Contact: Maggie Bridges, maggie@redwine.blue, 303.807.8304

Suburbs Across America, February 13, 2025 — Today, Red Wine & Blue’s nationwide local group organizing program, TroubleNation, reached a major milestone by expanding into their 50th state. Red Wine & Blue’s TroubleNation now has 672 groups (and growing every day) in all 50 states – more than double that of the extremist organization Moms for Liberty. With the midterm elections around the corner, TroubleNation groups are evenly divided between red and blue congressional districts nationwide.

“Taking back power from MAGA requires winning the suburbs,” said Katie Paris, Founder of Red Wine & Blue. “Every day, suburban women who haven’t been politically active before contact Red Wine & Blue to find out how to make a difference. We help them connect with one another, quickly grow their ranks, and take action together. There’s been a gap in local organizing infrastructure for too long. Women understand that the local level is where we have the most power – and we intend to use it.”

“The growth of TroubleNation has far exceeded even our expectations, which is in sharp contrast to groups like Moms for Liberty that are in decline,” said Missy McGinnes, Director of Distributed Organizing at Red Wine & Blue. “Since the inauguration, we’ve seen a surge in engagement, adding 148 new groups. While pundits may say that people aren’t taking action, what we’re seeing on the ground tells a very different story — people are organizing and mobilizing in greater numbers than before.”

Red Wine & Blue launched TroubleNation in September 2023 in response to the increasing demand for local organizing support among women who felt disconnected and alone. TroubleNation is a network of independent local groups across the country that are affiliated with and supported by RWB. Women can search for a local TroubleNation group by entering their zip code or get help starting their own if there isn’t one yet near where they live. TroubleNation is a full service, organizing support system that provides one-on-one coaching, new group orientation, small-group, customized training for group leaders, monthly happy hours, and continuous engagement from the Red Wine & Blue team.

Red Wine & Blue has TroubleNation members in every state available to speak on the record.

Medina Mavens, OH – Deep in red Medina County, Ohio, three women enraged by the Dobbs decision started what’s considered to be the original TroubleNation group in August of 2022. Since then, they’ve grown to over 500 members, holding monthly meetings and keeping members up to date through their Facebook group and email list. Some of their key accomplishments include gathering thousands of signatures for a Reproductive Rights petition in 2023 and educating their members about the dangers of Project 2025. In meetings, they hold discussions and watch documentaries about voting rights, gerrymandering, and more while also preparing members for action, like speaking up at school board meetings and getting one of their own members elected to the school board.

PHX East Valley – Laurie and Julie, two women based out of East Valley, Arizona, took over their local TroubleNation group after they found Red Wine & Blue through a New York Times article and were spurred into action. They relaunched the group back in September of 2024, with just 20 attendees, but their group has grown to over 150 members as of January. Mostly, their members are focused on how they can impact change around education in their communities.

NOVA Blue Squad, VA – Since starting at the beginning of 2024, this Northern Virginia TroubleNation group has grown to 260 members. They have a robust newsletter and meet monthly to discuss issues like Project 2025, reproductive health, and public education. In addition to writing letters to their elected officials, the group is heavily focused on relational organizing and getting their friends and neighbors to show up to the polls.

Red Wine & Blue is an empowered community of over 600,000 diverse suburban women working together to defeat extremism, one friend at a time. They train and connect women across the country of all political backgrounds – including many who have never been political before – to organize in their communities and address the growing threats of extremism to public education, reproductive freedom, and democracy.

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VIRGINIA – Statewide nonprofits Red Wine & Blue and We the People For Education are launching a multi-city tour across Virginia starting Wednesday, October 4. Other partner organizations include Vote Mama, MomsRising, NextGen, and National Women’s Political Caucus VA.

The 6 stops on the “Parents, Not Politics” tour taking place throughout October include:

Roanoke County – October 4

Front Royal – October 5

Henrico/Chesterfield – October 12

Leesburg – October 14

Prince William County – October 16

Spotsylvania/Stafford – October 19 

Each “Parents Not Politics” event will feature candid and critical conversations between school board members and candidates, parents, and students about the ongoing threat of extremism on local school boards and how these efforts to push a radical, far-right agenda harms our children and undermines public education. 

Each stop will also offer Red Wine & Blue’s famed Troublemaker Trainings to give parents the tools and organizing network they need to make a measurable difference in their own school districts.

Parents, Not Politics will offer substantive discussions that bring communities together, a sharp contrast to Gov. Youngkin’s “Parents Matter” tour, which only served to highlight extreme political rhetoric and pit parents against educators.

