Ambassadors Clubhouse, the North Indian newcomer from London’s JKS Restaurants that has become one of the toughest reservations in NoMad since opening in February, was fully claimed for the evening of April 30. Days before Mother’s Day, Marie Claire and Reshma Saujani’s nonprofit Moms First took over the two-story space for the second annual Power Moms dinner, honoring nine women—all featured in Marie Claire’s Motherhood Issue—whose influence reaches from runways and Olympic podiums to statehouses and the nightly standoff over bedtime. Samantha Bee hosted, and began by establishing that every woman being honored was too old to date Leonardo DiCaprio. The room agreed this was a credential.
In her opening remarks, Marie Claire editor-in-chief Nikki Ogunnaike crystallized the idea that inspired the Power Moms franchise in the first place: “You cannot tell the story of progress without telling the stories of mothers.” Motherhood, she said, “is not a footnote in a woman’s life. It’s not a detour and it’s certainly not a limitation. It is leadership. It is legacy.”
Saujani took it from there, dismissing the divisions that keep women from organizing: from trad wife versus girl boss, to working mom versus stay-at-home mom, as manufactured distractions: “They got us fighting each other so we don’t fight back.” Then she lit the fuse: “This room is a match. So let’s burn it down.”
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And with that, the night turned to the Power Moms. Ciara took the stage first to present Baby2Baby co-CEOs Kelly Sawyer Patricof and Norah Weinstein, whose organization has distributed more than half a billion essential items to children in need—and recently began manufacturing its own diapers to slash costs by 80 percent. “You can’t help babies without helping their mothers,” Sawyer Patricof said. “The two of them are inextricably linked.”
Others traced it back to their families. Activist Angelica Vargas, the single mom and mental health professional who went viral documenting ICE operations across Southern California, accepted her award from her father, Luciano, who teared up at the podium. “This didn’t start with me,” Vargas said. “It started with my parents, who raised me to be confident, to speak up, and to stand for what’s right.” Dr. Becky Kennedy had her own idea of what’s right, and it started with challenging assumptions about what motherhood even requires. “The idea of maternal instinct,” she said, “I actually think is so much of the motherhood system stacked against us.” If parenting is supposed to be purely instinctual, she argued, then struggling with it can only feel like proof “that we’re broken.”
Between courses, Sherri Shepherd took the podium to introduce Niecy Nash-Betts and brought the house down. There was a story about scaling the gate of an ex-boyfriend’s mansion to vandalize his Rolls-Royce, which came apart only because neither woman was willing to risk missing the PTA meeting the next morning. But between the jokes, Nash-Betts told the room about the moment she came out to her children. She’ll never forget their response: “I love you and I’m happy for your happiness.” To her, it was a reminder that “hey, I did something right!”
It wasn’t long before the room was fully in tears. Olympic gold medalist Elana Meyers Taylor described reaching the monobob finish line in February, where her nanny appeared with her two young children, one of whom has Down syndrome and both of whom are deaf. When gold was confirmed, she picked up one son and signed to the other: “Mommy won, mommy champion.” She dedicated the award to mothers of children with disabilities. “They don’t want your sympathy,” she said. “They just want to be seen.”
Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham answered that call from the policy side, but began, as so many speakers did that night, with family. Her father ran a makeshift dental office in the family garage in New Mexico, offering free care to children with disabilities until the unpaid lab bills put their house into foreclosure. The record she has assembled since, including universal no-cost childcare, universal pre-K, and free college, is the most ambitious in the country. “None of it is too hard,” she said. “You have agency. And this agency has the power to move mountains.”
One mother after another got up and gave the room something to carry home. Misty Copeland presented her longtime American Ballet Theatre colleague Isabella Boylston, now less than two months from welcoming her first child. (Copeland was the first person she told about the pregnancy). Meyers Taylor’s sister, Erica Warren, introduced her not as an Olympian but as the girl who once misspelled “Don’t Quit” on her backpack as “Don’t Quiet”; a typo Warren called a prophecy. And Ogunnaike read remarks from honoree Jesmyn Ward, who couldn’t attend but wrote that motherhood “nudges me toward connection and relationship in my writing and in my life away from the page.”
Marie Claire’s 2026 Motherhood Issue cover star Ashley Graham, introduced by her husband Justin Ervin, offered a rebuttal to the question every mother in the room has fielded a thousand times: “Balance is truly a myth that keeps moms feeling like they’re failing.”
As the evening wound down, Ogunnaike returned to the stage to make it official: “You walked in here tonight as powerful women. You leave as Power Moms.”
Marie Claire hosted the dinner in partnership with Moms First, with event partners Spanx, J.Crew, Little Spoon, Bugaboo, Zales, Bioron, and Maven.