grassroots-organizing
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Debbie Weir and the Quiet Architecture of a Movement
Across three decades of nonprofit work, Debbie Weir has practiced a deceptively difficult craft: listening to individual voices, then building the machinery that lets them move institutions.
Amanda Nguyen
Amanda Nguyen is a Vietnamese-American civil rights activist, author, and commercial astronaut who founded the nonprofit Rise after surviving sexual assault as a Harvard senior. She drafted the Sexual Assault Survivors' Rights Act, which passed Congress unanimously in 2016, and has helped pass dozens of laws protecting survivors. Nominated for the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize and named a 2022 Time Woman of the Year, she became the first Vietnamese and Southeast Asian woman in space aboard Blue Origin's NS-31 flight on April 14, 2025, fulfilling an astronaut dream she set aside for a decade to fight for survivors.
Jesse Hassinger
Jesse Hassinger is the CEO of Hustle, a San Francisco-based peer-to-peer text messaging platform used by nonprofits, political campaigns, labor unions, and universities to mobilize people at scale. With over eight years at Hustle progressing from Director of Support to Director of Product before taking the helm as CEO in early 2025, Hassinger brings a rare blend of grassroots political organizing experience and deep product intuition to leading one of the most widely adopted civic tech platforms in the country — one that has facilitated over one billion text conversations.