“Mainstream parents do not want to be told how to raise their children by Glenn Youngkin or any other extremist politician in Richmond,” said Penny Blue, the Red Wine & Blue Virginia Program Director. “The stakes for public education and students in this election are clear. At the end of the day, Virginia parents want the freedom to parent and to work with their children’s teachers, principals and local school boards to help prepare their children for 2050—not be dragged back to 1950.”

“Our public schools are successful when teachers, parents, students and community members comes together to embrace common-sense solutions,” said Tiffany Van Der Hyde, the executive director of We the People for Education. “This tour is an opportunity to not only push back against the extremism we have seen trickling down from the Governor’s Office all the way to our own neighborhoods, but to show families across Virginia that there is a better way forward, and it starts by electing effective, pro-public education candidates to our school boards.”

The events will also address the ongoing efforts to impede our student’s freedom to learn and to feel safe, including banning books, attacking our most marginalized students, demonizing teachers, librarians and other educators, stoking fear in parents, dividing communities with extremist, dangerous rhetoric, and spreading damaging misinformation. 

Red Wine & Blue is an empowered community of half a million diverse women working together to defeat extremism, one friend at a time. They train and connect women across the country with a network of half a million suburban women of all political backgrounds – including many who have never been political before – to organize in their communities and address the growing threats of extremism to public education, reproductive freedom, and democracy.

We the People for Education is a Virginia-based nonprofit focused on recruiting, training and supporting common-sense school board leaders. By empowering reasonable, pro-public education community members to push back against divisiveness and extremism, we aim to bring teachers, parents, students and communities together to champion proven solutions to the real challenges our schools face. Learn more about our work and get involved at wethepeopleforeducation.org. 

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RWB focuses on different key issues, including reproductive justice, fighting book bans, and addressing the culture wars currently dominating school board meetings across the country. They helped get a referendum on the ballot in Michigan to give state-level access to abortion, collecting well over the 425,000 signatures required. Here in North Carolina, they have worked with groups like Indivisible, as well as local campaigns with their get-out-the-vote efforts. While they do have in-person meetings over (of course) a glass of wine, they have also built a sizable online presence. For a group that isn’t composed of mostly Gen-Z or even millennials, they have smartly utilized the digital sphere to get their message out. They have expanded on Facebook and Twitter/X and even have a podcast. They have a whole section on their website dedicated to fighting book bans which is actually very well done.

Their official page labels them “Book Ban Busters” which I think is kind of neat! It makes them sound like superheroes. And let’s be honest, they have to be to do this kind of work. They talk about how extremists are trying to attack education, in some instances even banning books about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks. They state what I think could be a good tagline, saying “Suburban women aren’t having it.” A unique thing they are doing is sending ‘Banned Bookmobile’ kits out! This is a part of their new initiative called “Freedom to Parent 21st Century Kids”.

Read more about Red, Wine and Blue and the full article at themarysue.com 

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Red Wine & Blue Launches Virginia Program With Year-Round Investment to Organize Suburban Women Against Extremism, Including “Parents’ Rights” 

Suburbs across Virginia, June 15, 2023: Today, Red Wine & Blue launched a year-round Virginia state program to organize and mobilize suburban women against extremism—including “parents’ rights”, gun violence, attacks on public education and DEI, book bans, and attacks on LGBTQ+ people and reproductive healthcare. Virginia joins Ohio, Michigan, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania as states where Red Wine & Blue has permanent, year-round staff on the ground.

Founded in 2019, Red Wine & Blue has quickly grown to half a million members as suburban women reject extremism. Expanding into Virginia represents an extension of this momentum with over 3,000 members already in Virginia.

Red Wine & Blue reaches out to people who are ignored by traditional political organizing – and does so in nontraditional ways. They use microtargeted digital media to engage suburban women who may not have been political before, provide women with the tools and training to organize their communities, and empower them to reach out to their own circles: family, friends, and neighbors. They have a best-in-class relational organizing (also called friend-to-friend organizing) that proves that talking to someone you know is more effective than talking to strangers.

“In Virginia and across the country, the so-called ‘parents’ rights’ movement is about trying to control what our kids read, believe, and learn. Red Wine & Blue was on the ground in Loudoun County in 2021 and now we’re building on that work with long-term, year-round investment in Virginia for 2023 and beyond. Mainstream moms are fed up with a loud, vocal minority trying to control how we raise our children. We want to end book bans, gun violence, and attacks on reproductive healthcare. We’re organizing and speaking up—just like we have in other battleground states—because suburban women are on the frontlines fighting extremism in their communities every day.” – Katie Paris, Founder of Red Wine & Blue

