Building Community, Strengthening Families, Mom by Mom.
Cover Story | By PAMELA DEY VOSSLER | photos by BAMBI RIEGEL | riegelpictureworks.com
A MamaCollective small group gathering in what Tiere calls her Zen Den: from left: Kym Levine, Kristin Harris, Belinda Fang, Elizabeth Crosby, Tiere, Janet Cling, Lindsey Vinci, Jackie Vene and Karla Abarca Gomez
IT’S ONE THING TO KNOW A THING TO BE TRUE. It’s next level altogether to do that thing—then devote nearly all of your spare time bringing it to others. Spare time you don’t really have.
Such is Darien’s Tiere Hessert and all she does to create community among moms of kids from birth through middle school through her MamaCollective—a mix of small group discussions, workshops and salons featuring a range of speakers. She started it not long after Bjorn was born—the first of her six children, 11 years ago, and has kept it going ever since.
Her driving truth? Connection—real, intentional and deep. The kind that picks up some groceries, drops off a meal or drives your kids to practice when you need help. (There is such community to be built when you lend a hand, and when you take one.) The kind of connection that can also settle you when the doubts creep in and soften life’s inevitable blows. The kind that constitutes the weave of community, makes families strong and milestones better. The kind that assures you you’re not alone.
We are better together, in-person, and Tiere knows it.
She also knows some truths – like the benefits of real connection – are so obvious we miss them, or forget them, or lose them to the sweep of everyday demands and the prevalence of screens, leaving us feeling isolated in superficiality, especially when faced with the new versions of ourselves we find after our children are born.
It’s what happened to her.
With an undergrad degree in communication from UC Santa Barbara and a masters in literacy and childhood education from Bank Street Graduate School in Manhattan, Tiere was living in the East Village in New York City (NYC). She had been commuting to Newark, NJ where she was
a third-grade teacher. After years of knowing and dating her husband Bill, motherhood and marriage happened fast. She’d left her job to care for Bjorn, confident in her abilities to manage it all.
“I thought I knew everything. I was so focused on the birth, and then I take (Bjorn) home from the hospital, and realized I had no idea what I was doing,” recalled Tiere whose family lives across the country in California where she grew up. “Months went by and I felt really, really lonely. And so I fell into postpartum depression.
“I had all the community groups online. I had the Instagram accounts with the thought leaders. I had all the things at my fingertips through my phone and it didn’t help one bit,” she explained.
“I ended up seeing a psychiatrist, and he said, ‘You should do exactly what you were doing before you had a baby,’” Tiere said. “I was always very social so I went back home and filled a calendar with all these Mommy and Me classes. I went to every single one that was offered in downtown Manhattan, met a gazillion amazing mom friends, and still, I felt so alone.”
The missing piece, she found, was depth.
“I’d go to all these mom meetups, especially in those first few years. You’d meet someone really interesting and you’d be having a deep conversation. Then, inevitably, it would switch to sleep schedules or baby gear or you’d get interrupted,” she continued. “I wanted a space where you could talk in depth about one thing and walk away feeling like your cup had been filled, that you were heard and validated and felt a sense of belonging.”
Then came a YMCA mom’s support circle. “It was led by a therapist and she was having us all go around and share what was going on with us but we weren’t really connecting. It felt awkward, as if we were on stage and I didn’t know where to begin: Should I go deep or stay on the surface?” explained Tiere. “I went home and felt even more alone.”
It was her “aha” moment.
”All I wanted to do was get these moms together in my house, with coffee, with babies, and focus on one topic at a time,” she said.
So she did.
“I found this article called America’s Postpartum Practices. I printed it out, and said, we’re going to sit around my living room, we’re going to read it in silence, and then we’re just going to talk about this. My depression started to lift. I realized I’m not alone. This is happening to all of us. This is normal actually, this feeling of total transformation after you have a baby,” she shared.
The MamaCollective was born, beginning with that first group in NYC. Tiere created a framework for each gathering, zeroing in on a different topic each meeting. Topics ranged from identity after baby, relationship after baby, friendships after baby, sex and body, going back to work, faith and spirituality and more.
Tiere and the sold-out crowd at the Neha Ruch book talk she organized and moderated last January at the Darien Community Association
The gatherings followed Tiere as she moved from New York City to Greenwich in 2017, to Darien in 2018, to Miami Beach, FL during two Covid years and back to Darien in 2023. At each stop, her MamaCollective groups struck a chord. Moms everywhere wanted this, needed this, as much as Tiere did.
“When I went to my first meeting, I felt such a bond with the other mothers in attendance. Sometimes when you’re really in the trenches with little kids at home you can feel like you’re lonely. The meetings helped me realize so many of us are going through similar emotions. You may not connect with what every single person is speaking to but you can still feel what they are going through and how to relate to understand what they’re feeling,” said Annalee Gioiella of Darien.
“…being in person in meaningful, purposeful ways, that is what really creates a sense of belonging. I see it in my day-to-day life: the people that show up and are out there and getting friends together and creating things—those are happy people. We are social beings. It’s part of our DNA,” said Tiere.
By 2019, she was running four to five groups a week and they would fill almost as fast as the word of mouth that spread news of their existence.
“It showed that there’s such a need for small group connection,” said Tiere who holds each group to under 10 moms. (The salons and speaker gatherings top out at around 25.)
