact same thing, but in a different way, because we all have different values, abilities, and desires. Back in 2012, my values — I had little kids, was keeping my family and my community safe. My abilities were this decades-long career in corporate communications; I knew how to build a brand, I knew how to tell a story. My desire, as I said, was to stand shoulder to shoulder with a badass army of women. I had just sort of made this happen through sheer willpower of using that formula. Other women would come in and had different values, abilities, and desires, and I saw them thrive and do different things — whether it was leaving a relationship that no longer served them, or asking for a promotion, or going back to school, starting their own organization in their city or state.
It just occurred to me that this is a practice, and that there's a formula for this, and that we can all be trying this in our lives. There are these things that hold us back. For women, it's mostly guilt and shame that's put on us by society and then we internalize it. In my book, Fired Up: How to Turn Your Spark into a Flame and Come Alive at Any Age, I interviewed over 70 women, and I just threw this question in there. I asked them all, "What are you worried your deathbed regret will be?"
I certainly would have expected them all to say what the most common deathbed regret in the world is, which is that "I lived a life that wasn't true to me." None of them said that — not one of them. They were moms; they all said, "I will pursue what I want at the expense of my children," which is really fascinating, because I can tell you that's nothing I've ever heard from my husband before, because he figures if he pursues what's important to him, it's good for everybody.
Michael Carrese
So this was their regret that they would have?
Shannon Watts
Right, they were worried that would be their deathbed regret — that they pursued something that was important to them at the expense of their kids. These are state lawmakers, these are people like Maria Shriver. These are women who are doing amazing, important things, and yet they're sort of saddled with that burden. I just think it's really important that women realize we are, especially my generation — we are the wealthiest, healthiest generation that's ever existed. When we turned 50, we have a whole other chapter to live, unlike our moms. I just want women to make the best use of that time.
Michael Carrese
One of the things that's underlying this is a sense of passion about something, finding the passion and pursuing it. You write that women often mistake passion for other things. So what are those things?
Shannon Watts
Yes, staying with the fire metaphor, I call them false fires. There are these ideas that we bring in and take in from being very little — these "shoulds." We should stay small physically, we should stay at home with our kids, we should take on the majority of the caretaking. There are all these "shoulds" that we start to believe are our fulfillment. For me, it was busyness — that if I were more productive, then I will find my purpose; that is my purpose, just constantly being busy and helping other people. For others, it's happiness — this idea that you have this ephemeral feeling that is going to somehow become permanent. There are so many different ways to look at the "shoulds" that somehow become our fulfillment.
Going back to that example of women feeling like they will pursue what they want at the expense of their kids — we don't really, as women, ask ourselves often, "What do I want?" It's not because we're weak, it's because we are wise. We see all these obstacles in front of us, all of these "shoulds," all of these burdens that we have, and we realize it's better to just keep our heads down and keep doing those things. Imagine what if every woman asked themselves every day, "What do I want?" Governments would topple, family systems would fall apart, institutions would fail. We know what would happen if women didn't keep doing all the things they should, or they think they should, be doing. I just want women to make space for the desire, for the wants, for the needs, and to ask themselves, "What do I want?"
Often that doesn't happen until later in life. I think it would be great if it was a way of life that we started when we were young. I interview a lot of women in the book who — and it's interesting, particularly women who are the daughters of immigrants — they are expected to go down a very specific path: doctor, engineer, lawyer. They go down them and they realize, "This is not for me, this is not what I want to be doing." Then you sort of have to backtrack and start all over again. But it also isn't too late. There's always this idea that it's too late, I can't start something new. I just talked to a woman who is running for office where I live in Florida, who, during COVID, went back to law school at age 56 and got her degree, and is now running for Congress. It's just not too late.
Michael Carrese
So one of the things you also talk about is how women can advance themselves in a new pursuit by finding like-minded women, and I mentioned in the introduction the bonfire idea. Help our listeners understand what are some steps you can take toward finding those people and building that community?
Shannon Watts
Yes, I am an introvert, as an only child. I have always been, as I mentioned, busy and focused on my career and my family, and I didn't make a ton of room for friends, which are much, much harder to make as you get older. During Moms Demand Action, I had this whole bonfire, I call it, of women who shared my values and wanted to bring out my best abilities and who shared my desires. We are inextricably linked for the rest of our lives — those are the same women, some of them who are in my book, some of them whom now I know personally and am friends with.