“Virginia has been a hotbed of extremism for too long. We are sitting in the birthplace of this latest iteration of ‘parents’ rights’ extremism, which has nothing to do with rights or the freedom of parents at all. Organizing against extremism in Virginia and making sure voters know what and who is on the ballot is more crucial than ever. We are now the only access to abortion in the South and extremists are continuing to try to ban books, attack public education and DEI, and target reproductive healthcare. Red Wine & Blue is building permanent infrastructure to mobilize suburban women in Virginia—and extremists at every level of government should be worried.” – Penny Blue, Red Wine & Blue Virginia Program Director

Red Wine & Blue targets state legislative, ballot initiatives, and school board races – investing in making sure people know who and what is up and down the ballot. Last month, Red Wine & Blue launched “Freedom to Parent”, a campaign going on offense against the “parents’ rights” assault on kids and calling out them for undermining the majority of parents’ freedom to decide what’s best for their kids.

Some more information about Penny Blue, the Virginia Program Director, and Lara Bury, the Virginia Deputy Program Director, is below.

Before joining Red Wine & Blue, Penny Blue served as a Virginia School Board member for 8 years, leading the effort to ban the confederate flag in the district’s schools. Initially, she was the sole vote, but the ban passed unanimously after the murder of George Floyd. Penny also owned a consulting/training company, worked at IBM, taught math in the Virginia secondary school system, and served as an adjunct professor at Virginia Western Community College. Penny is the author of A Time to Protest; Leadership Lessons from My Father Who Survived the Segregated South for 99 Years.

Lara Bury, a suburban woman, baseball mom and military spouse in Northern Virginia, brings her decades of marketing, technology and leadership expertise to ignite and propel women in community-driven mobilization.

Red Wine & Blue, headquartered in Ohio, is an empowered community of half a million diverse women working together to defeat extremism, one friend at a time. They train and connect women across the country with a network of half a million suburban women of all political backgrounds – including many who have never been political before – to organize in their communities and address the growing threats of extremism to public education, reproductive freedom, and democracy.

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“A big goal is to flip back seats that were won by extremists in 2021 just to stop the chaos,” said Katie Paris, the group’s founder. The other side, she said, is “not winning as much as one would think based on how much they have dominated headlines over the last two years and been allowed to misrepresent parents.”

Read more on The Washington Post

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Cara Erskine was in Lansing earlier this year to testify on new weapons laws being proposed in the wake of mass shootings in Oxford and at Michigan State University.

While she was waiting to speak, she met members of Red, Wine and Blue, a group geared toward suburban parents who want to organize and push for change in their schools, as well as push back against ultra-conservative activists that have become more prevalent in the past few years.

The group recently created a campaign dubbed “Freedom to Parent 21st Century Kids”.

Read more at The Oakland Press

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The signs shocked Karen Svoboda of Fishkill, a mother of seven, including two who are gay, one who is bisexual, and another who is nonbinary. Then a friend introduced her to Laura Leigh Abby, a local mom who owns a fitness studio in Beacon with her wife. “She said, ‘These signs really, really upset me,’” Svoboda remembered. Abby had raised $500 to make alternative signs, and Svoboda, who has a background in nonprofit work, said, “We could get about 200 signs with that.” The women got to work and quickly settled on the phrase “Teachers shouldn’t be preachers” for their signs. Svoboda then felt they needed something else: an underlying message. She bought a URL from GoDaddy and Defense of Democracy was born.

Read more at NY Mag

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That’s the democratic way. The wrong answer to right-wing pressure groups is to tell them to butt out of school politics, which is what Terry McAuliffe said during his failed gubernatorial bid in Virginia. The correct answer — indeed, the only answer — is for other citizens to butt in.

We don’t live in China, which is now squashing history in Hong Kong schools. Nor do we live in Russia, where textbooks have purged references to Kyiv and Ukraine. We live in a democracy. The big question is whether we will raise our voices loudly enough to defend it.

Read more at The Philadelphia Inquirer

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Red Wine and Blue launched a series of Troublemakers Trainings to help instruct suburban moms on how to teach their friends and neighbors to fight back. And even as Republicans broadcast their intent to use the school wars to win back suburban voters, Paris and her colleagues were convinced the strategy would fall flat. “You’re going to claw back suburban moms by scaring them? How dumb do you think we are? That lit the fire,” Paris says.

Read more at The Nation

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The campaign, dubbed “Freedom to Parent 21st Century Kids,” launched Wednesday. It sits under national organization Red, Wine and Blue, which is geared toward suburban mothers who want to organize and push for change in their schools.

“We are not going to let the mantle of parents’ rights be hijacked by such an extreme minority,” Red, Wine and Blue founder Katie Paris said in a virtual news conference Wednesday.

Read more at The Tennessean

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