Jenna Lowe and her family moved to Old Greenwich from New York City during Covid.
She met Emily Goodman from Riverside when their daughters were 6th graders playing lacrosse.
Now in their 40s the two women became friends after Lowe made a comment about Goodman’s SUV.
At a lacrosse practice, Lowe, whose family needed to buy a second car for their new suburban life, complimented Goodman on her Telluride SUV.
“At the time it was the pandemic and you couldn’t even get a car,” she recalled. “But we became immediate friends – we called each other Telluride friends.”
The two working moms – Goodman is an attorney with two children and Lowe who has three children and owns a women’s sleepwear company with a partner – started running together. It was election season and they couldn’t miss school board candidate lawn signs around Binney Park.
“We started researching who they were and were interested in spreading the word about some of candidates we thought were sort of extreme,” Lowe said.
From there, Lowe and Goodman became the “Voting Moms,” and their first emails went to their friends.
“We decided the way to approach the list was not telling people how to vote, but laying out the positions of each of the candidates so each voter could be informed to make their own decision,” Lowe said. “We’re adamantly not telling you how to vote. We are non-partisan.”
“If you look at our emails, we rarely key in on whether someone is a Democrat or Republican,” Goodman said. “It’s all about your voting record and what you present as your platform or positions.”
Jenna Lowe and Emily Goodman created The Voting Moms website and email newsletter offering an unbiased and research-based primer for how to vote your community values in local elections. October 6, 2023 Photo: Leslie Yager
“A lot of parents are like-minded in terms of guns and school safety, and some of the candidates in our initial email had outside-the-norm views on guns,” Lowe said.
“The foundation of everything we do is based on the belief that there are many more moderates on both sides of the aisle than there are in either party,” Goodman said. “But it’s very difficult for people to vote in a way that reflects their values since it’s difficult to distill what candidates platforms are – especially from just a lawn sign.”
Goodman and Lowe said when they learned about Board of Estimate and Taxation votes against public school funding, especially for infrastructure projects like renovations of the 1902 Old Greenwich School, they wanted to act.
But as a practical matter – working and raising young children – running for office was not possible.
“We are regular moms, not politicians, and we’re not lobbyists,” Goodman said. “We realized the only way we could have our values reflected in these decisions was to vote for the people who represent our interests.”
“In Old Greenwich the community has mobilized, and that helped our message go viral,” Lowe said. “I don’t think anyone realized what was holding up the construction process, and now it’s clear what steps need to be taken.”
“We want our emails to be received without judgement. We offer facts based on our diligence,” Goodman said, adding that their newsletter subscribers, on both sides of the aisle, have been grateful.
“We get lots of emails from people saying, ‘This is awesome. I literally took your email into the booth with me,'” Goodman said. “We’ve been really surprised about how many parents of school aged kids we’re reaching.”
Lowe and Goodman note they do not sign people up without their permission. As subscribers forward the emails to their friends the distribution has grown. And grown.
To sign up for the Voting Moms email newsletter go to TheVotingMoms where there is a subscribe link, or send a request to [email protected].