A civil rights organization that teaches everyday people to pen their own rights into existence - and has passed more than 80 laws doing it.
Picture a hallway outside a legislative chamber. A person who was told, not long ago, that nothing could be done - that the system was the system - is holding a folder of language she helped write. In a few minutes a committee will vote on it. This is the scene Rise stages over and over, in capital after capital. It is not a protest. Nobody is holding a sign. The demand has already been translated into the one dialect government cannot ignore: a bill, drafted, sponsored, and ready for a vote.
Rise is a civil rights nonprofit with an unusual product. Most advocacy groups lobby lawmakers. Rise trains ordinary people to become the lawmakers' co-authors. Its founder, Amanda Nguyen, built the organization in 2014 after learning that her own rape kit could be destroyed in six months unless she personally filed to preserve it every half-year - even though the statute of limitations ran fifteen years. She did not write an op-ed about the absurdity. She wrote a law.
The first law was the proof of concept. In 2016, the Sexual Assault Survivors' Rights Act - drafted with Rise's fingerprints all over it - passed the U.S. Congress unanimously. In an era where the two parties can barely agree on lunch, a survivors' bill of rights cleared both chambers with nobody voting no. That is not an accident of goodwill. It is a method: keep the ask concrete, keep it bipartisan, and hand legislators something they can actually pass.
Then Rise did what a software company does after a successful launch. It shipped the same product everywhere else. The Team Rise campaign carried survivor bills of rights into statehouse after statehouse, iterating the language for local conditions. The tally now runs past 80 laws - a scale that most single-issue nonprofits never touch.
The most durable thing Rise built, though, is not any single statute. It is Rise Justice Labs - a 12-week accelerator that treats lawmaking as a teachable craft. Participants learn to draft legislation, build coalitions, meet with lawmakers, pitch journalists, and run a winning campaign. They graduate with mentorship and roughly $5,000 in seed funding to go pass their own law. Cohorts have already put more than twenty laws for survivors on the books. Rise took the thing that felt impossible - changing the law - and turned it into a curriculum.
The federal survivor bill of rights Rise drafted and passed unanimously in 2016 - guaranteeing rights like preserving a rape kit and knowing its status.
A 12-week program that trains survivors and allies to write bills, build coalitions, and win - with mentorship and seed funding to launch a real campaign.
A traveling exhibit that dismantles victim-blaming. It has appeared at the UN, MoMA, WEF Davos, the WHO in Geneva, and the Brussels Parliament.
A New York Fashion Week runway - hosted at MoMA - where survivors and allies walk to reclaim bodily autonomy and rewrite whose story gets told.
"Our mission is to help anyone with the vision and drive to pen their own rights into existence."
- Rise, on its theory of hope
Amanda Nguyen starts Rise after learning her rape kit could be destroyed in six months - turning a personal injustice into a civil rights organization.
The federal survivor bill of rights clears the U.S. Congress unanimously - zero votes against.
Amanda Nguyen is nominated for the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize for the movement's work.
Rise stages its NYFW runway, reclaiming the question "what were you wearing?" in front of the fashion world.
After six years of diplomacy, the UN adopts resolution A/76/L.80 recognizing survivors of sexual violence in peacetime - co-sponsored by 84 countries.
Amanda Nguyen publishes the bestselling memoir "Saving Five" and flies on Blue Origin's NS-31, becoming the first woman of Vietnamese heritage in space.
Return to that corridor outside the chamber. The person with the folder is not waiting for permission anymore - she is holding the language she wrote. When the committee votes yes, the hallway does not erupt. That is the quiet tell of what Rise actually changed: the outcome stopped being a surprise. A system that once told survivors nothing could be done now routinely does the thing, because someone learned the moves and passed them on.
That is the whole product. Not a march that ends, but a skill that spreads - a way of turning a private wound into public law, and then teaching the next person to do it too. Rise didn't just change one rule about rape kits. It changed who gets to write the rules.