From Red Wine & Blue, “an empowered community of half a million diverse women working together to defeat extremism, one friend at a time.”
On Monday night, nearly 200 suburban women across Virginia gathered together to celebrate Red Wine & Blue’s launch of a year-round Virginia program to mobilize suburban women against extremism.
Penny Blue, RWB Virginia Program Director and resident of Franklin County, and Lara Bury, RWB Deputy Virginia Program Director and resident of Springfield, were joined by Nicole Sperry, a Suffolk mom who got involved in politics after losing her 10-year-old daughter to COVID-19, and Jessica Berg, a Loudoun County teacher who has been vocal against book bans.
Founded in 2019, Red Wine & Blue has quickly grown to half a million members as suburban women reject extremism, including “parents’ rights”, gun violence, book bans, and attacks on reproductive healthcare. Virginia joins Ohio, Michigan, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania as states where Red Wine & Blue has permanent, year-round staff on the ground.
Watch the event here.
Key moments:
- “Woman to woman. Friend to friend. Relational organizing, this is what we do best. Relational organizing has proven to be 2 and a half times more effective than conversations with strangers and 10 times more effective than door knocking.” – Penny Blue, RWB Virginia Program Director and Franklin County resident
- “I became more active and more vocal about politics after losing my 10-year-old daughter to Covid in September 2021, just short of a month of the vaccine being approved for kids…I was quiet, didn’t want to cause any trouble, and that changed when the doctor told me her heart stopped. Red Wine & Blue gives us the opportunity to stand up and say to the extremist, groups, ‘Don’t speak for us.’ We are not alone.” – Nicole Sperry, a Suffolk, Virginia parent
- “Surrounding yourself with other people who are working on fixing the same problems is the easiest and most effective way. So, that’s us, we’re your people. We can help you get started to re-energize or just re-engage, or even if you’ve been doing the hard work for a long time, we’re just here to constantly give you that support.” – Lara Bury, RWB Deputy Virginia Program Director and Springfield resident
- “I’m so happy to have the energy of Red Wine & Blue in Virginia… this surge of energy and woman power and getting just one more person, one neighbor, one woman, one neighborhood, one suburb, to get out and vote and harness our power. We are greater in number, the other side…they seem like they’re powerful and a lot because they are so loud. But they are small, small-minded, and small in number.” – Jessica Berg, Loudoun County, Virginia teacher and parent
- “What I love about Red Wine & Blue is that everybody is welcome here…maybe you have friends out there who don’t like the book banning, or what’s going on with their school boards, or what’s going on with reproductive rights, invite them in. We are really trying to be a non-threatening on-ramp to politics for people who maybe haven’t been political before.” – Julie Womack, RWB Organizing Director
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 in Virginia and 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.
Sign up for the Blue Virginia weekly newsletter
