This past March, I worked the polls for the first time. I showed up, got assigned a table, and spent a couple hours helping my neighbors vote. It wasn’t glamorous. It was also one of the best things I’ve done in a long time. When everything feels like it’s happening to you, getting involved is the antidote. You feel less anxious, more useful, more connected to something real. Right now, that feeling is harder to find and more important than ever.
Ilana Glazer is banking on that feeling too.
The comedian, actor, and Broad City co-creator is launching Moms & Neighbors, a grassroots initiative aimed at protecting safe and fair 2026 midterm elections through community organizing, civic participation, and a pretty simple premise: moms and neighbors are already doing this work. It’s time to give it a name.
The kickoff event is this Sunday, May 10 — Mother’s Day — at Brooklyn’s Fort Greene Park from 2 to 4 p.m. There will be a family supply drive benefiting PS20’s Community Closet and Kid Zone Distro NYC (which distributes essentials to asylum-seeking children and families), voter registration with LAPC Voter Action Coalition, and a children’s concert by Brooklyn-based artist Caroline Strickland.
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Glazer has been in the community organizing space for about a decade, and says the concept for Moms & Neighbors crystallized while she was already in the work. “As I was organizing this year among my own community, it was with women and moms and my neighbors,” she told me. “I really realized that this is who upholds, uplifts the movement for human rights on the ground.”
She’d been on Zoom calls with Moms First founder Reshma Saujani, talking with moms on the ground in Minnesota protecting their communities. She’d been organizing alongside Ms. Rachel and Brittany Packnett Cunningham. What she kept seeing, over and over, was the same thing: “The movement is being done by moms and neighbors.”
The plan is to use the Mother’s Day Brooklyn event as a launchpad, then replicate the model in communities nationwide in the lead-up to the midterms. Glazer is also building a talent program so that actors, musicians, and artists can amplify the message, and her team is currently fundraising to support the infrastructure.
One of the most intentional choices in the Moms & Neighbors framework is that it is explicitly nonpartisan. The idea isn’t to sidestep the hard stuff. It’s to zoom out far enough to find the common ground that actually exists, even when the news cycle makes it hard to see.
“I actually feel like the nonpartisan nature is the sharper arrow of this moment in our culture,” she said. “This is a tool coming from the small group of people in power. They are fanning the flames of divisiveness, of difference.” She added that what keeps her energized isn’t what’s happening at the top. Instead, it’s the collaboration and respect she sees at the community level, “where party lines aren’t being drawn by a handful of people from above.”
That’s the bet Moms & Neighbors is making. That there are more of us than there are of them, and that moms and neighbors across the country have more in common than cable news would have us believe.
The goal, as she describes it, is to create a brand that can function as a catch-all for all the groups already working day in and day out across the country to keep their communities safe — groups where people “across party lines who think they’re so different from their neighbors, are coming together to fight for the greater good.” The softer container of “moms and neighbors” is intentional. “It can just soften this harsh rhetoric that we’re seeing happen at every level,” she said.
For moms who want to get involved, Glazer has built a five-level pledge at MomsandNeighbors.org specifically designed to meet people where they are. “Moms are busy,” she said. The levels go from checking your own voter registration and making a voting plan (level one) all the way up to volunteering to work the polls (level five), with steps in between for helping two friends make their voting plans, hosting a snack shift at a local polling station, and carpooling neighbors to the polls.
“Start at one, and if that’s all that you can give today, start at one,” she said. “But let’s see how much we can actually do to protect the polls this year.”
For what it’s worth, level five isn’t as intimidating as it sounds. I can tell you from experience: they train you, they feed you, and your neighbors are genuinely glad you showed up.
If you’re in Brooklyn this Sunday, find Moms & Neighbors near the Fort Greene South Playground from 2–4 p.m. The voter registration deadline for the NYC Primary is June 13. For everything else, go to MomsandNeighbors.org.