I think that when you follow this fire formula, you find your people and your power. Something interesting happened when I turned 50 and I stepped back from Moms Demand Action in 2023. I was listening to a podcast, and the podcaster said, "If you don't have five friends you could call in the middle of the night, you don't have enough close friends." I thought, well, I have five kids. Then he said, "And that doesn't include your family." I thought, what is the point of having five kids if I can't call them in the middle of the night? But I do, all the time, for the most bizarre things.
I decided, as any type A woman would, to read up on friendship — how do you make friends, how do you find your people. The next thing that I did in my life was to create bonfires based on my book. I talk a lot about these people in my book, and now women are taking the book and they're creating them in real life. We just partnered with an organization called Red Wine and Blue, and we had a Zoom where over 50 women volunteered to start these bonfires where they live, to talk about their personal, political, professional passions. I've now been to them in Sarasota and Tampa and St. Petersburg. I think in a post-polarized, post-social-media, post-pandemic world, people are looking to meet their neighbors and to know and understand their community. A lot of that machinery already exists for men — you can join the Elks Club, there's all these different local male clubs — but there's not a lot of that in place for women. Given that we live such long lives, and often longer lives if we're married to men or partnered with men than they do, it's really important to have those friendships and those partnerships. That's your support system. Those are the people who are going to help you figure out what your fire is, help you achieve it and grow it, and be there for the next one.
Michael Carrese
Sounds a little bit like book clubs — somebody has to take the initiative to get it going, and you find a group. Some book groups last decades and decades and decades.
Shannon Watts
Yeah, I agree with that, but I think what's interesting about women — I'll give you an example, which is menopause. My mother's generation did not talk about menopause at all. I don't even think they knew what they were going through, and certainly no doctors were there to help them. It was verboten, because it was considered disgusting or weird to talk about it with other women. My generation is like, forget that — we have this whole whisper campaign going, like, "How do you find estrogen patches? Should I be on testosterone? How do I weight lift?" There's all this information that we didn't get from our moms that we are interested in talking about. I think these groups are so important to facilitate that, so you don't feel alone.
Michael Carrese
Well, you do talk about how midlife can be a real catalyst for change. Tell us more about that.
Shannon Watts
Yes. I won't use the F-word on your podcast, but I will say that there's what I call the double bind of "F's giving," which means women are supposed to give all the F's — we have to care about the world and our family and our community and our partners and our parents and our kids — and yet we also have to give zero F's, because there's going to be blowback when you go out in the world. Anytime you decide to do things differently, whether you're going to do more or you're going to do less, people are going to have opinions about it. That is what most women have said to me: "I wish I had a handbook to prepare me for all the blowback I would get when I did things differently, when I went out into the world and tried to be brave."
As someone who experienced a huge amount of blowback, which I described to you earlier — men with guns being dragged out of any event I went to — hopefully you're not going to experience that, but you might get a snarky comment from your mother-in-law, someone might say something in the kids' pickup line because you didn't go to a soccer game because you were out figuring out what you wanted to do. I just think it's so important for women to be prepared: you're going to have to get comfortable with being uncomfortable. People are going to trigger your guilt and shame, and you're going to have to do it anyway. It is also like a muscle — everything is sort of this idea of a practice, and you're going to just have to keep trying to do it over and over again, until you don't feel those feelings and decide you don't want to do that thing.
I meet so many brilliant women who have amazing ideas, but they don't feel like they can get started until they've crossed every T and dotted every I. If I had done that, I still wouldn't have started Moms Demand Action. I still don't know everything there is to know about gun violence or organizing or the legislative process, but the point is to take those first initial baby steps.
Michael Carrese
Yeah. Do you think developing the thicker skin and preparing yourself for the blowback is harder to do once you've reached midlife, or maybe it's easier?
Shannon Watts
I think it's easier. There's actually an interesting study that came out that said, when you start to lose testosterone and estrogen, you're not as emotionally involved and you're not as attached to what people think about you, and so therefore you can kind of do it more bravely. I have definitely experienced that in my life. The things that I would tolerate, or put up with, or people-please, or worry about what people thought — I don't really care anymore. I know I only have a finite amount of time left. It certainly doesn't feel as endless as it did in my 30s and 20s.
