social-justice
(14)
Dara Parker and the question money keeps avoiding
From queer community leadership to global impact investing, Dara Parker keeps returning to a difficult question: who gets to decide what money is for? Her route to Toniic runs through dinner tables, grant applications and the rugby pitch.
Fizz Ahmed Has Spent His Career Making the Locked Door Look Optional
Before he sold enterprises on AI-built software, Ahmed sold T-shirts to buy books for children in Dhaka. The through-line from Brandeis to Google to Lovable is a stubborn interest in who gets access - and who has been left outside.
The League Found the Voters Hiding in Plain Sight
The League treats culture as civic infrastructure. Its wager is simple: the right storyteller can make a court race, a care-work policy or a documentary feel less like homework and more like something worth passing along.
Mixte Communications knows when to hand over the microphone
The social justice agency sells a scarce commodity: communications capacity. Its work shows why the person delivering a message can matter as much as the message itself.
Change Consulting puts a good cause to work
A worthy mission still needs someone to make the calls, shape the message and get the story out. This Oakland agency has built its business around that unfinished work.
Tariana Little Put Public Health Behind the Camera
A failed qualifying exam loosened one plan. A 90-day Craigslist experiment supplied another. Tariana Little turned research, a camera and an insistence on community voice into an agency built to make complex work feel human.
ANJA
ANJA (ANJA Life LLC) is a minority-owned, state-licensed adult-use cannabis dispensary in Highland Park, New Jersey. Founded by a team of New York- and New Jersey-based entrepreneurs, it opened in January 2024 as the first recreational cannabis dispensary in Highland Park. ANJA pairs a curated retail and delivery experience with an education-first mission - normalizing cannabis through reliable information, community events like ANJA Fest, and partnerships with local New Jersey cultivators. The name is a play on the cannabis synonym 'ganja' and a Sanskrit term meaning 'to manifest.'
Adrienne Becker
Adrienne Becker is the CEO and co-founder of Level Forward, the public-benefit entertainment studio she launched in 2018 with filmmaker Abigail Disney. From a Los Angeles base, she finances and produces films and stage work that pair compelling stories with real-world advocacy - a slate that has earned a combined 37 Tony nominations (Jagged Little Pill, Oklahoma!, Slave Play, What the Constitution Means to Me, Suffs) and Oscar-recognized films (The Assistant, Red White and Blue). A former CEO of DailyCandy and SVP at Nielsen and IAC who got her start on Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign, Becker treats entertainment as a tool for economic and cultural change.
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.
Change.org
Change.org is the world's largest online petition platform, letting anyone start a campaign, gather signatures, and pressure decision-makers on social, political, and consumer issues. Founded in 2007 by Ben Rattray, it now reports more than 580 million users worldwide. The platform operates as a public benefit corporation and, since 2021, is wholly owned by the nonprofit Change.org Foundation. Its stated mission is to empower people everywhere to create the change they want to see and to shift the balance of power between individuals and large institutions.
Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins
Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins is the co-founder and CEO of Promise, an Oakland-based govtech company valued at $520 million that helps municipalities and utilities offer zero-interest payment plans to struggling residents. A former union organizer turned labor federation executive turned music manager for Prince, she now runs a platform that has reached 5 million+ households across 20+ states, proving that treating people with dignity is not just ethical — it is a business model. Named #247 on the Forbes Self-Made 250, she built Promise from a YC Winter 2018 bet to a $23 million-funded company generating $33M+ in annual revenue.
Leila Chreiteh
Leila Chreiteh is a digital communications strategist and activist who has spent her career bridging social justice causes with the people who care about them. A Georgia-raised, Agnes Scott College honors graduate with a self-designed Human Rights major, she founded a refugee resettlement nonprofit on her college campus, ran for Alabama state legislature, championed immigrant rights at the Justice Action Center, and brought her storytelling instincts to the startup world as Communications Strategist and Director of Community at Outlander VC in New York - weaving a thread of progressive purpose through every platform she touches.
Rashida Tlaib
Rashida Tlaib is a groundbreaking American politician and lawyer serving as the U.S. Representative for Michigan's 12th Congressional District since 2019. Born in Detroit to Palestinian immigrant parents as the eldest of 14 children, she made history as the first Palestinian American woman elected to Congress and one of the first two Muslim women in the House. A founding member of 'The Squad' progressive coalition, Tlaib champions working-class issues, economic justice, and human rights with authentic grassroots energy. From raising her 13 siblings while her parents worked Ford assembly lines to fighting for the unhoused, higher wages, and accountability, she brings Detroit grit and moral clarity to Washington.
nikhil trivedi
nikhil trivedi is the Director of Web Engineering at the Art Institute of Chicago, where he has spent nearly two decades building open-source museum technology while simultaneously championing anti-oppression frameworks in cultural institutions. His tagline - 'Museums. Technology. Social Justice.' - is not a brand, it is a practice: he co-created Visitors of Color, contributed to the MASS Action Toolkit, received a UN Women Gender Equality Award, and built a public data API that connects AIC's collection to historical records of the transatlantic slave trade. A Desi Chicagoan, sitar player, and former high school band member, he codes in PHP by day and runs his own Mastodon instance by night.