“There’s often an emphasis on these larger gatherings, these bigger cocktail parties, bigger parties,” observed Tiere. “Everything’s big, big, big and I love that (we need those, too!). But you can’t possibly really get to know someone (in that setting). There’s a sweet spot of like six to eight people. That’s how friendships form. That’s how community ties get stronger,” she added.
Born to a family of artists and introverts in a house across the street from a beach in the hippie town of Leucadia, California, Tiere attended the school outside her neighborhood where her mom was the arts program administrator. She has one sibling, a younger brother. It was an idyllic childhood but Tiere spent much of it on her own, daydreaming. She knew she wanted a big family (…though “I didn’t think I would get up to six,” she said, laughing) and she knew her calling was people.
“I always felt a craving to bring people together. I studied communication in school and honestly, I just wanted to talk to people all day and hear their stories,” said Tiere.
Tiere, Bill and their six children
“Tiere is a natural connector, and through MamaCollective creates these very cozy, intentional talks amongst women that immediately slice through the middle-aged suburban fluff, cracking our hearts open for real-talk-express,” said MamaCollective mom Brooke Lavery. “She’s a treasure to this community,” she added.
Tiere also knows there is community in silence, that every space need not be filled. She learned it through the years she has been leading small groups using the inquiry method she studied at Bank Street, teaching through questions and guiding people to their own understandings.
“I have a guideline that says sit in the silence,” said Tiere of the description on her website detailing how to run a MamaCollective small group. She offers it gratis to anyone who wants to lead one. “The more I’m quiet during a discussion, the more the magic happens: There are times where everyone’s quiet, and I say just roll your shoulders back and wait, because that’s when someone comes in,” said Tiere of engaging even the quietest small group attendees.
Tiere recognizes, “It takes a lot of bravery for moms to show up to something when they don’t know anybody else. I always want to be a soft, comfortable landing pad for people,” she said.
“Tiere is warm, thoughtful and accepting and creates a super special environment that is perfect for talking, sharing, connecting,” said Jackie Vene, another MamaCollective mom.
It follows that she is also passionate about place making (the art of creating spaces that foster community), and volunteerism.
“I think that we have sort of lost the vision of how much volunteerism elevates a town and how much it really connects people,” said Tiere, nonetheless proud of the volunteerism that underpins so much of what happens in Darien. A past member of the Darien Parks and Rec board, Tiere is part of the Hindley School Welcoming Committee and helps in other ways, too. “Volunteerism is sky high in Darien. People may say it’s overwhelming and a lot of work but I see the flip side: It bonds people and creates another layer of community.”
It follows also that while those original group discussions continue to form the core of the MamaCollective, it has grown to include a mix of weekly workshops with Lorena Seidel, the leading growth mindset parenting coach in the U.S., salons every other week to which Tiere invites a range of speakers covering everything from Scandi parenting and living in high Type A environments to strength training and more, and larger presentations from authors and speakers such as Neha Ruch, author of The Power Pause who Tiere brought to a sold-out crowd of mostly young moms at the Darien Community Association last January.
“I’ve never seen so many new moms eager to be in one room!” said Darien mother of two Chelsea Leach who attended the Neha Ruch event. “Tiere led an informative discussion on the book with such ease, her humor and humble nature shines through! She has an amazing gift of sparking discussions on motherhood topics we’re all thinking but may be afraid to share,” she continued.
Tiere is committed to lifting moms in every way—and, by association their families—with chances to learn, expand and bond. Her latest kick? The teachings of author Lenore Skenazy, who she brought to the Darien Library in 2024 to speak about her book Let Grow – When Adults Step Back, Kids Step Up.
“I’m so, so, so passionate about this,” said Tiere. “If you can give kids more independence, you can reduce anxiety and depression in kids. And Darien is ripe for this. We have sidewalks. We have a critical mass of kids. We have the youngest town in Connecticut. We have a safe town. If we’re not doing this, who is? So that’s my whole kick. It’s getting Lenore Skenazy back, and encouraging parents to let kids have more independence, more free play (and responsibility!).”
In a time of extreme disconnection, Tiere is fighting back, mom by mom. She knows community is the answer – to just about everything so she finds time in her impossibly tight weeks to host the gatherings, line up the speakers, emcee the author talks.
“If I waited for a perfect time to have all these things perfectly in place, I would never do them. You just have to do it,” said Tiere.
And thank goodness she does. “We are all better moms because of the community Tiere has fostered,” Annalee added.
Tiere’s List of Small Group Offerings for Local Moms
(All handles listed are Instagram)
• Alliance Center in Stamford (Working Moms Group, Neurodiversity Group + more) @thealliancecenterct
• Circle Moms (New Moms) @circlemoms_
• YWCA (Playgrounds and more) @ywcadn
• Parent Collective (New Moms) @theparentcollectivetpc
• Darien Community Association (Empty Nesters Group and more) @dariendca
• MOMSnext (Elementary and Up Moms/Faith-based) momsnextdarien@gmail.com
• Clear Space for Joy (Group Coaching) @iamjulievincent
• Lindsay Hurty (Midlife Transitions) @lindsay_everwell
• Liz Haines (Small Group/Corporate Young Moms in Darien) @claritywithlizhaines
To learn more about the MamaCollective, including how to participate in Tiere’s small group gatherings, visit mamacollective.com or follow her on IG @mamacollective.