Michael Carrese
You don't have any F's left to give, as I say. When you were talking before about having to wait and cross all the T's and make sure you're absolutely ready to do something — as you probably know, there's a lot of studies that show, in terms of employment, men will go for jobs for which they have very few qualifications at very young ages, and often get them, and women with far more qualifications won't apply because they're like, "Well, I don't check all of the 30 boxes that they're asking for." This sort of reinforces the problem as you go along.
So Elsevier, as you may know, is an education company, and we're always looking to fill knowledge gaps. Is there a topic that you think we should make a video about, or some other educational content that would really fill a gap in knowledge that's of concern or of interest to you?
Shannon Watts
Yeah. I think menopause is one. I think weightlifting is another — we aren't told as women, until at least these days, until it's almost too late, and you go get a DEXA scan, that you need to be lifting weights your whole life in order to be healthy and strong all the way until the end of your life. I think women are often intimidated by going to the gym — I know I am. So I love that idea. What else — menopause, weightlifting, and I think specifically hormone replacement therapy. There's just so much misinformation and misunderstanding about the benefits and the potential risks.
Michael Carrese
Excellent topics. Thanks for those. So as we wrap up here, another question we'd love to ask our guests is to provide some advice to the students and early-career professionals in our audience about — what's your go-to advice about approaching their careers? You've offered a lot of great advice so far, but is there anything else you would leave them with?
Shannon Watts
Yes. First is laying the groundwork of figuring out your values, abilities, and desires. There are thousands of values — Brene Brown is sort of the North Star of values; if you want to see what all the values are, you can get one of her books. Figure out what are the values where you are in your life right now, understanding they will change eventually. What are your desires? Ask yourself, "What do I want?" Think about what you really enjoyed as a kid. What would you be sad if you don't accomplish by the end of your life? That can inform your desires.
Then what I think is really interesting is this idea of "What are my abilities?" I see, in particular with women — as you mentioned, like who applies for what job — women so often downplay their abilities. I coach a lot of women, and what they often say to me is, "Well, who wants to hear from me? Who wants to hear what I have to say?" It's because you have so many abilities you don't realize. There's an exercise I go through with women, and in the book, where I say, "I want you to list all of your abilities." That includes even if you threw a kick-ass kid's birthday party, because that is a lot of executive functioning. What are all your abilities? But then here's the tricky part — you have to take it to your family and friends and ask them what they see your abilities are.
The value of this list is it's there to remind you constantly that you should apply for that job, or you should start that organization, or you should ask for that promotion. The other piece of it is it tells you what abilities you're missing. We always think that if I don't have this innately, then I'm not up to the task, but that's not true — you can go get so many of these abilities, you can acquire them. If there's something that's really important to you that you want, then start taking those steps toward acquiring those abilities so you can get to the place you are.
I think the most important thing is taking that first step. I tell the story in my book of Jessica Yellen, who has just created this amazing platform called News Not Noise. She was the first person to do news on Instagram, and it was before people were doing that at all — she was the CNN White House correspondent, she was more than qualified, and yet she was too nervous to make this first video about — I think it was during a Supreme Court hearing for a justice. Finally, one of her friends said, "I'm not leaving your house today until you go out and you film a synopsis of what's going on in your backyard." She did it, and it was very imperfect — in fact, people thought she was in Cuba because she had palm trees in her backyard. She eventually deleted it and took it down and did another one. The point is, it was a starting place, even if it was imperfect, and it was what helped her start to perfect it and do it more and get comfortable with it. If you don't take that first baby step, and you're just always thinking about it — "I've got to be perfect, I've got to be totally ready" — no. You have to build the plane as you fly it.
Michael Carrese
That's a great practical framework for folks to be thinking about. You'll get more of that sort of advice in Shannon Watts's most recent book, Fired Up, which explores how women can harness their ambition at any stage of life. With that, I want to thank you so much for joining us today. It's been a fascinating conversation.
Shannon Watts
Thank you for having me.
Michael Carrese
I'm Michael Carrese. Thanks for checking out today's show, and remember to do your part to raise the line and strengthen the healthcare system. We're all in this together.