Dominique Browning, Moms’ Co-Founder and Director, lost her job as editor in chief of House & Garden in 2007, when Condé Nast decided to close the magazine. Dominique tells the story of this event in All the Cool Girls Get Fired, a new collection of essays compiled by Laura Brown, founder of LB Media, and Kristina O’Neill, head of Sotheby’s Media, about jobs lost and lives regained from some of the coolest—including Oprah, Carol Burnett, and Jamie Lee Curtis. For Dominique, getting fired led to many months of self-reflection and ultimately the founding of Moms Clean Air Force. Following is an excerpt from her chapter:
Saying yes was a really good exercise because I got some consulting gigs and did some work for The Wall Street Journal. One day I had lunch with a friend of a friend who was on the board of the Environmental Defense Fund [EDF]. She said she used to love my Editor’s Letters and my essays. She suggested I write about what the Environmental Defense Fund does, because they had a hard time explaining it. And so, I said yes.
I started interviewing people and writing a column for EDF. It was nothing like House & Garden. I did interviews with scientists and economists and policy writers, and I would get to the end of a forty-five-minute discussion—and I would call myself an intelligent, educated person—and I’d say, I don’t understand a word you just said. Start over. And now you need to tell me what you do in a language that your mother could understand. That’s when I realized they had a big communication problem there.
I was also meeting with headhunters in the nonprofit world. I thought, “I have a lot to bring to this picture. I know how to communicate. I know marketing.” But I was told, “You don’t know anything about the nonprofit world. We’re not interested in you. It doesn’t translate.” So, I thought, “OK, that means I have to figure out how to do this a different way.”
This was thirteen or fourteen years ago. The entire green advocacy movement was in a depression, and it looked like nothing was going to happen. And that’s when I realized one of the problems was that nobody was talking to voters. At the same time, I had started blogging (remember blogging?) in anticipation of my book coming out. At the time, there were all these women who were self-described mommy bloggers, and I started looking at that because it was really interesting to me. And what were they writing about? How do we protect our children? What do we need to buy that’s toxin and chemical free? I’m reading all this and thinking, “How can we harness all of that energy toward the climate movement?” And that’s how Moms Clean Air Force was born.
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During an interview I was doing for my book, I met an older woman. She was very wise. She said to me, “Honey, go where the love is. You gotta go where the love is.” At the time, I said, “Oh, yeah, that’s nice.” I didn’t really know what she meant.
But a year later, there I was thinking I love talking to these scientists. I love the idea that I can take care of my children, even though they no longer need me to take care of them, but I can be thinking about the world my children will inherit. Maybe this is where the love is; maybe this is what I need to be doing.
Getting to this place was its own adventure. Now, I work with about twenty people and we have a website that is full of news and information and resources and we have 1.5 million members all over the country. All my previous media work allowed me to help communicate to people why they need to care about these issues. I do a lot of writing about climate and mental-health issues. Another group of people work on regulation and laws, and so we spend tons of time in Washington. We testify in front of the Environmental Protection Agency; we demand stronger laws. We are trying to change things on a systemic level.
A lot of the work we do is hearing people’s stories about what they’ve gone through. We find people who will testify in front of Congress or the EPA. The most gratifying part is when we convince legislators or the EPA that we need stronger regulations for X or Y and then it happens—I can say I brought three hundred moms to testify in front of the EPA three hundred times. My day-to-day work is just like what I did as an editor in chief—working with people who have different skills and deploying them.
Excerpted from: ALL THE COOL GIRLS GET FIRED: HOW TO LET GO OF BEING LET GO AND COME BACK ON TOP by Laura Brown & Kristina O’Neill. Copyright © 2025 Reprinted by permission of Gallery Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, LCC.
Tell Congress: Defend EPA’s Ability to Protect Human Health and the Environment