When Kamala Harris didn’t win the White House, four women from the Monadnock region who campaigned for her decided to rebrand.

They’re now Monadnock Women for Action, and they have a simple message -- “Do something.”

The group – Sharon Smith and Chris Halvorson of Peterborough, Barb Jatkola of Jaffrey and Coni Porter of Fitzwilliam – attended protests in Keene and Concord on Saturday in opposition to the Trump administration, Elon Musk and the cuts to federal spending, programs and jobs. These were two of many demonstrations across New Hampshire and around the country, set up by an organization called 50501 – 50 Protests, 50 States, 1 Movement.

“We really were just four worried women,” Halvorson said, standing with around 2,000 other people in the rain in front of the New Hampshire State House. She resonated with U.S. Sen. Cory Booker’s 25-hour speech on the Senate floor earlier in the week. “We’ve got to get up and do something, even if it makes us uncomfortable, and here we are in the rain.”

The women run a website and Facebook page with information about various protests and ways that their community can take action. They said they’re concerned about health care and libraries, as well as Immigration and Customs Enforcement after federal agents visited the Mi Jalisco restaurant in Peterborough in February.

Smith said the spending reductions have already affected her life. She volunteers with a program called America Reads that teaches reading to first-graders, but she said it won’t return next year because its federal funding got cut.

The group members said they’re also upset about the tariffs recently placed on dozens of countries, which led to a stock market crash a few days prior to the protest. Halvorson said she’s chosen not to look at the numbers in her retirement account yet because she “didn’t want to be depressed.”

“It’s affecting everybody I know, because I hang out with people who are the same age, who are retirement age,” Halvorson said. “We’re living off essentially what is the stock market.”

People from across the state echoed the Monadnock group’s concerns. Sara McNeil, a Warner resident, said she’s overwhelmed and “way past the point” of worrying only about the Trump administration’s impact on the issues that are most important to her -- education and reproductive rights.

“It’s everything,” McNeil said. “It’s the environment … He’s going after the food pantries, USAID, things that are just humanity.”

Rally-goers also called on their members of Congress to take action. Andrew Peyton, a 22-year-old from Manchester, stood near Main Street holding up a sign that encouraged New Hampshire’s senators and representatives to “fight back.” He said he doesn’t like that U.S. Sens. Jeanne Shaheen and Maggie Hassan have voted to confirm Trump’s cabinet members, who he views as “unqualified” to lead the country. Both Shaheen and Hassan voted in favor of 10 Trump nominees and against 12.

“I think that voting for those and kind of supporting anything in the administration is a dereliction of duty,” Peyton said. “I want to see just more activism, more obstruction. I would like to see a lot more from them in terms of obstructing the current agenda, as well as just coming up with solutions to the problems that they’re currently facing.”

Charlotte Matherly is the statehouse reporter for the Monadnock Ledger-Transcript and Concord Monitor in partnership with Report for America. Follow her on X at @charmatherly, subscribe to her Capital Beat newsletter and send her an email at cmatherly@cmonitor.com.